Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner, and Leigh Honeywell have co-authored a great blog post “No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities”. The article is primarily about supporting women, but it’s also a great read on making more supportive, collaborative, creative teams.
It’s probably worth taking another look at Godin’s Linchpin with ideas from this article, and see how it holds up against the “rock star” metaphor.
When I was 15 years old, I definitely wanted to be Todd Howard:
On November 10, Howard’s latest project arrived like a thunderclap: Fallout 4 is the biggest game his team has ever made, a Skyrim-sized post-nuclear world brimming with more than 100,000 lines of spoken dialogue, coupled to a mammoth crafting system fed by all those wasteland odds and ends players can pluck from dilapidated desks and derelict trashcans.
In other words, he creates vast, virtual worlds for video games. These days I’m not as interested in the virtual worlds, but Howard’s work itself—the work it takes to create those worlds—is very interesting!
Translation Ad Agency’s Chief, on Setting a Belief System – NYTimes.com.
I enjoyed this interview, and appreciated Stoute’s thoughts on organizational leadership.
In his talk “Why work doesn’t happen at work,” Jason Fried criticizes what he calls “M&M’s”: managers and meetings. But is his harsh attitude justified and/or helpful?
For workers in really toxic environments, I’m sure this is refreshing stuff. He says, (and I’m paraphrasing) “Managers just preside over work, so they like to call meetings to see what’s being done… and effectively halt real work.” And this paves the way for his new (repackaged?) ideas:
The Book Deal
My past colleague Eric Buth has a theory about how people make “book deal” pitches for popular, business-oriented books (and, by extension, the related speaker circuit). He thinks there are three main elements of successful pitches:
So, does Fried’s talk fall into this pattern?
1. Absolutist, contrarian perspective? You bet.
2. Anecdotal and/or skewed quantitative evidence? Yes again (implied, or at least unsupported).
3. A sense of urgency for spreading the author’s solution(s)? Well, you know, either you’re willing to run your business/organization into the ground, or adopt Fried’s ethos. It’s your choice.
A Middle Ground
His message serves as a reminder to generally be productive—a good message. For small businesses, Fried’s message might make a lot of sense. For folks who work in and for larger organizations, maybe less so.
Maybe it’s easier for everyone to collaborate in smaller organizations. (Among other factors, it probably depends on the communication skills of the participants.) But in a larger organization, with several hundred employees or more, how long can individuals and teams go without checking in to a larger group? A week? A month? A good old fashioned meeting might be a refreshing time to reconnect with colleagues and talk through important project details.
I spend time in meetings coordinating people and projects. Every week. Sometimes my colleagues and I don’t make clear progress, but a lot of the time we make decisions that affect the day-to-day work of our colleagues (for better or worse). They are often valuable, and Fried clearly doesn’t disagree. In the end, his solutions are very sensible. The upshot of his claim seems to simply be: not all meetings are good or useful.
Though Fried’s talk serves as a guidepost, I’m interested in more subtle ways to bring unproductive meetings to a halt.
What do you value in a design process?
At EdLab, our teams often have great latitude in structuring our design processes – indeed, we can change almost every aspect of project management, from inception to final outcomes (and ongoing documentation and reporting). As a consequence, the teams I am a part of – creating diverse software, video, and exhibitions – all work a bit differently. What are the good and bad effects of this freedom? What amount is worth having? To paraphrase Stan Lee:
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
In my everyday work at the lab, I often feel and see the emotional and intellectual effects of shepherding a project through a design process – and negative examples easily come to mind. In considering project work in this way, it is not always clear that it’s a design process per se that leads to each and every outcome (e.g., the emotional response of a team member who feels his or her idea wasn’t adopted), but it seems helpful to consider many (and diverse) aspects of a work environment as part of a design process. In doing so, I hope to assess what structures or freedoms can be articulated as being worth having with a wide range of desirable outcomes in mind.
Consider a common situation: when is a team responsible for documenting its progress on a product? – Every day? Every week? To what extent? And how? What is the cost of this? What is the purpose? What decisions will or could be made as a result of such documentation? A team that has more latitude when it comes to responding to the need for documentation can tailor it to fit the nature of the project. A ready-made rubric, on the other hand, might not allow for the nuances that the team can account for, but I suspect organizations often favor consistency over specificity. In doing so, I wonder what, on balance, they lose. But also: what is the strain on the team that is left to weigh many variables? Such a rubric is a good example of what kind of components constitute a more structured design process.
To better understand the cost of such structures (i.e., monetary cost, but also their effect on goals like creativity and innovation), I have found it helpful to reflect on characteristics of design processes that I value. A few of those characteristics:
Short of following a structured design process, cultivating one, or attempting to cultivate one, I expect an organization would articulate habits, dispositions, and behaviors that are valued. But, I wonder, could these characteristic be understood as part of “a process”? And is it beneficial to frame them as such?
Here’s Steve Jobs, from a recent email thread with Gawker’s Ryan Tate:
Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?
This last missive from Job’s is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple’s iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don’t look too closely, you might be impressed by it.
By now it’s well-known that Apple draws the ire of the free software community. But Steve Jobs take the time (here in a private email conversation) to clearly articulate his views and motivations. Really? A CEO taking the time to pursue an email flame war with a spiteful blogger? Very respectable. Admirable, even.
That’s what it seems to take these days to engage the public, especially in the software development space. And I like Jobs’ response and his insistence on participation: he asks (I paraphrase), “Are you at least engaged in similar work?”
But wait, is that enough? Tate started the email thread by criticizing Jobs’ abuse of the language of “revolutions.” Does Jobs offer an adequate defense?
Jobs’ response is related to a too-easy dismissal: “If you don’t do X, you can’t criticize it.” But I don’t think that’s Jobs’ attitude in this case. Tate’s criticism against Apple is steeped in deep knowledge of the software world. I think Jobs’ is asking for empathy, saying (again I paraphrase), “It’s hard to bring these new technologies into the world, isn’t your quibble with us a minor one? Why can’t this discussion be more civil?” Or even, “It’s a mistake to equate what we’re doing here with something important.”
But then that’s why Tate is right and Jobs is, ultimately, a corporate ass: Jobs isn’t taking personal responsibility for his company’s ridiculous (“it’s magical” and “it’s revolutionary”) claims. Jobs’ insistence on deflating the significance of the iPad’s implications for the software community flies in the face of Apple’s language describing it. Once you say it’s revolutionary, there’s no going back and saying that you didn’t mean “in a cultural or political way” (Jobs’: “It’s not about freedom”).
So, frankly, this exchange turns out to be as offensive as it is instructive. I’m glad Tate shared it. Sure, we can empathize with Jobs… it is tough making great things. Especially complex things. But the work of understanding them – seeing their implications, assessing their value, and measuring their impact – is a shared responsibility between both developers and consumers. Indeed, it’s part of the cost of doing business, though easy to forget.
So, how can a development group take responsibility?
Tino Agnitti, the founder of IRPens.com, gave a seminar presentation about his entrepreneurial experiences today at EdLab. I really enjoyed his keen insight into his current work, ideas, and past experiences working on projects. He told his story of starting a business around the “IR Pen,” which is significant for the EdLab since it’s a good example of a technology-inspired educational tool.
For me, his company is in an analogous position to Apple creating the iPad – they are working on refining a computer/human interface. In Tino’s case, he is allowing his customers to engage a more social computing experience: the user will likely stand in front of a projected image and manipulate screen objects in a very direct way than is currently the norm. Plus – and this is where I think the iPad analogy really does some work – there is a great hardware/software combination potential. (For example, Tino showed how one could create OS and software shortcuts by writing text on the wall.)
I wonder how this kind of technology will be used in educational settings in the next 5-10 years… Today, I think the fact that it’s still a novel technology might be it’s biggest draw (I’m reminded of the related Techknowledge series on the “Wii in the Classroom” below). But one can see the innate social nature of technologies like this, and it’s not hard to start imagining this kind of interface working its way into all aspects of work and play.
[brightcove video=”3250891001″ /]
My other favorite ideas from the seminar:
Tino at work:
Tino doing project management:
More about the product:
Thanks Tino!
