THE LEAFLET

December 14 2023

corny virtual transitions, how to do day 1, defy the data

CORNY VIRTUAL TRANSITIONS

When you’re managing a shift from in person to virtual work with a teammate, the most important thing to ask yourself is what you anticipate changing for the worse if you're virtual with this person. 

Next ask yourself: what is the virtual equivalent of delivering the pivotal thing that would otherwise disappear? 

You want to artificially build whatever is on your list of informal, in person energy generators into your upcoming virtual time together. So, for example, if you meet daily, you could have a reminder in the calendar event to discuss one thing that made you laugh over the past day, or one thing that you want to commiserate over from last week, or one thing that you want to debrief really quickly. 

Bake all those things in. Decide that you’re not going to feel weird about this. 

To some degree, your success in the new virtual relationship depends on not apologizing for or avoiding the artificial structuring of those valuable moments.

Read the rest here.

-Ben

HOW TO DO DAY 1

Zoom out to describe wild success in your leadership a year from now. Write a few bullet points, then add texture and specificity. What kinds of choices are your teammates consistently making? What can you count on as the reliable mood and pace of problem solving? What external evidence or quantitative measures of success will be visible?

Now, zoom in, asking yourself: given that that's a year out, how should I start? What do you need to do in the early going to bring about the specific successes you described? 

Get even more specific and ask yourself: on the very first day with your new team, knowing that a year from then you're going to have that wild success and your initial plan is generally what you just said…

What does the first day require of you as a leader of that team? 

Read the rest here.

-Ben

WHEN AND WHY YOU DEFY THE DATA

Pay attention to evidence. Measure it against what matters. You put that data to use in service to a mission and a way of being that you believe in. The data itself cannot be that mission or way of being. You ask too much of it and too little of yourself.

The principles that drive you and your people, among all the honorable, wholesome principles one might choose from, may vary. You need not say the other principles are false or worthless. It may simply be that they are not the ones that matter most for the particular kind of thing you want to achieve and the particular kind of person you want to become as you achieve it.

A drag racing team is different from a day care is different from a VC firm is different from a state legislative office. They can all operate morally and effectively. The dogmas that drive and underpin their choices may differ, arguably will.

Read the rest here.

-Eric

COMPELLING QUOTES

Poet David Whyte on horizons and happiness:

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson, on persistent pessimism in America in The Givenness of Things:

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat.

Columnist David Brooks on intuition and big decisions in The Second Mountain:

“Intuition” is a fancy word for pattern recognition. It can be trusted only in domains in which you have a lot of experience, in which the mind has time to master the various patterns. But when you are making a transformational choice, you are leaping into an unknown territory. You don’t know the patterns there. Intuition can’t tell you. It’s just guessing.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric