THE LEAFLET

March 07 2024

parents > punks, pace and vibes, exec and ops thinking

PARENTS > PUNKS

It’s undervalued, I think, how good it is to work with people who see and express earnest delight in this basic absurdity of what we are up to, this Having a Job In 2024 thing. Those ones who can poke fun and laugh and get others to laugh at it - all in good faith. Laughter builds trust; it can be a bonding, inclusive force; it burns the acrid booze out and leaves the warm flavor.

The kind of humor and appreciation I’m talking about - in the face of evident absurdity and self-seriousness - shows up often among parents when they’re talking about parenting toddlers. These little tyrants! Their snacks! Their shaky command of English! We love them and they make almost no sense. What a world. We get to raise them.

This is so far preferable to me to what I class as a ~punk take on the basic workplace absurdity that I struggle to even write sentences about this undesirable alternative. This is dumb, leave me alone, can’t you tell we’re all just in pixelated boxes, ugh, hairflip. Yeah dogg, we know. We all gotta be here. Make it fun. The corniest thing possible is to think a posture of critique saves you from absurdity. 

It does not. It just makes you less generous to other people carrying heavy loads.

Read the rest here.

PACE AND VIBES

The value sets I’ve seen do the best work for teams are short enough to be memorizable and diverse enough to speak to most situations teammates encounter day to day. This usually means three values are too few and eight to ten are too many. 

If you’re playing in the sandbox of ~4 to 6 values, you’ve got enough room to choose ones in a couple categories that often get overlooked. Those categories are Pace and Vibes.

• Values in the Pace category could include: speed, action, urgency, calibration, deliberateness, precision

• Values in the Vibes category could include: enthusiasm, joy, generosity, inclusiveness, honesty.

Read the rest here.

EXEC THING AND OPS THINKING

When I’m in executive thinking mode, I’m wondering:

• Can we buy our way out of this problem?

• When I zoom out far enough that this problem doesn’t seem to matter, what else is true? Can I make those things true when I zoom back into my current context?

• Can we solve something upstream that solves this problem by default?

• What’s the uncomfortable thing that our mission might ask of us right now that only someone with real power could do, demand, deliver?

When I’m in operational thinking mode, I’m wondering:

• Where are there inefficiencies in what we have that could be cured with a simpler system? Maybe one that relies less (or not at all) on working memory, will power, or individual responsibility?

• What’s the move that relieves a current pain point with the resources we have?

When I look at the aggregate of the two sets of questions, the executive ones seem to invite friction. They contemplate relatively big change. Lotsa feathers might get ruffled. We may find ourselves thrust into a new, uncomfortable context. 

The operational ones, by contrast, seem to alleviate friction. They make life in the current context more palatable and effective.

Both, I think, at their best, yield simplicity on the other side of complexity. Neither is the “right” way to address a problem in every case. Sometimes, slipping into one paradigm, when your role, rank, or tenure says you should stick to the other, can unlock new possibilities.

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Author and investor Tony Fadell on failure:

Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson on fathers and sons in Gilead:

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Critic and essayist Hilton Als on conviction:

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric