Posts from Awesome Folks #29

Author

Emily Webber
September 23, 2022

Hello,

This week I have been busy working on a few different things, which reminds me that working on lots of different things means context switching. One of the things I have been working on is research for a conference talk I will be giving at Lean Agile Brighton and SEACON; this has had me looking into any data on context switching (it's all getting a bit meta). Research shows that "software developers involved in two or more projects on average spend 17% of their development effort on cross-project interruptions" that's 5 hours a week, add in some coffee breaks, and you've lost a day.

Hopefully, these posts will be a helpful break in your day rather than an interruption! Let me know what you think, by hitting the thumbs up at the end of this newsletter.

Happy Friday

Emily

People and culture

Why You Should Separate Salary And Performance

By Marc-Peter Pijper

We all believe a great school report deserves a tenner, right? Well, I disagree. Here's why I believe that. And how that translates to separating salary from performance. Good performance brings its own rewards, and especially in the workplace.

Building Your Team’s Safety Ecosystem

By Meg Saxby

Five experiments for establishing team psychological safety. Odds are you’ve heard the term “psychological safety” before and know it’s an important component of a functioning team.

Organisations and systems

It’s the uncertainty, not the delay, that gets you in the end

By Tim Harford

I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across Gare du Nord in 35C heat. The problem was not the delay, but the discomfort, the anxiety and the uncertainty.

Critically Engaging With Models

By Rebecca and Mathias

Our worldviews are grown from other people’s models. How do we control what models we let in? You might be familiar with The Five Stages of Grief aka the Kübler-Ross model for processing grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance).

Setting and measuring goals

TBM 41/51: Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead)

By John Cutler

A company sets 24 ambitious goals for the year. They do not consider the org chart at all when creating the goals. The goals are completely department/team agnostic. The goals are solution-agnostic (e.g. increase _______).

Podcasts of Late

By Christina Wodtke

Hello folks, I keep forgetting to mention podcasts I’ve been on lately! check it out: First, ProdPad digging into what’s gone wrong with OKRs Key Takeaways OKR processes in dysfunctional organizations Why OKRs may not be working for you How to build high-performing teams How to achieve radical

Tools and approaches for teams

Designing content for behavioural change: a framework

By Natalie Shaw

I’m sharing my tried-and-tested framework on how to design products and services for behavioural change. It’s applicable to all types of behavioural change, though my experience is connected to real-world problems—for example things relating to health, education, bullying and hate speech.

Other things

London Shop Fronts on Instagram by me!

A last little treat. I amassed a collection of photos that I took of shop fronts in London between 2003 and 2019 and posted them to a blog. I had a little following and a few features in national newspapers, blogs and radio. I am reposting these photos on Instagram as a retrospective exercise; follow along for regular posts.

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