July 23rd newsletter
Thought for the week: A tension I feel as a new homeowner and the breadwinner in my household is between the tasks I need to do (and being a little obsessive about “solving them” and my relationship with my daughter and wife. My challenge to myself and to my readers is to try to do both. You can say yes to relationships and still get your things done. As someone who’s task oriented, I have to remind myself to say yes to relationships. Maybe your challenge is different. But you can do both.
I've been thinking this week about how easy it is to talk past each other in the pursuit of achievement and creating things.
It must be so frustrating to be an artist.
One of my favorite examples of artists talking past people is Pearl Jam’s song “alive”.
Eddie vedder wrote the song as an angry frustrated rant, like I've been through all this stuff and I'm still alive unfortunately.
He said that the crowd rewrote it into a song about triumphing over adversity.
Which one is right? It doesn't matter.
People do art for themselves and to impact others, the song clearly does both.
Success.
You have to follow the muse and do the thing you're supposed to do and hopefully it means something to other people.
What an honor pearl jam has had to be able to have millions of people screaming these lyrics at their shows for 2 decades plus. Does it really matter if they didn't get it the same way Eddie did?
I kind of like both interpretations.
I love so many things about agile and lean methods but one of my favorite things is that it starts with listening to people.
That's it, that's everything, listening.
I love creating things, that's my art, building new stuff.
But I want people to use it and you can't get people to use things without listening to them about what they like and don't like.
They have to put their hands on the thing, and feel it, then you have to listen to their reactions.
I've grown so suspicious of negative opinions of things, often people haven't put their hands on the technology and are constructing a negative opinion on a belief rather than actually touching the tech.
This is another place listening is so important. You can turn negative biases into good experiences by listening and empathizing.
You've got to believe in what you're doing and how it will help people.
Often the negative opinions can hide valuable information.
People don't know what they want, they may be given what they want and not like it because they did a poor job explaining.
Listen, empathize, ask probing questions about their problems.
When I worked in student activities, I was forever forgetting to book trash cans for events. Sometimes I could slap something together and sort it out - a call to someone I had a relationship with in facilities, the location already having trash cans, or some duct tape and some trash bags would be good enough.
It’s fun cooking up new ideas, it’s fun working through the use cases but it’s often the simple stuff, the trash cans that you forgot that undermines your idea.
Clunky designs can undermine even the best tool. People love working with things that look good.
If it’s data work, is your visual easy to understand? Do the labels make sense? Does it work for colorblind people? Did you show something you shouldn’t have? Or worse, not show something you should have? Yeah it looks exciting to you, but did you miss key details that are actually the first thing other people will notice?
See, that’s the thing with trash cans, they’re not fun, they might not be integral to the event happening, but people will absolutely notice if they’re not there. They’re not the after thought, they’re the essential.
Now, how do you stop forgetting trash cans?
We did this activity years ago where they grouped us into groups based on personality type and asked us to build our house.
My group had a water slide, a crazy fountain, many creative details. Suddenly, the facilitator said “where’s the bathroom”. Whoops, we forgot the trash cans.
The other group had sorted their pieces of their design into color codes and had a very nice place but I wouldn’t call it fun or interesting. They had a bathroom though!
So, is one group right or wrong? I think we need both. We need people who want to test the boundaries, try new things. We also need people who remember the trash cans and keep things in order.
We don’t need people to become like each other. We need each other.
So you never forget the trash cans by working with someone who loves remembering the trash cans. Partnership.
We’re not meant to do this alone.