Be a thermostat, not a thermometer

April 10, 2023

#134 – April 10, 2023

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

Wait to cover the uncertainty in time across cluster nodes before reading and writing values so values can be correctly ordered across cluster nodes.

Too many managers don't know how to manage remote people. Worse, those managers, or their organizations, don't trust people to do a good job. The organization installs spyware to see if people are working.

Creating scalable, consistency and noise-free interview evaluations.

On why failure is not all that bad… as long as it's safe.

We have strategies for encouraging cooperation. Counterfeiting these strategies is also valuable. That’s why I differentiate between the strategies (like consequences flowing towards power) & the words we use. Even with the best of intentions whatever word you use to refer to a strategy, someone will come along & twist it.

In unfamiliar, high-stakes situations, we’re hard-wired to default to the mechanisms that we’ve relied on the past. However, new situations often can’t be met with old solutions. This is the adaptability paradox: When we most need to learn, change, and adapt, we are most likely to react with old approaches that aren’t suited to our new situation, leading to poorer decisions and ineffective solutions.

newsletters