Podcasts

Change-Harvesting and the Dynamic Unity

Change, Change Harvesting / / 5 minutes of reading

Reframing ourselves around change-harvesting involves several important concepts or concept-clusters. Maybe the most basic of these is the idea of a “dynamic unity”. Let’s go there. We call a thing a "unity" because we experience it as a whole thing. It has an inside and an outside and a border. It might be made up of other parts, other unities, even, and the border might actively exchange parts from outside & inside, but still we see it as a whole […]

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Safety

RAMPS / / 7 minutes of reading

RAMPS — Affecting Safety Affecting safety, the sense of belonging — being valued & accepted — is about creating a stabilizing center-of-mass built around health. A note: none of what I have to say here is relevant if your organization ignores violence, or hasn’t already taken the steps necessary to end overt racism, sexism, age-ism, creed-ism, or nation-ism in its policies. Those require drastic action. Change that, or leave it, first. I mentioned it in passing before, about anger-less or

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The Camerata is Launched!

Change, CCS, Camerata / / 3 minutes of reading

Announcement: The Change-Harvesting Camerata is officially launched today! There’s a special launch offer. Read on, to get more info about the camerata itself, and find out the launch deal. A camerata — h/t Jess Kerr for that term — is a group of people working on a common problem, both together and separately. Part salon, part clubhouse, part Republic of Letters, part continuous colloquium, it provides a kind of interactive operational base for that community. A camerata is centered around

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RAMPS – S is for Safety

RAMPS, Coaching / / 4 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Safety — the sense of being valued and accepted, of belonging — is a powerful motivator for many individuals. A lack of safety often seems like a simple switch, instantly shutting down talented and capable people. (This topic of safety is a minefield right now. The absence of a safe place to stand today seems, paradoxically, to shape all our discourse into a "calm-to-rage in sixty seconds". Please to make allowances, and if you can’t, then at least a ticking

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How I Work – Preaching And Practicing

TDD, Geekery, Refactoring / / 6 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series How I Work

A respondent asks, "Are you always able to practice what you preach? I don’t mean intentionally dropping but unintentionally as your mind is sloppy. I have great difficulties in applying 100% of my "knowledge" 100% of the time." Sometimes questions open up huge areas with lots of issues and subtexts and angles, and this is one. It’s too big to fit in one or two tweets. First, the direct answer: Oh, hell no. I am definitely not always able to

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Purpose

RAMPS, Change, Coaching / / 7 minutes of reading

RAMPS: Affecting Purpose Raising a sense of purpose — service to a "greater" — in someone who’s sensitive to it, involves offering purposes and then connecting to them. I try not to frame these muses as mere critique. This one’s hard for me to pull off. Clumsy ham-handed misleading efforts at motivating people via purpose are the norm, not the exception, and I’ll give it to you straight up: one gets a little pissy about it after a while. 🙂

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RAMPS – Purpose is Service to a Greater

Change, Coaching, Sociotechnical / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: P is for Purpose, the sense one is serving a valued "greater". Those who rate this band of the motivational spectrum highly can be go-to workhorses, but only if we keep them connected to their valued greater. If rhythm is largely focused on the distribution of "feels good" through one’s working life, purpose works to carry us through the "feels bad" part of it, by transforming the local discomfort into an instrument for the higher goal. Have you ever

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RAMPS – Ways To Affect Mastery

Coaching, Change, Sociotechnical / / 7 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: Affecting mastery, the sense an individual has that she is growing in a way she values, means first jiggling our ideas about efficiency & relevance in work, then jumping in to the opportunities that jiggling will reveal. We talked about the widespread pernicious conceptual cluster we call "finish-line efficiency": the idea that software development is basically a race, w/a start, a well-marked track, and a precise finish line some distance away. Overturning this is central to engaging mastery. I’m

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RAMPS – Mastery is Opportunity to Grow

Change, Coaching, Sociotechnical / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

RAMPS: M is for Mastery, the sense that my work is actively helping me grow, along some dimension I value. When my motivational spectrum calls for a high degree of mastery, I do my best work when it is just a little over my head. People sometimes confuse the drive for mastery with a drive to know everything. But it’s not the knowing, per se. It’s not catching the skill, it’s chasing the skill. My own spectrum rates mastery the

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RAMPS – Ways to Affect Autonomy

Coaching, Sociotechnical, Change / / 7 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 15 in the series RAMPS

Autonomy is the sense of free motion in a team. I adjust the levels of this by expressing important needs as problems, letting go of unimportant needs, and managing risk by a combination of acceptance, next-stepping, and iteration. The more we need creative technical work, the more we have to concern ourselves with providing the humans who do it the adequate autonomy to do it well. Machines can’t give us what we need, and the extent we build machine-like things

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