Ask good questions; No meetings; Be creative
Milk, No Sugar #261
💡Think
Decision inertia is when we, under high pressure situations, freeze when it comes to making a choice.
Seeing every option at this moment as equally bad means that we delay making any decision at all, and the stakes increasingly become higher and higher. The rational mind says “of course!”, but when in these situations we can’t see a way out and the whole project suffers.
The key to escaping this paralysis is basically to make a choice. By committing to something, we can course correct as we test out the results of our decision.
Just think of it in the terms of an emergency worker. If the fire brigage met a blaze and – seeing ten different places to begin – delay the water canons until it’s too late, that’d be a biiiig problem.
Now distill that down to the (less serious) choices we have to make on a daily basis, and you can see that the fires we have to handle need to be distinguished regardless of which way we try first.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ Leadership is about asking good questions
I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. A leader that knows everything is an outdated sentiment that is simply not true. Showing vulnerability as a manager, mentor, or colleague shows that the way to success is through collaboration and joint ownership. This even works at an organisation level, as shown through the Domino’s Pizza example here.
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❷ No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I was drooling whilst reading this post. It’s from Gumroad CEO (who I’ve featured before) and he outlines how he’s building a company that in essence wants its employees to work…less. Every employee is someone who has side projects, and they are encouraged to pursue them, whilst working a few days per week for their actual employer. It’s radical but I’m very on board, and I highly recommend you read this.
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❸ Be creative: jump out of the system
Creativity is typically quite limiting. Think about a painting, it must be in a frame right? No, of course not. How about a poem – it’s got to rhyme. You get the picture. The trick to pushing our creativity is to first understand what the typical rules or boundaries are and breaking those suckers right down.
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Bonus round
Because of course you wanted to know about the history of peanut butter
🎧 Listen
Collaboration is key, with the CEO of Automattic
I’ve shared this one around quite a bit this week, as it touched a particular inspirational nerve.
Automattic have been a distributed (not remote!) company since their inception, so they know how to look after employees. They effectively put an employee’s life at the centre of their work, rather than forcing us to skirt around work to try and live.
The centre of this is collaboration, which I seem to be banging on about more and more these days. It comes down to well structured documents in the workplace, and not forcing decisions to be made in a snap because this basically only suits the extroverts.
Listen to this podcast (1 hour 24 mins)
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🙏 Thanks
Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu