Technical debt; Sunk costs; Low-risk learning
Milk, No Sugar #294
💡Think
I read an excellent Twitter thread about leadership this week, in particular on “being the hero”.
Organisations are almost set up to enable people to fix problems, rather than avoid them. It’s here where people make their careers, land promotions, and become renowned for making everything great.
The issue is that you won’t become renowned for avoiding mistakes, and just doing a great job because…that doesn’t write a headline.
It’s up to us though to try and fix this. Can we build cultures of constant recognition for good work, rather than idolising the “fixers”?
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ A more sustainable approach to technical debt
Whether you work in tech or not, “technical debt” should be familiar. It’s where inefficiencies calcify over time causing you to have to rebuild everything. This, as you can imagine, is both infuriating and expensive. This post is directed at both developers and business builders (i.e. all of us) to try and address this problem before it becomes unmanageable.
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❷ How Susceptible Are You to the Sunk Cost Fallacy?
I’ve mentioned this concept in the newsletter before, but this article is written by much more esteemed people than myself. They run us through what it means in the workplace, how common it is, and reference a study to determine how much people are inclined to sacrifice what they actually want to do because they’ve already said they would do the opposite.
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❸ Building a culture of low-risk learning
This article is from the Intercom (customer service tool) team, explaining how they work from a product perspective. The answer: very fast. They “ship” fast and often, meaning that they need to have a culture that firstly accepts this notion, and secondly is prepared for things to go wrong (or right!). I really like this, as it feels like things are always moving, but have definitely worked in places where this approach would cause the house of cards to fall very fast.
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Bonus round
“Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet" – uhh, yeah
An honest article by someone assessing their passion for tech as they enter their sabbatical. I think we can all relate to the burnout points
The history of Google’s failed attempts at releasing messaging apps
🎧 Listen
The power of possible
In this episode, Kat Cole uses a term that I’ve not come across, but can relate very hard – “the dark side of gratitude”. It’s the concept that we can be so humble with what we have that we forget we have the responsibility to work towards something better. Ultimately, this means that we stunt our own growth by being limited by the gratefulness of our current situations.
Listen to this podcast (65 minutes)
Apple Podcasts – Spotify
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🙏 Thanks
Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu
Founding member special shoutouts:
Kevin Fernandez (@kvnfz)
Karl Barker
George Sumpster