Continuing with the theme: last week I posted a piece about how to kick your standup meetings into gear. This piece is a good polemic for not having them at all.

Meetings aren’t sacred. Even standups. Take a read.

I just thought this was a great, great list. If you’re writing code, or managing people who write code, do yourself a favor and read it.

Just picking one example, this one made me pretty much laugh out loud with recognition:

“When developers try to solve a problem, they sometimes try to find a way that will solve all the problems, including the ones that may appear in the future.

But here is the thing: The problems from the future will never come and you’ll end up either having to maintain a huge behemoth of code that will never be fully used or you’ll end up rewriting the whole thing ‘cause there is a shitton of unused stuff”

A great piece from Ed. Not sure I totally agree with it, but it will make you think about why and how you value anonymous feedback, and along the way consider the difference between critique and criticism (they’re very different). Great stuff.

When I teach Radical Candor workshops, somebody almost always asks “well, how do I show caring if I don’t have a deep relationship with somebody??”. The answer is: small, obviously thoughtful actions have a significant impact in building connection and trust. Well worth a read if you’re wondering about why some of your connections seem uncomfortable or broken, and what small, effective steps you can take to improve them.

A neat little list of the blocks we put in our own way when we don’t want to actually make a move. Worth checking out to see if you’re using any of these right now to avoid taking action on something.

Loved this. Standing meetings are supposed to be about action (at least, IMHO). If you have one that has devolved into a standing ritual checkin, read this, and get in there and fix it.

Yes indeed, coding in the real world is different from How It Should Be. A lovely post about the differences between how you might imagine code gets written, and how it gets written in the white heat of the real world :-)

Nice. A whole ton of advice from the community to those just joining. Even if you’ve been at it for a while, there will be stuff to learn, and definitely a resource for those newly joining your team as their first real job.

Smart, sensible tips for working with that big old codebase. Nice.

I don’t have the expertise to know if this is correct, arguable or utterly wrong. But, wow, really?

Exactly what it says. Pass it on.

I heard this for the first time at a meeting on Wednesday night in SF. I was all WTF? then, and I’m still WTF? now. Nuts.

A nice description of evolving from the “Make It So!”, authoritative style of leadership to something more subtle, complete and effective.

“It took me a long while to realize that yes, there is an alternative way of leading: through vulnerability. While there’s no doubt that authoritarianism can work, more often than not your team will end up hating their jobs, and quite frankly so will you!”

A vision sounds like a “nice to have”, but it’s actually a practical necessity. Julián Limón Núñez makes the case convincingly, particularly relating to software product development.

“Product vision is the consistent glue that allows teams to stay aligned to a common objective, focused on outcomes, and enables them to flourish and bring their craft to life”

“My team had failed. We had missed our sprint commitments again, and [the scrum master] was pissed off”

Ruminations on the dampening effects of trying to Get Everything Right All The Time. Fear of failure closes the mind, shuts down creativity and reduces options. Not caring about failure - well, we don’t want that, either. A good read.

I liked the use of “abandonment” here to describe what happens when “autonomy” is misunderstood to mean “leaving people alone”. Short piece, worth reading.

“Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture. Yet very few of us think much about ritual design”

A nice description of carefully designing a ritual to re-enforce a set of values.

My Notes on how your group/team/company culture is being built, right now, based on your personal behaviors and values. Being aware of the impact of who you are is a vital step to defining and guiding your culture. How to use that awareness to build a culture that you want, and is consistent with who you are.

My Notes on how to consciously build culture through naming, symbols, rituals and stories. These are tools humans have used since we have had language to bind ourselves together in groups. They’re still powerful!

This is excellent. Gets to a core issue (perhaps the core issue) in communication breakdowns quickly and concisely. Bonus: links to other pieces Ed has written on related topics at the end of the piece.

“When our efforts to communicate go awry, one of the most common causes is a failure to distinguish between intent and impact. When delivering a message we typically imagine that these two concepts are aligned–it may not even occur to us to view them as distinct”