Shipulski On Design

Archive for April, 2024

When you catch someone doing good work, do you praise them?  If not, why not?

Praise is best when it’s specific – “I think it was great when you [insert specific action here].”

If praise isn’t authentic, it’s not praise.

When you praise specific behavior, you get more of that great behavior.  Is there a downside here?

As soon as you see praise-worthy behavior, call it by name. Praise best served warm.

Praise the big stuff in a big way.

Praise is especially powerful when delivered in public.

If praise feels good when you get it, why not help someone else feel good and give it?

If you make a special phone call to deliver praise, that’s a big deal.

If you deliver praise that’s inauthentic, don’t.

Praise the small stuff in a small way.

Outsized praise doesn’t hit the mark like the real deal.

There can be too much praise, but why not take that risk?

If praise was free to give, would you give it?  Oh, wait.  Praise is free to give.  So why don’t you give it?

Praise is powerful, but only if you give it.

Image credit — Llima Orosa

If you have nothing to say, be the person that doesn’t say it.

If you’re not the right person to do it, you’re also the right person not to do it.  Why is it so difficult for to stop doing what no longer makes sense?

If it made sense to do it last time, it’s not necessarily the right thing to do this time, even if it was successful last time.  But if it was successful last time, it will be difficult to do something different this time.

If we always standardize on what we did last time, mustn’t this time always be the same as last time? And musn’t next time always be the same as this time?

If it’s new, it’s scary.  And if it’s scary, it’s bad.  And we don’t like to get in trouble for doing bad things. And that’s why it’s difficult to do new things.

Deming said to “Drive out fear.” But that’s scary.  What are the attributes of the people willing to face the fear and demonstrate that fear can be overcome?  At your company are they promoted? Do they stay? Do they leave?

Without someone overcoming their internal fear, there can be no change.

If a new thing is blocked from commercialization because it wasn’t invented here, why not reinvent it just as it is, declare ownership, and commercialize it?

If prevention is worth a pound of cure, why do people that put out forest fires get the credit while those that prevent them go unnoticed? Does that mean your career will benefit it you start small fires in private and put them out quickly for all to see?

If you always do what’s best for your career, that’s not good for your career.

When you do something that’s good for someone’s career but comes at the expense of yours, that’s good for your career.

Why not say nothing when nothing is the right thing to say?

Why not say no when no is the right thing to say?

Why not do something new even though it’s different than what was successful last time?

Why not demonstrate fearlessness and break the trail for others?

Why not be afraid and do it anyway?

Why not build on something developed by another team and give them credit?

Why not do what’s right instead of doing what’s right for your career?

Why not do something for others?  As it turns out, that’s the best thing to do for yourself.

Image credit — Steve Hammond

The Idealized Future State (IFS) is all the rage these days.  The idea behind it is the team defines the IFS so it can then define the steps needed to achieve it.  The IFS is just what it says it is – a description of the perfect state of our future affairs.  It defines what things will look like and how things will go when the system evolves in the best imaginable way.  It describes a future perfection.  Some troubling questions should come to mind.  Here are some.

How is “best” defined? What if there is disagreement on multiple bests? Whose best becomes bestest? Once the best best is chosen, can’t it be bested by a better best?

If there were two IFSs at a social event, what would you ask them to figure out which one was an almost-IFS and which was the ideal-IFS?  And if both were imposter-IFSs, how could you tell?

Since the IFS is supposed to predict the future and we can’t predict the future, why do we think it’s a good idea to ask people to predict the future?

If it takes imagination to create an IFS and imagination is not bound by reality, isn’t it likely that an imagined idealized future is not possible to achieve?  And won’t a project that must achieve an impossible future likely to run long and miss its launch window?

Wouldn’t an Achievable Future State (AFS) be a little less bad?  But who gets to choose what is achievable and what is not?  And how could they know?

Instead of fixating on an IFS as the ultimate destination, why not agree on the situation as it is and locate yourself within that context?  Why not start the journey with a sense of direction?*

Why not understand the situation as it is and do the next right thing?*

Why not run small experiments in parallel and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t?*

*Thanks to Dave Snowden for this language.

Here are the top blog posts (in descending order) from the previous twelve months.  The short descriptions give some context for the posts and my intentions for writing them.

Thanks for reading.

Mike

When You Have Enough… The post describes behaviors that demonstrate you have enough and the benefits of having enough.  And it calls out some problematic consequences when you don’t think you have enough. The main point of the post can be summarized in one sentence – When you have enough, it’s because you’ve decided you have enough. Enough of what, you ask?  Well, I left that up to you.

Overcoming Not Invented Here (NIH), The Most Powerful Blocker of Innovation.  With innovation, sometimes the novelty threatens which causes the Establishment to reject new ideas.  The post described what NIH looks like so you could spot it at twenty paces.  Here’s a summary of the post in three sentences.  If you can’t understand why a novel idea never made it out of the lab, investigate the crime scene and you may find NIH’s fingerprints.  If customers liked the new idea yet it went nowhere, it could be NIH was behind the crime. If it makes sense, but it doesn’t make progress, NIH is the prime suspect.

Is The Timing Right? I was surprised that this post was popular.  The idea behind the post was to give examples of being too late and being too early so you could dial in the timing of your work.  I thought the bias toward accelerating everything, pulling in projects, and doing everything in parallel would contradict the idea of a right time to do the work.  But, people liked this one.

Stop, Start, Continue Gone Bad.  This post was intended to poke fun the fundamental problem that we start far too many projects and finish too few or finish too slowly.  I introduced the dangerous variant of Stop, Start, Continue called Start, Start, Continue and described its consequences.  To battle that variant, I introduced the powerful antidote called Stop, Stop, Stop.

When you say yes to one thing, you say no to another.  In the heat of battle, we want to make progress but we forget that our and our company’s capacity is limited.  With this post I wanted to describe “opportunity cost” with straightforward yes-no language to help us remember to say no when yes is not the right answer. And I proposed a system to help do just that.  Here’s the first step — Open your work calendar and move one month into the future.  Create a one-hour recurring meeting with yourself.  You just created a timeslot where you said no in the future to unimportant things and said yes in the future to important things.

How To Grow Talent. The objective of this sparse post was to give examples of how to use the work itself to help people grow and to show what a natural progression of growth can look like.

Image credit — Mike Beales