Shipulski On Design

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

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