Emergent: June 2019
This month: the power of saying less, management advice and how your dumb rules are frustrating your best people, and what makes a map good.
Emergent is a monthly newsletter that features Noah’s ideas, writing, podcasts, and other things that are capturing his attention. Subscribe here.
Welcome to June. This month, I’ve been thinking about silence and also how I can be a better manager. That led me to two interesting articles on these topics that I wanted to share this month. Plus, I found a great article on map design that will fascinate you.
If you like what you see or have some suggestions, drop me a line at noah@paloalto.com.
For previous editions of Emergent, head on over to Medium to view the archive.
Thanks for reading!
Noah
1. This month’s thoughts on silence
“When people set up meetings, they focus on what they’re going to say and how they can cover off on as much as they can by the end of the meeting. If the outcome involves influencing the rest of the people in the meeting to do something, letting them speak should be the focus. When people are heard first, they tend to listen to what you say when it’s your turn. Silence breeds curiosity and curiosity leads to a conversation where someone will listen to you.”
Read the full article to get 9 reasons why silence is often the best way to get the results you want. Read more now.
2. This month’s management advice
Dumb rules are frustrating your best people
At Palo Alto Software, we’ve tried to reduce most of our policies to just a single sentence: “Use good judgement.” We’ve found that crafting rules to deal with the 1 percent of team members who might abuse a policy just frustrates and hampers the 99 percent — the smart and motivated team members who are always trying to grow the company.
It’s a core part of our culture that we’re cultivating, and I recently came across an article that goes into detail about why our strategy is working. Read the complete article here.
3. This month’s interesting thoughts on design
If a map is intended to help you find things, shouldn’t it include all of the information it can? It turns out that “the most useful maps distort what they depict and leave out tons of possible information.”
This article from cognitive scientist Barbara Tversky distills misconceptions about maps and discusses how to best display complex sets of information in limited space. Read more now.
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