What I’ve Read, Round 2

Here is another collection of some content I’ve consumed in the past week/weeks/chuck of time.

So, in no particular order except that I’m starting with all the ethics-related pieces at the top:

This must-watch from George Aye on design and power dynamics:

This short take on our individual bias, which is worth your time and thought.

This read about design ethics. Yep. Do the ethics thing!
(Also see this awesome site that was linked to in the article: Tarot Cards of Tech.)

And moving on from ethics…

This article on peer/team coaching! This is a great practice and I highly recommend starting it. Even when I feel like I don’t have anything big I need coaching on, my peer coach has managed to be super helpful; checking in on even tiny areas of frustration or stuck-ness keeps you moving forward and progressing!

Kevin Bethune’s TedTalk about design superpowers. I did not like this talk. I did not feel it said anything very useful. Additionally, I dislike the mythology of the magical superhero designer—lots of people are doing designer things with non-designer job titles, and there’s not anything special about designers other than they’ve spent time learning how to use many design tools/methodologies, whereas non-designers often find themselves makings design decisions or using some designery methods out of instinct, necessity, and/or common sense.

Another TedTalk from Tristan Harris about mind control! Starts with facts that you should know about all these platforms that we use all the time, and the competition for our attention and why it is how it is and who’s in the back room making the decisions. “Technology is not neutral,” is a nice quote from this. Also: “I don’t know a more urgent problem than this, because this problem is underneath all other problems. It’s not just taking away our agency…it’s changing [our democracy and] our ability to have the conversations and relationships we want with each other.” So…what do we do about it?! He offers three “radical” changes. We need to admit we are persuadable and change our mindset completely around protecting our mental vulnerabilities. We require transparency and accountability from the “control rooms” that try to persuade us. And we need a “design renaissance” that stops trying to capitalize in our attention in ways we don’t like, but aids and empowers us. Listen for more detailed details and concrete examples (how rare!).

The Dawn of System Leadership: An interesting and sometimes annoyingly abstract (despite their attempt to give concrete tools; I think you’d have to go out and practice these a whole bunch to start to feel grounded in these concepts) look at what a ‘system leader’ is and some ways to cultivate that.

This article from 2014, The Social Innovation Revolution, in which the author never actually says why business and social innovation should care about each other. I believe the implied relationship here is that if business doesn’t change we will run out of natural resources and destroy everything; and that if social innovation doesn’t try to enter businesses, they won’t change.
But what she actually says is that businesses can’t solve their modern challenges through the old models (ok so…bummer for them?); and also that apparently technology has made us citizens so powerful that businesses need to actually cater to our needs now!
Honestly I see the reverse playing out; business seems to have moved further and further away from true human needs in the last 100-ish years, and technology has enabled businesses to convince us that our desires are needs, rather than responding to real demands in the market. A caveat to that is that some businesses will face public backlash (enabled by social media technology) if they behave in a way that consumers 1. find out about 2. understand and 3. are able to rally against.

A super interesting article about a newly emerging type of org structure, based on the idea of the evolution of organizational structures. The examples are fun. The ideas are intriguing. Give it a read!
One thing the article doesn’t mention is that there is sometimes a need for earlier types of structures. Not every organization, I believe, can or should evolve to ‘teal’; there are times when we simply can’t have or don’t want the kind of variation and autonomy that exists throughout a teal org.
Think of the military: you probably do want strict protocols followed throughout when national security and the use of deadly weapons are at play. At the same time, I’m sure there’s room in such orgs for a little bit of teal philosophy, allowing local groups to respond to their individual needs and challenges.
Also, having met enough people in my life who were not capable of critical thinking or willing to do any real share of the work, for example, it’s easy to imagine how the teal dynamic can easily fall apart. Even one bad actor in a group undermining the efforts of others, intentionally or not, can make it super challenging for the dynamics to succeed.

An article from McKinsey about being both an agile and stable company. They used a cute rhyme! It’s a bit of a slog! It did have a few interesting thoughts in there, especially when contrasted with the above article about teal orgs. There seems to be a very brief nod to the idea of self-organizing organizations, about which the article says, “this isn’t enough.”
I’m curious about how these two articles and models of structuring a company can play together, and I don’t really have an answer for this! I was rankled a bit by this article where it talks about aggressively standardizing processes, and not allowing local units to customize their own versions. This seems most at odds with the mentality of a teal org and the idea that people in a smaller unit can best determine their own working methodology. There’s definitely something to be said for not having every process/detail regulated and monitored for machine-like efficiency. Humans are not machines, after all, and I think one of the most-true ideas that supports the emergence of teal orgs is that no group of people is alike and therefore no team will see the same response from a predetermined protocol.
There are definitely advantages to optimizing for efficiency that your average group of humans is unlikely to uncover on their own—such as UPS banning left turns on their driving routes. At the same time, a driver in a very rural town is not going to have the same problem turning left on country roads that an urban driver is.
No matter how successful optimizing in this algorithmic way is, dictating it across a company and turning humans into little machines probably isn’t great for morale. I think a teal mindset could be applied to the implementation of such a protocol, encouraging adoption without rigid enforcement that strips people of their ability to make judgement calls. (Even though I will be the first to admit that human judgement is highly faulty and we tend to overestimate our own abilities and efficiency. I like this example from a Hidden Brain episode about chaos—when forced to change routes, about 5% of commuters found a new, better route.)

Okay, those are all the articles I feel like sharing. Thoughts! Comments! Additions!

One of these days I might post a “what am I listening to” because honestly I listen to a crazy number of podcasts and most of the things I’ve learned in the last 5 years have probably come from a podcast; it might be worthwhile to share those as well.