Personal – Page 17 – Graham Chastney

Blessings #174 – Vulnerable Places

For most of my life I have tried my hardest to be in control. It’s a feeling that most of us have; the need to be in control. Without control we feel exposed and vulnerable.

I hate to imagine how many night’s sleep I have lost because I have been facing a situation that I wasn’t in control of. I was reminded of this the other week as I lay in my bed looking into the darkness and turned over and over a situation that was going to face me the next day. This wasn’t even a very important situation, but it had got under my skin.

Over recent years I’ve tried to change this as I’ve become increasingly aware of two things. The first is an obvious one – I’m never going to be in control of everything. The second is not so obvious, but is more profound – control pushes people away and puts me into a cage of isolation.

If I’m going to be someone who lives a life that is connected with other people, truly connected, I need to drop the control, be open and as a result be vulnerable.

In a study of what makes people wholehearted Brene Brown made this observation: "In order for connection to happen we need to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen". Brene has some really profound insight into what it means to be vulnerable and open and wholehearted, a video of here presentation at TED is at the end of this post.

She also makes the observation when talking about how we numb our vulnerability "We make everything that is uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty – you’re wrong I’m right." I’ve definitely been guilty of that in the past, and probably will be again, but I’m trying not to. I’m trying to be someone who embraces the vulnerability of the journey of faith that I’m on.

Jesus never asked us to have all of the answers, he did ask us to journey together. I’m trying to embrace the unknown alongside the known. I’m trying to let my relationship with Jesus grow in the weakness.

Part of this journey of vulnerability has been to create a few places where I can be open and exposed in safety – places of vulnerability. One of these places takes place on a Thursday morning as myself and two other men get together for breakfast and to chat. Most of the time we talk about things that others might regard as trivial, but they are things that are close to each one of us. They are things that we feel the need to share, in vulnerability, with the others. We don’t even have the answers most of the time, that’s not the point either. Our aim is to allow ourselves "to be seen, really seen".

I’m sure that part of Jesus statement "Unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in" Mark 10:15 is that children have a wonderful ability to make themselves vulnerable without condition.

We cannot live a life completely in control, it would be madness to try, but we can try to live a life of hiding. Jesus us asks us to come out of the hiding and to make ourselves visible, exposed and vulnerable.

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Brene Brown

Use those 60 seconds wisely

For many of you the next few days represent an opportunity to do something different with your minutes.

You have a choice what you do with those blocks of 60 seconds.

The worlds is busy doing all sorts of things, but what are you going to do?

As for me, no I’m not writing blog posts, I scheduled this one before the Christmas break. I’ll be following my usual holiday pattern and turning down the volume on my online interactions. I have the title music of a TV programme from my childhood ringing in my ears now “why don’t you…?”

Targeting Communications

We have so many choices for communication that it’s easy for us to communicate in the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

I doubt I’m unique in the variety of places that I interact. When I write something I try to think about the different groups that I’m wanting to communicate with and to hone my message to fit that group.

At a high level the groups fit a bit like this:

Twitter: This is quite a broad constituency, but it’s mainly the people that I work with. I tend not to write about personal things because of this. I do send updates about my blog to twitter, but they generally fit with that constituency as well. Twitter is my primary update location, if I’m going to update my status anywhere it will be on twitter. I have been trying to tone down the volume a bit recently.
Linkedin: Although I’m quite active on Linkedin I don’t write very much. I mainly use it to keep in contact with where colleagues and former colleagues are up to. I could send automatic updates from twitter and other places here, but I don’t.
Facebook: Nearly all of my interactions on Facebook are personal ones. There are some colleagues who I have as friends but mostly my interactions are with people outside work. As well as updating and commenting I’m also likely to use Facebook for instant messaging and messaging communications with those who I know use Facebook. I also send my twitter updates to Facebook.
Google+: Well, next too nothing really, I feel like I’m still keeping a watching brief. I sometimes post a link to my blog. Most of the people in my circles are work people. Google+ has not really taken off with my outside work friends.
Email: I use email all day every day but try to keep the communications as tightly targeted as possible. Most of the time I avoid reply-to-all, but occasionally get caught out, and try to reduce the distribution list rather than grow it.
Blogs: I run two blogs because I write about different things. This one is mostly about things that I’m thinking about from day to day, I’m not very targeted in what I write, but people seem to accept that. The blessings blog is about, well, blessings. A few people read avidly, but most people find information via search (>65% of my visitors are new each month).
Skype: Skype plays a minor part on my communication regime. It’s sometimes get used for instant messaging communications and sometimes for video interactions with the family.

I think that’s most of it, but if you want to know more my about.me is a reasonable place to keep up to speed with what I’m contributing to.

I wondered whether other saw things in a similar way so I’ve talked to a number of people and many of them seem to be seeing themselves having similar persona to these.

With these broad collections in mind I’ll target different places based on what it is I am writing.

I also make assessments on the length of what it is I am going to write. This isn’t very elaborate, most of the time it’s a simple question – short or long? If it’s short I’ll try and constrain it down to the 140 characters of twitter, if it’s long it goes here on this blog. That is, unless it’s really one-to-one communication and that’s what I use email for, still. I don’t see that we have a suitable alternative to email for this type of communication just yet.

Communication is such an important thing that we do I think it’s vitally important that we do our best to communicate in the best possible way.

I seem to have written a lot about communications recently:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Announcement Trailer

I am really looking forward to this coming out – unfortunately it’s December 2012:

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Announcement Trailer

Perhaps I should read the book this Christmas instead?

Seasonal Gratitude

It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:

(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)

Giving up on a goal: 1000 posts

Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.

I need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.

This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.

I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.

I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.

Axiom: The 10X Employee

One of the characteristics of an axiom is that it’s obviously true and as such you rarely question it.

I’ve subscribed to the view that some people are 10 times more productive than others for a long time – it has been obviously true.

As I look around the place where I work I can see that some people produce wildly more than others.

I’ve also worked on many projects where I’ve seen people who can clear the workload at an astonishing pace, they are obviously, noticeably more productive.

I was reminded of this axiom recently while reading a couple of articles by Venkatesh Raso on Developeronomics:

At the centre of the debate being had here is the idea of the 10x engineer:

The thing is, software talent is extraordinarily nonlinear. It even has a name: the 10x engineer (the colloquial idea, originally due to Frederick Brooks, that a good programmer isn’t just marginally more productive than an average one, but an order of magnitude more productive). In software, leverage increases exponentially with expertise due to the very nature of the technology.

While other domains exhibit 10x dynamics, nowhere is it as dominant as in software. What’s more, while other industries have come up with systems to (say) systematically use mediocre chemists or accountants in highly leveraged ways, the software industry hasn’t. It’s still a kind of black magic.

One of the reactions comes from Larry O’Brien knowing.net describing the 10X engineer like this:

This is folklore, not science, and it is not the view of people who actually study the industry.

Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle. There is abundant evidence that this is not the case: the most obvious being that there are no companies, at any scale, that demonstrate order-of-magnitude better-than-median productivity in delivering software products. There are companies that deliver updates at a higher cadence and of a higher quality than their competitors, but not 10x median. The competitive benefits of such productivity would be overwhelming in any industry where software was important (i.e., any industry); there is virtually no chance that such an astonishing achievement would go unremarked and unexamined.

In another article from 2008 Larry O’Brien gets into the specifics of programmer productivity:

That incompetents manage to stay in the profession is a lot less fun than a secret society of magical programmers, but the (sparse) data seem consistent in saying that while individuals vary significantly, the “average above-average” programmer will be only a small multiple (perhaps around three times) faster than the “average below-average” developer (see, for instance, Lutz Prechelt’s work at citeseer.ist.psu.edu/265148.html).

So, it would appear, there seems to be some disagreement on this axiom which is precisely why I started this series – how many of my axioms are really just nice ideas?

One of the problems with axioms is working out where I first came across them, this one is proving difficult to remember. I suspect that it comes from my old friends Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister writing in Peopleware:

Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals:

Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.

Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.

Count on the half that are better-than-median performers out-doing the other half by more than 2:1.

Peopleware: Individual Differences

But where did this come from: "[this diagram], for example, is a composite of the findings from three different sources on the extent of variations among individuals". So it comes from research undertaken around 1984 on software programmers.

You may have notice that I was vague at the beginning of the post about who the 10X people were being compared with – the median, the worst? It was deliberate, because I didn’t know, the axiom had become degraded over time and I couldn’t be specific. I was confused, and after doing some digging, I don’t think I’m the only one.

DeMarco and Lister point to and reference some real research for 10X being between worst and best which seems like a safe place to be. Everyone seems to agree that there is an order of magnitude difference between median and worst so that seems like a safe place to be too.

I feel like I’m having to constrain my curiosity a bit because there would appear to be so much more to learn but my time is limited. So I’m sticking to the safe areas.

Whatever the true axiom, we all need to understand that there is a significant difference in people’s productivity (however you might be measuring productivity) which makes it’s vitally important that we get the right people doing the right things. But it’s also important that we understand what our 10X place is and seek to optimise our time there and try to remove the constraints that are keeping us from getting there (he writes after a day of endless interruptions and chats resulting in very little personal productivity Smile ).

Blessings #173 – The Power of Small Steps

In our front garden there is a willow tree who’s branches, twigs really, reach to the ground.

This tree sits in the middle of a small piece of ground that is covered with slate chippings.

The chippings are quite large and the tree branches are only thin.

When the wind blows the small branches brush across the chippings backwards and forwards.

It’s only a gentle brush, and each swoosh can only move a few small chippings a small distance. If you sat and watched it you’d struggle to see that anything was changing.

Each step is tiny but it doesn’t take long and it doesn’t take much wind for the tree to clear the chippings from beneath it’s branches in less than a day. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to move a pile of stones off the drive and back under the tree. Of you added the piles up it would form a huge mound.

We don’t have to take massive steps to move mountains, we just have to take consistent small steps, moving a stone at a time is enough.

Likewise, you can’t finish a marathon in one huge step, you finish a marathon by putting one foot in front of the other over and over again. Each step gets you nearer to your goal, put together enough steps and you’ll get to the end.

Christians are also called disciples which means follower. We don’t follow for a day, we follow for a lifetime. The Christian faith is a walk of thousands of steps and he walks alongside us in every one. Sometimes it’s good to look back and see how far we’ve come.

Writing Limits

The other week I wrote about how I’d tried to change the balance of my writing so that I was Writing Less to Write More.

The challenge was to spend less time on Twitter and Facebook so that I wrote more consistently here.

The lesson I’ve learnt from this experiment is that there are limits to my writing output. I don’t have enough capacity to allow me to contribute in all of the places I’d like to, I have to be selective.

Over the last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to put the experiment in reverse and to deliberately get sucked back into Twitter and Facebook. This unsurprisingly precipitated a drop off in writing here, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way it was.

If you are a keen observer you will have noticed that I still wrote the occasional post, but nothing of any quality, or with any consideration. I wrote the easy stuff mainly in the Because it’s Friday category.

So I have a choice, I can contribute lots of little bits to all sorts of social media places, or I can contribute in a considered manner – I can’t do both. It’s a personal preference, but I think I’d rather be more considered, so it’s back to Writing Less to Write More.

Making some changes

I’m in the process of making some changes on this site. I’ve felt for a while that it needed a bit of a facelift. I’ve been trying to stick to my principles of simplicity, but the current manifestation is perhaps a bit too minimalist even for me. It’s not finished yet.

I’ve also been experiencing some performance issues which are proving difficult to get to the bottom of.

If you are a reader of Blessings then you’ll notice that it is currently in maintenance mode. I want to resolve one set of performance issues and get to a format I like before spreading it across both sites.

Inappropriate cultural tendencies

When it’s light enough I cycle home from work across a park. It’s quite a big park and has a semi-dedicated cycle path right through the middle. I say semi-dedicated because it’s really a wide path across the park with a big white line down it, there’s also a set of painted cycle symbols on the side that is intended for cycles.

Within the UK we drive on the left.

As I cross the park on my way home, the cycle track is on the left.

Everyone walking in my direction is walking…on the left, on the cycle track. It’s very rare that I see someone walking in my direction who isn’t walking on the cycle track.

They are walking over the large symbols of cycles telling them that it’s an inappropriate thing to do.

They give me a glare every time I pass them by (even when they are stood on top of a big symbol of a cycle) as if I am the one being inappropriate..

Why?

They have no reason to be walking on the left. There are no indications that would suggest that they do it. Actually the indication is that they should walk on the other side.

The only reason that they are consistently walking on the left is our cultural tendency to walk the way we drive – on the left.

The cultural tendency is stronger than all of the signage. It’s even stronger than their experience – people rarely change sides after I’ve passed them.

I should also point out that all of the people walking in the opposite direction are also driving on their left.

I wonder what other cultural tendencies are making us do inappropriate things?

My (Former) Job No Longer Exists

I used to do a job that no longer exists.

Technology has made the job that I used to do mostly redundant. The task that I used to do still gets done, it’s just that it’s no longer a full time job because technology does most of it without requiring someone to think about it.

There are parts of the job that I currently do that will no longer be required soon, I’m sure of that.

I’m not worried though.

Change gives me the opportunity to learn something new.

Change gives me the opportunity to create something new.

Change gives me the opportunity to stop doing some things that are a bit of a chore.

It’s a changing world and we all need to recognise it and respond. This isn’t anything new, it’s always been like that.

Have you met a wheelwright recently? They still exist, but there used to be thousands of them.

How about a tweeny? Do you even know what a tweeny is?

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