Category: Uncategorized

In negotiations, there’s a term called anchoring. It refers to the concept that whatever first number is dropped in a conversation, is the number that will be the mental anchor for the rest of the negotiation. It’s why you should avoid saying the first number in any negotiation – if you’re too low, you’ve anchored […]

Whenever we talk about actual work, there’s a tendency of trying to understand how long something will take – or any other proxy metric that means the same thing, but in a more indirect way, such as complexity. This can serve a helpful purpose, but I think it’s mostly a distraction. Let’s talk about estimations! […]

Remember house parties in your twenties? I do, and one of the highlights – and one of the common thing between most parties – was that the kitchen would be the focal point of most gatherings. Since a lot of partying revolved around drinking various kinds of beverages, the kitchen offered itself as an ideal […]

To get something out of the way – yes, I do say no quite often. But even if "no" is in itself a complete sentence (true!), I still think it’s a really boring sentence. Make better sentences. If conversations are two-way streets, no is like a stop sign. There’s no opportunity in no, no next […]

We’re running regular surveys in which all employees are asked to rate various aspects of their workplace, and that gets then summarised and condensed and gives me, as a line manager, the opportunity to understand what the people reporting to me think of the company, the team and their environment. My general expectation is to […]

If you take a group of people and have them walk one kilometre over a flat surface, and compare that group to another group that walks a kilometre over challenging terrain – those groups will be different in the end. One of those groups will have a story to tell, an achievement to celebrate and […]

It feels like I’m entering some sort of phase where the focus is on some of my mental models. One of those is flight levels. Solutions have different flight levels. Conventionally, a flight level is the altitude at which an airplane is flying. The higher up you are changes significantly what you can see. You […]

There’s words I use a lot at work. One of them is capability. What’s a capability? It’s something your system can do, kind of like a skill or feature. If you’re building a content management system, and that content management system can display blocks of HTML, and not only rich text, that’s a capability. It’s […]

There must be a special place where all the abstractions that were never needed, but still built, go when a project is abandoned. Today I want to talk about optimising for frequency. What I mean by that is to make the things you do often during development of a thing really easy, while not getting […]

Note: I was not sure if I should publish this post, because it very much feels like i’m putting folks in too broad categories – I’m not, it’s one of the many mental models I use at work, when leading teams. I’m writing this with many grains of salt, and I’d ask you to read […]