February 25, 2022

s11e03: Talking to people is fun

0.0 Context setting

It’s Friday February 25th. Which means it’s the weekend tomorrow! I have no idea what time is anymore. It turns out that today’s newsletter is about What I’ve Been Doing Lately At Work, so…

1.0 Things that have caught my attention

1.1 Talking to people is fun

… I started the day with a super fun, super interesting research interview with a leadership exec.

I love doing these and I say they’re super fun and super interesting because I get to:

• do homework and learn about a new organization, what it does and how it does it
• ask dumb questions
• … and also use those dumb questions to explicitly and sometimes less explicitly test my assumptions, (e.g. “so if I think I understand this right, and from my experience, x usually happens… is that what happens here?”)
• connect and sympathise with people? Most people I work with don’t have the time to think about the problem I’ve been brought in to work on, and just hearing someone say that back to them “well yes, this is a complex problem, and it’s understandable you haven’t been able to deal with it because gestures your shit, it’s on fire¹”, anyway, people really appreciate that and that’s just nice
• assure people that their particular problem isn’t necessarily that unique and that most people have roughly the same shit on fire (whether in government or in the private sector) and that is because it’s always a people problem and that because their problem isn’t that unique, there are Things That Can Be Done
• honestly, just asking questions is great. People love to explain their jobs.

I mean, it helps that I do all this with an English accent in America.

I also have to admit that it kind of works super well with my ADHD: by the time I’ve chosen to work with a client, and I’m super lucky in most cases to be able to choose who I want to work with, I’m reasonably sure that I’ll be able to hyperfocus on figuring out everything to do with how they work.

Also? It’s not that most places are dysfunctional, but that people are always more or less doing the best they can, and it just so happens that really there isn’t enough time in the day to be able to focus on what matters to make things less dysfunctional.

Oh, right: and also because I connect dots. When I get to talk to someone in an exec position who also has silo experience (or is siloed!) it’s an opportunity to check whether what I’ve learned (or the assumptions I have) are true. So far, most of those assumptions are, and also so far, most people like to hear echoed back to them what they intuitively can feel are the problems in bits of an organization just not talking to each other. See, I said it’s a people problem.

Ack there’s more as I’m thinking about this!

I am a big fan of being as candid as possible if only because if you do it well and sensitively, people react super favorably towards it. One example of candor is to get specific about people: when I hear someone say “oh, this group, they don’t like doing this thing”, then I say something like: look, I know everyone’s doing their best and everyone has their priorities. And because I’ve read the org chart and made a mental model in my head and paid attention to who does what, I say: “so, when you say this group, do you mean group y, led by person z?” and a lot of the time the person I’m talking to is all OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR SAYING THAT OUT LOUD, I’M TOTALLY NOT ALLOWED TO SAY THAT OUT LOUD and also I say “yeah, good job I told you we’re not recording!”

Lastly, and I can’t remember if I’ve written about The Time I Realized Sometimes This Job Is Like Being Columbo, but really once you get people talking it, it is not entirely unlike the scenario where the murder suspect quite happily tells you exactly how they did it, but in this case it’s people telling you what they do and how they do it and everything in between because, well, someone’s paying attention to them. Which is great, and also, you know. Sad.

Hey ho, white collar knowledge worker work during the dying throes of late-stage capitalism!

1.2 One single thing that caught my attention

My friend Lee the other day noticed that 90s teen film Pump Up the Volume[^Pump] is now available in digital formats that Cory Doctorow disapproves of:

Anyway! Turns out I remembered that in the year above us in my sixth form at a respectable grammar school there were a bunch of kids who ran a local pirate radio station which, if you are British, is hilarious, because middle/upper-middle class British kids running a pirate radio station! How funny!

But also prompted this thought: like Lee said further downthread, one of the things about pirate radio in the 90s was the hyperlocal shout-outs to kids doing a specific thing at a specific place at a specific time. Which is also funny because nobody had mobile phones then, so if you wanted to call in to the broadcast and you were out, then you’d have to… do it from a payphone? Also how funny!

But then: those hyperlocal, real-time shout-outs. Pirate radio stations… are they… still a thing? Like, the need to connect with a group in realtime over, say, audio, isn’t a thing you need to do illegally anymore because hey, we have streaming? We have the Ticks Tock, we have the Facebooks Live, we have Twitch, we have YouTube streaming and so on and so on. So I suppose the kind of transgressive part is if you’re being an asshole on somewhere like 4chan and you’ve got a little live stream somewhere. In which case well done you, you’re also potentially much easier to hoover up in our surveillance capitalism world. Yay?

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That was also 15 minutes! I like this new 15 minute format. There’s way less pressure on writing and I actually get it done.

How are you? It’s the weekend! The weekend!

Best,

Dan