Thursday, March 22, 2018

Deadlines

A month ago I asked here for volunteers to keep tabs on me in order to set a short-term improvement goal and then go find an "accountability buddy" (to borrow the name from Lisi & Toyer) with whom I might either share a similar goal, or simply keep tabs on each other as we each go on their own goals, with the idea behind it is to drive each other to put the required effort.
I was fortunate enough to have Lisi ping me a few days back and help me formalize some of the thoughts that were running through my head by placing them in a mindmap. I might go occasionally and add some stuff to it.
Narrowing stuff down, I managed to remain with three goals I'd like to do first:
1. Create a personal "talk library". Creating a conference talk, for me, is still quite an arduous task - finding and idea and formulating it
2. Go over BBST free material and invest time to learn it (probably as a preparation to taking the course)
3. Building a project I promised my dad a while ago and got distracted by a lot of other things.

So, want to help me keep track and achieve one of these goals? All you have to do is choose a goal you want me to help you, and ping me in some way. We'll set up a way to check on each other later.

Since I'm not sure what to choose, I'll go with "first come, first serve" - If someone wants to join on one of my goals, or simply find one of them interesting to listen to - I'll go with that.

In terms of timelines - next couple of weeks I'll be busy with a the upcoming holiday (It's Passover time, so next week is cleaning, and the week after is friends and family), and probably the following month I'll be working on a slide-deck for a talk I committed to give at a local meetup (that's my way of forcing myself to prepare talks for conferences in advance), so I'm hoping to start working towards one of those goals on May 1st, and would love to find a partner for the journey up until then.

Anyone wants in on that ?

People problems suck

(No Hebrew, it's enough to wallow in it one time)

So, today our manager informed us someone on the team is being sent home.
I don't think anyone on the team was surprised by the decision, as we all were experiencing some of the difficulties for the past 6 months, but even so, and even if we might think it was the correct decision - it is no fun.
What is really upsetting is that everyone in the team knows that this person had their heart in the right place - they cared, they tried their best, and then some, and really cared for what they were doing. The question buzzing in my head (and in others, according to some corridor talks after the announcement) is "Did we do enough to try and avoid this?" After all, we often say that caring and trying can take one a long way. So, could we have done anything different to fix the situation in any other way then letting that person go? Could (and should) we have done more than what we did?
When I look back, it seems to me that all the symptoms were originating from one core problem - We did not manage to make the team a safe environment for that person to try and fail, in part because the way this person was failing was hurting the team and in part because we didn't try consciously to do so - we just assumed that everyone feels safe to fail and missed it when it wasn't. This, obviously, only made things worse, because when someone is not feeling safe to err, they default to not doing - which is only another failure that adds pressure and make everything spiral down really fast.

I'm not sure if I have any concrete conclusions out of today.
Or, in other words - bummer.