There is a particular feeling when someone whose work lit your path turns around and says, yes, you saw it too. It is not only pride, although I admit to that. It is also extreme relief. The thing you felt in your chest turns out to be real. You were not making it up. Continue reading When Your Inspiration Answers Back
Every delivery method ever invented is trying to maximize the same three pillars: speed, function, and quality. We do this by balancing two masters that have been at war since the first project manager drew a Gantt chart on a cave wall. Agility and control. They want different things. They always have. Continue reading The Second Coming of Waterfall
But if I squint a little and set the fear aside, even at the risk of losing a few of you here, it’s a remarkable metaphor. It may be the best one I’ve found for the kind of cultural change I’ve been writing about for years now. Continue reading Changing Lead Into Gold: A lesson in alchemy?
The critics who say Ted Lasso doesn’t know what to do with women are half right. Ted doesn’t. Not yet. That’s the story. The show is asking a question a lot of us have been fumbling with for a decade: how do you show up for people whose lives you don’t fully understand, without making it about you? Continue reading Ted Lasso Doesn’t Know What to Do With Women. Neither Did I.
This book is my attempt to name what’s happening and point toward what might be possible. But it can’t do anything sitting in a warehouse. It needs to get into hands. Your hands. And then the hands of the people you know who are running out of room. Continue reading 34 Generous People (and Counting): A Room to Be Human Update
Norway saved me. I do not know how to say it more plainly than that. I grew up inside the American “I” — mine wrapped in church clothes, the head of the household as the measure of all things, work ethic as worthiness, merit as a private possession. I did not question it. Formation does not announce itself. It just tells who you are. Then I married a Norwegian, lived a decade inside a different set of assumptions, and came home with foreign eyes. I touched the wall almost no one gets to touch. Continue reading Two Halls, One Day
The workers of 1886 didn’t get the eight-hour day by wishing. They got it by demanding it together, out loud. A century and a half later, the demand is due for renewal — before the next great wave of productivity gets distributed the way the last one did. Continue reading The Holiday We Gave Away
What will need healing? This is the harder question, because a trench doesn’t just change what you build. It changes who you become while building it. The public servant who learned that loyalty is a liability. The engineer who learned that openness gets you copied and closedness gets you paid. The neighbor who learned that the other side cannot be talked to. These are wounds, and wounds take time to heal. Continue reading Building From Inside the Trenches
Which means that every time you get choked up at something ridiculous, you are getting evidence. Not that you are soft. That the circuits are patent. That the thing which protects you is online and reachable, and that you know at least one reliable route to it.
If you cry at Ted Lasso, your equipment works. Continue reading I Cry at Ted Lasso
Part One named the reason: forty years of institutional silence, because nobody knew where the line fell between naming a human reality and imposing a belief. Silence became the professional norm, and then the norm became the vocabulary.
But here is the finding that ought to end the argument about whether this belongs at work. Continue reading Rescuing the Baby, Part Two: Standard Equipment
