I regularly hear these title words around me – or words to that effect – and, depending on my mood, this makes me smile…or groan.
They are the recurring ‘message’ sung out from many senior figures in organisations and then ‘cascaded down’ …and then informally kicked ‘around and around’.
And my main reflection on hearing it?
“As if we don’t want to!!!!”
A little parable springs to mind1 which I’ll set out as follows: Continue reading
I recently wrote a measurement guide and a hugely important (and definitely too short) section within is titled ‘Beware the allure of measurement’.
Unfortunately, our working worlds seem to be obsessed with measurement, to the detriment of getting on with doing obvious things.
So I was very happy to read a LinkedIn post by a chap called Nuno Reis which really ‘laid into’ this measurement point.
Nuno starts by telling us that we’ve been lied to! And not only lied to…but sold the exact opposite of the truth.
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people around me talking about ‘playbooks’…and this makes me uncomfortable.
This post is me thinking about why this might be.
What is a playbook?
Looking up the definition (Dictionary.com) we get three uses:
The original use (way back in the Elizabethan 1500s) is “the script of a play, used by the actors as an acting text”.
Then we get the sporting usage (ref. American football from 1940s): “a notebook containing descriptions of all the plays and strategies used by a team, often accompanied by diagrams, issued to players for them to study and memorise…”
And finally, we get the more general sense of it being a stock of usual tactics or methods – to solve a particular problem in a particular way.
What we can see from each of these three uses is the fundamental meaning that it is about something being defined up-front (usually by some director or coach), rote-learned1 (by the actors or players), and then ‘delivered’ (regurgitated?) on instruction.
I can almost picture the Director on set shouting “aaand…action!!” Continue reading
So, this blog has been going (on and off) for ten whole years.
A decade! Blimey, I never expected that.
My early posts used to ‘fly off the page’. My later ones were (and are) often agony to write…. hence why they are few and far between.
I’m forever referencing dozens of half-written posts in conversations (as in “I’ve started to write about that…”) …which sometimes causes me to finish another one.
As a bit of a ‘trip down (my) memory lane’ I trawled through the list of nearly 200 ‘brain farts’ written so far…and I looked for those that, for some reason, stood out to me2.
I curated these into a list of ten3. You might like to pick a few to read (or re-read if you’ve been coming here for a while) …
A bit of fun:
Profound (at least as I see it):
…and I should note the one (and only) time that I did a serialised post over a week about big corporates:
“Your Money or your Life!” [Oct 2016]
Right, that’s it for my trip down memory lane. I’ll see what the future brings…
Footnotes
1. I sometimes read old posts and cringe at how it is written/ laid out etc…and I fight the urge to do some ‘renovations’ (i.e. make it look better than it actually was!).
2. Every post was written for a specific reason (either something had just happened around me, or someone had explicitly asked for help, or I’d had a Eureka moment or…) so, on reviewing them as a list, lots of them caused (shall we say) flashbacks.
3. I think that there may be a handful of people that have read a fair few of my posts. If this is you, then I’d be really interested in knowing if there is a post that ‘stood out to you’ (i.e. one that’s not in my list of ten). It’ll either make me smile/laugh or perhaps groan.
4. This post refers to a previous job that I held…although it’s still close to the truth.
5. Post Image: In the spirit of ’10 years is a long time’ (i.e. change), this post is the first time that I’ve used an AI ‘Text to Image’ creator (Adobe Firefly) for my little corner thumbnail post picture. An interesting area to explore.
I’ve been writing stuff about performance measurement on and off for a while now.
I’ve often been struck by the lack of clarity and consistency regarding the terms used in conversations and I’ve wanted to ‘do something about that’.
So…I started to write something down – for myself, and for those that I’ve been working with.
And this blog is a useful spot to ‘place’ the result so that those people (and any others that are interested) can easily find and make use of it.
So, please find attached:
Measurement of Performance – Education Document Version 1.1
That’s a shit name…but I haven’t thought of anything better…yet.
Footnote:
1. I’m already working on a Version 2.0 because there’s a specific section that I want to add…but it will require a good bit of thought to write.
2. You are very welcome to contact me with any observations you have on the document but, as per everything ‘blogging’ (i.e. the sharing of partially formed thought) please be constructive, as opposed to troll-like 🙂
3. This guide sits alongside (i.e. compliments) my earlier one: ‘Control charts: A ‘how to’ guide
4. I have added this guide to a ‘How to guides’ tab at the top of the blog so as to make it (and other guides) easier to find.
I often enjoy reading the regular emails that emanate from ‘The Daily Stoic’.
Here’s an extract from one that struck me:
“You clean and then it gets dirty. You do the dishes and then five minutes later, the sink is full again. You made it through your inbox in the morning and by the time late afternoon strikes, you’re already digging yourself out again. Literally before you’ve even finished putting the dog’s toys away, they’re splayed out across the floor. Just as you put the finishing touches on that big project, another is dropped on your plate. You finally organize your kids’ clothes and now they’ve grown out of them.
This can drive you nuts. Or you can learn to love it. Continue reading
It’s a Friday afternoon for me…and I was just about to log off and go home. I haven’t posted in a wee while and thought I’d have a quick peek at the set of ‘posts I’ve written but didn’t publish’ and I found a short one that amused me.
I wrote it at the peak of COVID-itus and, given some dramatic protests going on at that time, I chose to keep my powder dry.
But, bugger that…here it is (better late than never):
I’ve seen a repeating misunderstanding (e.g. within social media1) of the mathematics re. the relationship between vaccinated people and those being treated in hospital with COVID. Continue reading
Nooo…that’s a desirable outcome, not a ‘thing’ that you can decide to do…. or command from others.
We can’t simply say that we will trust each other, and this be so!
Context: I’ve experienced several work scenarios where, after studying the work, people have concluded that there is a problem with a lack of trust.
I’m not disputing that this can be the case. On the contrary, this doesn’t surprise me.
However, in the rush to want this situation to change, we often find the simplistic treatment to be the issuing of a statement such as (from now on) ‘We will trust each other’…or words to that effect. Continue reading
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