Author: giantknave

Everyone’s creating Playbooks!

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , ,

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 →

Ten years of twaddle (Nov. 2014 – present)

giantknave Brain Farts

So, this blog has been going (on and off) for ten whole years.

A decade! Blimey, I never expected that.

  • It started off in a very amateur fashion1, with me mainly ‘moaning about the world’.
  • It matured into longer, better referenced, (intended to be) educational pieces.
  • …and nowadays it’s a bit of an ad hoc hobby.

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:

  1. What have the Romans ever done for us!! [Oct. 2015]
  2. “My Lord, I bring news!” [Feb. 2016]
  3. “Dad…what do you do at work?” [May 2016]4
  4. Dilbert says…let’s automate everything! [Aug 2016]

Profound (at least as I see it):

  1. Depths of Transformation [Sept. 2016]
  2. ‘Chain’ beats ‘Triangle’ [Feb. 2017]
  3. Smoke and mirrors [June 2019]
  4. On Resilience [May 2020]
  5. The Righting Reflex [Jan 2022]
  6. On Vector Measurement: the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of [July 2022]

…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. 

Performance Measurement – A guide

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , , , ,

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.

Learning to dance with entropy

giantknave Brain Farts , , , ,

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 →

COVID: A small – but significant – piece of Maths

giantknave Brain Farts , ,

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 →

“We need to trust each other more!”

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , ,

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 →

“Our work this year”

giantknave Brain Farts , , , ,

I regularly notice many service organisations1 communicate to the public with a list of facts that apparently demonstrate that their services are a good thing. This usually occurs at their reporting year-end and is titled something like “Our work this year”2.

I call this the ‘didn’t we do well!’ comms.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big supporter of the concept of services that help people….and, yes, I’d like to know what these services are doing and how well this is going. Continue reading →

The Golden Moment

giantknave Brain Farts , , ,

Short post time to set out a concept that I frequently talk about…

When a client chooses to contact a service system (#inbound) there is a good chance that they have prepared themselves for this moment1, such that they have:

  • A degree of time to talk, and the mindset to want to explore/ resolve/ move things forward;
  • secured themselves a suitable/ conducive environment in which to do this (e.g. a room with privacy); and
  • gathered (what they believe are) the necessary supporting information/ documents…or may have ready access to them.

Conversely, when a service system attempts to contact a client (#outbound), it is highly likely that we may find it difficult to get hold of them…and, if we are lucky enough to achieve a connection, very few (if any2) of the above conditions may be in place! Continue reading →

My ‘broken record’

giantknave Brain Farts , ,

I often hear groans from some of my colleagues when we are in conversation.

Their (regular) usage of a specific word triggers me to interject when they are talking…

…which creates an ‘oh no, there he goes again…’ moment 🙂

This post is sort of an apology for me being me…and yet, clearly, it’s not!

This is in no way to blame those that trigger me. The problem (as I see it) is that an important concept has become sooo bastardised in ‘modern’ organisations that it has become ‘how we all speak’. We don’t even notice. I regularly fall in the hole myself. Continue reading →

Freedom from Flatland

giantknave Brain Farts , , , , , ,

Many years ago1 I was introduced to a wonderful little book – a satirical novel called ‘Flatland: A romance of many dimensions’.

It was published way way back in 1884 by an English schoolmaster, Edwin A. Abbott, and sits within the rather specialist genre of ‘mathematical fiction’. The book explores the nature of dimensionality.

By chance, after various books, experiences, thoughts and conversations, Flatland came back into my mind as a metaphor for explaining something seemingly far removed. I realise that, for regular readers of this blog, you may be struggling to find the link…so here goes my explanation: Continue reading →