6 Points

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My daughter played in a squash tournament last weekend.

In squash, each player has a computer-generated ranking that is reasonably accurate. It’s very easy to think that these numbers tell the whole story.

So, when my daughter lost her match (11-9, 12-10, 12-10 ) to a girl with a 0.10 lower rating, she was very upset.

The next morning, gearing up for day 2 of the tournament, I asked her a question: “If you had won 11-9, 12-10, 12-10 instead of lost, would you have been pretty happy with the result?”

“Yes,” she agreed, she would have.

We did the math together and noticed that the difference between what happened and what might have happened was 6 points.

6 points out of 64 were the difference between “existential crisis” (“Maybe I’m not really improving. Maybe I’ll never improve.”) and “I’m on the right track.”

There are situations in which the difference between winning and losing really matter: if your business runs out of cash but has a fundamentally sound business model, what matters is the cash. And if you “almost” hit your targets every time, then you might have a target-setting or an accountability problem.

But most of the time, we act like my daughter, allowing the space between our narrative of wins and losses to be much bigger than what actually happened.

Drawing the lucky last card feels like our just reward for playing the hand correctly. But the two events are, in fact, unrelated.

 

Trajectory

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We’ve all done compounding math.

Invest $100 today and compound it monthly at 1%, and it will be worth $3,595 (35x return) in 30 years. Compound it annually at 2% and it will be worth $137,740 (1,377x return) in 30 years. And, of course, compound it at 0% and you’ll have $100 forever.

Now, apply this thinking to something you’re working to improve—it can be in your personal life or your organization. And think about getting a tiny bit better each month, say 1% or 2%.

At those rates of improvement, you’d be 30% or 60% better at this thing in two years’ time.  And, let’s be honest, a 1-2% monthly improvement at anything we’re really putting our mind to feels like almost nothing.

So, what do we make of issues that we’re stuck on? Ones that feel like whack-a-mole, where we keep putting in effort and we seem to end up in the same place?

If any meaningful amount of time has passed since we started working on these problems, that means that all our efforts don’t add up to even a 1-2% monthly improvement.

There are only two reasons this could be the case, and they are two sides of the same coin:

  1. The things we’re doing are not effective at addressing the problem
  2. The thing we think is the problem is not really the problem

While this is conceptually easy to understand, coming to terms with it is hard.

If we know that slow progress compounded over time results in massive change, being “stuck” can only happen if all our effort is having almost no yield. When that happens, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Compounding math doesn’t leave space for any other conclusions.

How We Learn Algebra Today

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Two weeks ago, I was sitting with my daughter, helping her study for a test on linear equations. She’s in 8th grade, and we’re already getting to the point where my recollection of some of the math she’s studying is rusty. Soon she’ll be in high school and I’ll be of no use at all.

She had a set of problems that stumped both of us, and I told her to use ChatGPT to get an explanation for how to solve them so she could learn and practice the approach before school the next day. She told me she didn’t want to, that she didn’t like using AI, and that she’d just ask her teacher in office hours the next day.

While I have sympathy for her reaction, and a preference for her always talking to her teacher when she wants to go deeper, her approach isn’t going to work. The power and leverage created by AI tools is too much to pass on.

Just last month, a member of our 60 Decibels team created a working prototype to replace a piece of software that we’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for. The prototype took 15 minutes — 15 minutes! — to develop on v0.dev, and we expect it to replace the expensive, paid software we’re using sometime this month.

There’s a reason the Shopify CEO’s leaked memo — in which Step 1 reads “Hire an AI before you hire a human” — went viral. If we’re not retooling how we are running our organizations, we are already falling behind. Whereas if we’re diving in, we have the opportunity for unparalleled leverage.

Our job, then, is to keep on talking to the human—in my daughter’s case, her math teacher. But we need to go into that meeting having practiced and learned and honed our skill with the free tutor who now lives in each of our browsers. We need to take every repetitive task, every task that can be easily described, every part of the work that’s not uniquely leveraging our specific skills, relationships and insights, and find a way to have an AI tool improve or take over that part of the work.

 

Who, What, When

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Organizational complexity grows faster than the growth of organizations.

One of the drivers of this is the math of large groups: the number of relationships in a group grows much faster than the number of people in a group.*

For example, in a nuclear family of 4 people, there are 6 pairs of relationships. That number grows to 10 in a family of 5 and, if each of the 3 kids in this family has three kids, it grows to 136.**

Similarly, when a company grows from 10 people to 100, the number of pairs grows from 45 to 4,950. That number excludes all external relationships and all other configurations of people.

In this context, it’s easy to see why seemingly simple concepts like prioritization and hitting deadlines can become difficult to maintain as an organization grows. Suddenly, everyone has a list of 100 things, and everyone is doing their best to get most of them done.

While this is true, it also allows us to get into bad habits.

One of these bad habits is vagueness around who will get what will get done by when. It’s the difference between:

  • (Easy, natural) We talk about things, agree (in principle) about the decision, someone says they’ll run point. Meetings end with inconsistent documentation and summary around next steps.
  • (Rigorous, learned) We decide things, agree with clarity about the decision, and we always have a point person who signs up to action something and gives clarity about the deadline. All meetings have consistent written prep and consistent summaries and documentation of next steps.

In the “Rigorous, Learned” culture, for each and every decision, there is a Who, What and When. No exceptions.  (The only wrinkle is that the “When” can either be the due date or the date by which a due date will be decided upon.)

The difference between “nearly clear” and “clear” here is huge: there’s no 80/20. As in:

  • “We (mostly) decided this” v. “everyone knows and could repeat back what the decision was”
  • “I’m pretty sure Alexis is in charge” v. “Alexis is in charge”
  • “She’ll give us an update next week” v. “She’ll get it done by April 21st”

No one person can make this happen alone.

We must decide as a group to change how we show up for each other; and we must reinforce a new set of habits—particularly during meetings—that support these new behaviors.

When we build up these habits, we weave something new into our cultural fabric.

We become a group of people who keep our promises to one another, who know we can count on each other, and who know what’s most important.

This new culture will persist no matter how big we get.

 

==================================================================

Math notes

* I wanted to describe this as an “exponential” relationship but, strictly speaking, it is quadratic. The easy way to describe this is that the number of relationships grows proportionally to the square of the number of people in the group.

** 2 grandparents, their kids (3 + 3 spouses), and their grandkids (3 x 3) makes a 17-person family. The number of pairs in a group of 17 is (17 x 16)/2 = 136.

 

 

The Structure of an Apology

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It’s not as hard as it looks if we ground our apology in facts.

We say the following:

It is a fact that this happened.

I understand that this happened.

I apologize to you for my role in making this happen / not stopping it from happening. 

I feel genuine remorse about the fact that it happened.

Owning our mistakes is one of the bravest, most empathetic things we can do. No fooling.

Pain in the….Arm

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

The time I’d normally have spent, yesterday, finalizing today’s post was after the plasma injection I got in my arm for persistent (last 10 months) tennis elbow.

The doctor told me not to use my right arm (includes typing) for the week.

So, that post will go live next week. In the meantime…

I remind myself that I am More than the Broken Parts.

And, for further reading that may not have crossed your desk: here’s the memo about what is happening to U.S. foreign aid in the aftermath of the dismantling of USAID.

Hopefully what emerges will be some semblance of what is described.

“Our Values” vs. “What’s Valued”

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

While I have written “values statements” many times over the years, it’s not an exercise I’ve embraced.

It often has felt like a smokescreen-inducing, hand-waving endeavor.

“Let’s write down a bunch of statements that are, at worst, non-specific and disassociated from everyday reality; at best highly aspirational.”

Therein lies the problem.

I’ve been thinking of ways to approach this exercise differently: instead of framing it as “values,” we should start with “what’s valued here.”

Meaning: what are the specific behaviors and orientation that we, as a culture, deem important to our collective success?

How do we believe each of us should show up to create maximum impact?

What types of actions do we want to see more of, in anyone and everyone, no matter who they are and where they come from.

I wrote about this in my Culture Graphs post, which talks about the ongoing, iterative interaction between your today values and your tomorrow values. These values—literally the behaviors that are valued in your organization—are not static and they are not determined by what you’ve written down. They are the sum total of how people interact every day.  These actions interact with your cultural fabric and weave something new.

So, start with asking yourself, “what behaviors / attitude / orientation do we value here?”

Things that are concrete, real and specific. Things that we see embodied in the people who make the most impact?

The process of writing these down is a way of uncovering desired behaviors that have been implicit or hidden from most of your team.

You aren’t “creating a values statement,” you are revealing, to your team, what is valued here.

When people struggle in an organization, part of what is holding them back is the fact that no one has taken the time to say “this is how we expect you to behave.” These people feel unseen or culturally out of sync because these behaviors haven’t been made clear to them. Worse, if your senior leadership cannot agree what these behaviors are, they have no way to reinforce your culture.

If you’re ready to jump in to writing down a “what’s valued” statement, I’d recommend this 2002 Harvard Business Review Article, Make Your Values Mean Something by Patrick M. Lencioni. It breaks down values into these four categories (paraphrased):

  • Core values: deeply ingrained principles that serve as cultural cornerstones
  • Aspirational values: those that a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks
  • Permission-to-play values: the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee
  • Accidental values: arise spontaneously, without being cultivated by leadership, and take hold over time.

Without a clear articulation of values, Accidental Values take over, and your Culture Graphs take on dangerous level of randomness. Whereas with articulated Core, Permission to Play and Aspirational Values, you create clarity for your employees and take responsibility for building the culture your team has decided it needs to succeed.

The F Chord Opportunity

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been working on playing guitar for about a year.

It is, mostly, harder than I’d expected—given my lifelong experience as a musician—but also extremely enjoyable. Moments of playing a truly beautiful, soulful tune, or of getting my girls to sing while I play, are nothing short of transcendent.

One of the challenges every beginner guitar player will face is learning to play an F chord.

The F chord – image from https://notesonaguitar.com/how-to-play-an-f-chord/

To play it properly, you need to curl and press down firmly with your middle, ring and pinky fingers, and, simultaneously, press down three other strings with your second finger.

Getting it to sound like anything other than a buzzing mess was, at first, impossible. Playing this F in tempo, as part of a song, still seems ludicrous to me.

Each beginning guitar player must decide how to confront this challenge. The natural thing to do is to avoid it: you can do a lot on the guitar without being able to play this awful chord. You can avoid songs that have it. You can play a ‘mini’ F chord, which is much easier. Never learning the F chord, and all the associated bar chords, seems like a viable path.

And yet, there’s not a single “real” guitar player out there who can’t play an F chord.

So how do we handle this as guitar players and in other part of our lives? How do we approach the skills that we could easily dodge and we think no one would notice—skills that are high leverage specifically because the only way out is through.

Skills like learning how to:

  • Sell
  • Write code
  • Coach
  • Negotiate
  • Give honest, constructive feedback
  • Hear honest, constructive feedback
  • Put yourself on the hook
  • Keep your promises
  • Own your mistakes
  • Make strategic choices with incomplete information
  • Disagree productively
  • Develop resilience around our motivation
  • Influence without authority

F chords are everywhere, they’re just not always easy to see.

The 5-minute call

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, I needed to get some information quickly from some folks outside of my company.

I offered up a 5-minute call that was really, truly, a 5 minute call. I made the agenda clear as well as the timing.

All calls got scheduled and completed within 48 hours, they each lasted no more than 8 minutes, and even the ones that had to happen at strange hours felt easy.

Note: this is not a post about cold outreach or marketing gimmicks.

Instead, it’s a reminder that we can get a lot done in a very short amount of time, especially where relationships of trust exist.

Grabbing 5 minutes internally with a colleague is such a normal thing—it’s the reason Slack huddles exist.

But doing the same thing with people outside your company—that is rare.

We get caught up in four emails and 30-minute slots and Calendly.

How much more connected could you be if you used tiny windows to have important, focused conversations.

(Oh, and checking in on how someone’s doing, with a call and not a text, counts as “important.”)

Is “Polished” Writing a Good Thing?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

How we communicate evolves with time and with the medium.

I write my texts (mostly) like I write my emails, resulting in my kids repeatedly telling me that it sounds “aggressive” when I put a period at the end of a text message.

(They also want me to use exclamation points much much more! LOL)

While I’m comfortable with the idea of tone and style evolving over time and in different contexts, I’m uncomfortable with what happens when we no longer need to struggle with a blank page. I’m skeptical that it’s a good thing that Gmail is now offering to “polish” my posts and that LinkedIn suggests “rewrite with AI” every time I string a few words together.

Clear writing and clear thinking co-evolve: I don’t know anyone who writes well who doesn’t think well; and how we express our thoughts in written form is a great way to reveal whether our thinking is as clear as it needs to be. I also know that convenience will win out—why wouldn’t it?—and that the cost of all of this convenience will be mostly invisible.

It’s already established that AI is most useful when you have subject matter expertise, so you can tell the difference between good and bad, and use these tools as leverage for your strengths.

How do we avoid systematically undertraining ourselves as strong writers and strong thinkers, to use the tools without having them replace an activity that sharpens our mind?