Insights on leadership, technology, and human-centered strategy, originally shared on LinkedIn and expanded for deeper exploration.
People don’t change. In aggregate, it’s a safe operating assumption. But it obscures two things: 1) how people behave in a system is a reflection of what it takes to thrive or survive in that system 2) any individual person may be capable of profound growth and change.
Advising, consulting, and coaching all entail listening with empathy and reflecting back to earn trust. Advisors then recommend what to do, consultants advise and collaborate in doing, and coaches unblock people’s intelligence and experience so they devise and do for themselves.
I consider generative ai a tool. One fraught with opportunities for misuse. One contributes to our industries consumption of resources. That said I use it almost daily. Examples of how I use it:
And I’ve done RAG prototypes built on my writing and on publicly available legal documents.
Software engineers with both high craft and an outcome focus will embrace pragmatic decisions in a codebase if the leaders comprehend the downstream implications of those decisions and have a history of methodically paying down tech debt as is it becomes a problem.
Get off the train at Chambers and find myself in front of a breakfast taco cart. Not ‘a’, but rather one of ‘the’ breakfast taco carts. Machacha con Huevos, please. Of the rest of the day, I say, “I see you. Let’s do this!”
I’ve come to learn coaching is tied into the power of witness. To have a safe space to speak your thoughts. To be seen doing what you believe is right. To know someone non judgmental cares and will follow up with you. To be reminded to appreciate the moments when it works. To be accepted and encouraged to move forward when it doesn’t. That’s powerful.
Genuinely love work from home but I can lose perspective. Taking a walk through Union Square farmers market to appreciate life as an impressionist painting.
My consulting pair and I made life a little better for our client yesterday as a side effect of pursuing our main mission there. That felt… fantastic.
An iteration review is about showing incremental progress to goal, informing stakeholders of immediate work to come, raising and mitigating near term risks and blockers. This doesn’t determine what to talk about but it does inform why you would spend time on any given topic.
Today I am using LLM AI to help me break up and summarize a transcript for a two hour walk through of a software system so that I can creat detailed annotations on the sequence diagram we created in the session
Back from PTO, immediately on a project. Challenged to find time for writing. Next week…
Witness today of an organization ignoring accommodations they were instructed to follow. Staff entirely empathetic and a manager who was not and who lacked the training, capability, and empathy to address the situation effectively. This is just how it’s been. That there’s something better to compare it to is evidence of some progress.