Secure by default

Draft

How people prioritize their time/What dictates what people do

In my experience pain is the primary factor in how people intuitively prioritize. By that I mean what people usually spend their time on is what they find or expect to be the most painful if not adressed.

A persons expectation of pain can come from past experience, or from newly aquired insight and belief into what could turn problematic in the not too distant future.

Depending on how prone someone is towards execution vs planning, some people almost instantly start _doing_ the second they realize what their top priority should be. That can prove problematic in the context of cooperation.

People who just start doing risk don't taking the following into account:

• A proper and shared understanding of the problem
• The resources needed to solve the problem (and other priorities competing for those same resources)

Examples

Identify a task or a project (vs sending an email).

The amount context people provide automatically vary greatly depending on their experience with and intuitition for sharing context.

Draft

I have always been horrified at the meeting culture (or rather lack thereof) in some organizations.

In many organizations that I have collaborated with, it's not uncommon for a workday to consist of back-to-back meetings with 5 to 10 people (or more).

Problems with meetings:

• Breaks up focused work
• Unclear contribution expectations
• Drains mental capacity (digital meetings in particular)

Objectives of meetings:

• Share information
• Discuss project status or issues
• Make sure everyone is aligned
• Build trust
• Ensure that someone pays attention to/prioritizes something

The case for insight sharing

The accessibility of people

People aren't always accessible, nor do we expect them to be.

People have meetings, work different hours, get sick, go on holidays, sleep, have a life outside of work and, one day, leave our organization altogether.

Therefore, the questions of how work should be done, how it was done and what can be improved should be accessible without having to consult a person.

The relevance of proactively managing insight in a modern organization

• More knowledge work
• More specialized work
• More innovative/unfamiliar business models
• More distributed work (people in different places and time zones)
• Insight is produced and obtained everywhere in the organization (not just at the management level to be pushed down)

A modern organization has less hiararchy, more trust and more distributed and continously evolving responsibilities.

The modern society is more subject to expectations of personal availability that the modern organization to some extent needs to counterbalance in ordet to protect its people.

In a modern organization, more people need to be able to be able to identify and feel empowered to fix bugs in how the organization operates.