Improvisational comedy, like all team sports is about effective, high-energy, spontaneous collaboration. One of the seven major tenets of Improv is building off each person’s comment and suggestion with “Yes, and…” rather than dismissing it with a “but…”. “Yes, and…” extends, explores, and enhances the previous suggestion – building trust among all the team members, …
Category Archives: Productivity
Get Your Email Read with Specific, Compelling Subject Lines
One of my biggest pet peeves is vague email subject lines. This is for two reasons; Sometimes I only have time to read the subject lines – anything urgent needs to jump out. If I need to file and revisit the email, a clear specific subject line is easiest to re-find. My experience analyzing open …
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Stop Doing Dumb Stuff
When I need a quick kick in the pants, I reach for Tom Peters’ Brand You 50. Each one of his 50 tips are tow trucks pulling me out of what ever rut I find myself in. This is why I’m so excited about his new manifesto from Seth Godin’s ChangeThis project. This I Believe! …
Want Better Collaboration – Stop Asking Questions
The first step to a collaborative environment is to banish questions. Yes, banish the question mark from all conversation. Questions reinforce heirarchial relationships rather than build the peer-to-peer relationships necessary for innovative, effective collaboration. Step #1. Everyone is smart and everyone’s knowledge is of equal value. A question forces someone else to make something for …
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Only Pigs Can Talk
I’m reviewing an excellent presentation [pdf] on the agile software development landscape when two bullet points on Scrum’s daily meetings stopped me: Chickens and Pigs are invited. Only Pigs can talk. It took Googling to decipher the metaphor. Though it goes against my earlier stifling team work post, identifying who’s involved and who’s committed is …
Usability Not Usable? – Part 2
“People are usually not receptive to a newcomer waltzing in and telling them they’ve been doing their jobs wrong.” Usability departments exist in a number of our client organizations. Unfortunately, their organizational structural frequently instills an adversarial relationship between the project teams and usability group. The usability group is considered an outside agency – ony …
Instructions not Inventory
To create a to-do list reflecting your ultimate goal, we highly recommend taking the advice descibed in Recipes Instead of Lists from Nerdherding for Beginners: “A recipe will include infrastructure work and ‘planned re-work’ that might otherwise be forgotten the alternative is simpliy a list of ingredients.”
Daily Productivity Tips
We’re working with a number of clients to make their days more effective. One of the smallest, yet most profound changes is making each meeting a working meeting. Though powerful and effective, this technique does go against more than 96 years of conventional wisdom This technique works especially well for document review meetings – have …
The 30 Second Rule
If it takes you or your collegues longer than 30 seconds to find a piece of information, then your workplace organization needs drastic improvement. I recently attended Minnesota Technology’s overview on Lean for the Office. The 30 second rule is a great yardstick to measure your day against. Extend the principal a bit..if no one …
Do As Little As Possible
How little can I do to successfully reach this goal? Continually asking youreself that questions is the best ways to minimize rework, reach goals quickly, guarantee sustainable solutions, and design for wear. This approach creates a functional prototype quickly, keeps stress levels down, and keeps product teams lean. Johanna Rothman has an excellent post highlighting …