This post is a sneak peek at an idea from the upcoming book "Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career"

At various points in the lifecycle of our projects we like to ask about the lessons we have learned from that project.

But not all LLs are created equal.

For example raw observations or opinions like "I should have paid more attention to X" are a fine starting point but they are unlikely to make a tangible difference on their own.

So what makes a good lesson and how do me make ours better?

The must-ask question then becomes: Good for what purpose?

My answer:

The purpose of a successful lesson learned is to do something differently such that we get better (expected) results.

Which means to me that:

• If there's no change in action then the lesson has not been learned.
• If the new action does not lead to better (expected) results then it was the wrong lesson.

So at minimum a good lesson learned should describe in concrete terms:

1. a change in behavior (who should do what, when and how)
2. the desired result (preferably something we can see or hear)

More information that can be useful:

1. In what context or under what assumptions does this lesson apply?
2. What is the key moment when we should perform this action? How do we know it is that moment?
3. Compared to what? What mistake is likely to lead to what undesired result?
4. What was the actual story that led to this lesson? What happened? What did we do and how did we do it? What happened then?

What are you going to learn from your recent experience?

If you like this approach to lessons learned subscribe using the button in the bottom right of the window for more ideas from the book.

This post describes one of the key ideas from the upcoming book "Grow Together: Gain Clarity and Momentum in Your Tech Leadership Career"

When you feel stuck on the way to your long term goals or confused about what those goals should even be – don't despair – you don't need to know everything!

The only question you need to answer is what to do next?

Now or Not Now

A common cause of stuckness is trying to consider all options one by one.

If you consider each idea on it's own you will become overwhelmed.

You can never implement all ideas that have some value. Most of them do.

On the other hand our human instinct is to not lose good ideas so you might invest a lot in trying to capture and organize those ideas for easy reference later.

This is almost always a waste of time and a breeding ground for procrastination.

Instead notice that there is only one real decision to make about priorities:

1. NOW
2. not now

The NOW category is inherently limited. Even if you're working with a big and super-competent team you can only do so much in a given day, week or month.

This means that the key question is not "Which ideas are good ideas?", but rather "What is most important now given our limited resources?".

So what about the not now category? Aren't there good ideas there too.

Yes!

But I submit that most of the time it's safe and efficient to just delete them.

When the time comes to make another planning decision you will have a bunch of new ideas available. If one of the ideas you have on your list now is truly great it will probably resurface. If not then maybe it's for the best for it to be forgotten.

There's a relatively small subset of ideas that are unlikeley to reappear but also important not to forget – go ahead and store them (perhaps in your calendar). Use this sparingly otherwise your will end up right where you started – overwhelmed and stuck under the weight of too many options.

Forget Optimal

Another common source of stuckness is trying to make optimal decisions.

As a physics/math/cs student I was steeped in the kind of problems that have concrete solutions and commonly the task called for finding the absolute best one.

This is impossible in most real life situations.

You just don't have the information or the processing power to shoot for optimal.

What you can do instead is what the military might call reconnaissance by combat. Attack the problem in front of you and learn from the experience.

Instead of optimal your next step should be good enough for now, safe enough to try and short enough to learn quickly.

Ship something every week

If you're stuck or confused get unstuck by shipping something in under one week.

If you're clear and running full steam ahead also consider extracting smaller chunks you can ship within a week. People will benefit sooner and you might find out something surprising and adjust your long term plans.

How to chose what to ship:

1. Can it be done in under a week?
2. If successful, will it make someone's life better?
3. Can you learn from it?

Plan it, do it, then reflect on it.

Now what are you going to ship this week?

The following are three harmful beliefs:

1. What I see is reality.
2. What I think is the truth.
3. What I want must be.

What I believe is more accurate:

1. What I see is a tiny subset of reality, heavily filtered by my imperfect senses.
2. What I think is a result of my experiences and influences going back to childhood.
3. What I want is just that – what I want:
   • it’s ok if I try and fail
   • it’s ok if other people want other things (we may disagree or even fight, but the difference itself is neither strange or unnatural).

Do you agree?

Let me know.

Our purpose with Grow Together Academy is to help more great teams happen.

Great teams that create and learn together.

Great teams that get amazing results, without creating casualties.

That is not always easy.

Sometimes the winds are against us and sometimes we might even find ourselves in a pit of despair.

It can be hard to climb out of a pit of despair.

But rarely is all hope lost, so here are some things to try in common scenarios.

Pit 1: Everyone for themselves

In this pit there is no shared purpose. People are doing things to get what they want, but there’s not much collaboration, in fact people sometimes get in each others way and fight.

Best case: everyone does their own thing independent of others.

There is one more insidious variant here, which we could call hidden misalignment. It happens when there theoretically is a shared purpose in the abstract but people differ on the real world translation. Perhaps without realizing it.

For example:

Let’s make the world a better place!

Andy: Better place? Yes! More freedom!

Ben: Better place? Yes! More order!

Worst case: a classic rat race. Success is mostly individual, helping others means wasting resources or even harming your own chances. For some people to win, others have to lose.

What to do if you’re in this pit (and you can’t or don’t want to leave):

Find allies. Start with a shared interest. Preferably one that is narrow and specific.

Pit 2: It’s crap

In this pit the things we make or do are not good enough – software is slow and keeps crashing, roofs leak, walls are crooked, games are lost, missions fail.

This is a relatively easy one, as long as people care.

What to do with your team:

1. Find a strong enough WHY for improvement for example by getting inspired by stories and grounding them in your reality.
2. Don’t dwell too long on what you do NOT want (i.e. the problem). As soon as possible translate it into something you DO want (a desired outcome) and focus on that instead.
3. Find what IS working well and turn up the good.
4. Find the next best improvement and attack it.
5. Learn continuously with the Plan-Do-Reflect loop.

Pit 3: No one cares

This might be the worst one of the three.

In this pit people are deep in learned helplessness and stupor.

They might say things like:

So many attempts failed before, this one will fail as well…

Or they might be busy with their lives outside of the team and team-related opportunities don’t seem attractive enough to move them.

What to do when people don’t care (yet)?

1. Find out what people DO care about. Find ways to align those benefits with the team purpose. Or at least balance them.
2. Create a smell of success. Make something good happen and generate evidence that good things are possible afterall.

Build your ladder, rung by rung

In Grow Together Academy we practice most of those strategies to give you practical tools, not just for when everything is going smoothly, but also for more difficult situations.

Share your story

And what do you think?

Have you ever been in one of those pits?

Or a different one?

What did you do to climb out?

Hello there!

Around 2015, I believed that online training could be better than live training, so I started experimenting under the name “People Skills for Geeks.”

By the end of 2019, I had proof. Thanks to those early experiments and my experience in Seth Godin’s AltMBA (cohort 33).

As I write this in early 2021 the point is pretty much moot — almost all learning is online. 

So instead of comparing online and live I will share the best ways I know to learn online in 2021.

It is a hot topic for us [Michał and Richard] as we design Grow Together and it might also help you improve your own learning or even create learning experiences for others.

First of all I need to share a core belief:

Learning is behavior change

that leads to better expected results.

No behavior change => no learning.

With that in mind:

As much as possible do the actual thing. In the case of GTA it means to create and to learn together.

Create together

In GTA you will work in small groups to create something meaningful with others. 

Something none of you would likely not be able to create on our own.

It can be a powerful experience to work through difficult issues with a small group.

Especially if that group was brought together from all over the world and has bonded over several weeks of working together.

For example one course I’ve attended not long ago included people from the UK, Sweden, Poland, Germany, France, Australia and Singapore. This variety helped see the problem we were working on from different perspectives and learn that much faster.

Learn together

Learning by doing is a strong start, but there is more.

As you probably know muscles grow during recover not during a workout.

And so it is with learning. Most of it happens when you reflect on what you did after you did it.

And it’s even better if you’re surrounded by perceptive teammates who will help you by sharing their observations and opinions for you to consider.

In GT you will be invited to regularly share your reflections with other students. You will also be invited to do the same for others which will boost your learning even further. It will help you clarify your thinking and give you a chance to grapple with a wider variety of situations.

We call this The Learning Loop or the Plan-Do-Reflect (PDR) loop and it is one of the pillars of our own learning and the whole Grow Together program.

The beauty of this part is that as you learn with the group during the program you also learn how to learn and you will be able to bring the same methods to your team so that more learning can happen there too.

Long term learning

I could go on all day about designing online learning experiences. And one day I might. But today I will leave you with a promise that Grow Together Academy will be unlike anything you’ve experienced in the past.

By being a participant from the very first cohort you can help us achieve that goal and then follow the evolution of the program in future cohorts, which will be free to join for alumni.

See you soon,

Michał and Richard

To go far you need a large tank of high-octane fuel—or even better, a steady supply of renewable energy.

You need to be able to tap into powerful drivers that actually move people to do things.

And as a leader, you need to start with yourself.

Otherwise, you simply won’t get very far.

For example, I always had money-related goals on my mind. Sadly they never moved me to do much of anything. The things that actually happened, I did for other reasons and money was a side effect. Important, but never the primary thing.

To create a strong, motivating vision we must take into accounts three aspects:

1. what you want,
2. what other people want,
3. what might be possible together.

Each can take many forms, but there is one thing that unifies all three. When you dig deeply into what moves people it’s likely you will find stories.

Get inspired by stories

When you look closely our goals do not typically appear out of the blue. They are often created by comparing our situation to a narrative about other people’s experience. As humans we have a strong tendency to mimic each other. And there is no better vehicle than a story to communicate important challenges and and behaviours of those who stand up to them.

The idea for Grow Together Academy was also inspired by many stories.

That includes stories from our own experience working with many teams and many leaders, stories from the best books we’ve read, stories from the best offline and online courses we’ve attended, and stories from the ones we’ve designed & delivered ourselves.

Stories from great books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Time to Think, and From Contempt to Curiosity.

Stories from movies and TV shows about how teams and leaders can behave at their best and worst, including: Star Trek, Dune, and Lord of the Rings.

And most relevant for the type of experience we’re creating right now, there are the stories of several excellent online cohort-based courses that I attended, including Seth Godin’s AltMBA (I was part of cohort 33), Building a Second Brain(cohort 11) or a Polish course about building courses.

It’s stories all the way down.

But to make the best use of stories we need one more thing: we need to ground them in our own reality. To relate them to the things we see, hear and do in our immediate environment. But this is a topic for another time (and one which we will definitely dig into during Grow Together Academy).

And what stories inspire YOU when it comes to leadership and collaboration? What epic heroes would you most like to be like? The vibe of which amazing teams would you love to replicate?

Where does teamwork happen?

For many teams it’s in meetings.

Sure, everyone might have tasks to work through on their own, but in many teams the key interactions happen in meetings and conversations.

There’s nothing wrong with that IF it works well for your team.

But it doesn’t always.​

A strong everything-is-a-meeting habit may lead to:

• people wasting time,
• people being nailed to their workstations without much flexibility to adjust their schedule,
• frequent unpleasant surprises, when a lot of what’s discussed is quickly forgotten.

On top of that remote work is a whole new medium.

Remote work is fundamentally different than office work and we should take advantage of that.

One important idea in this new world is async.

Enabling asynchronous work is a big opportunity to improve the way your team communicates and collaborates.

Being able to work more asynchronously can improve:

• depth of focus which leads to higher quality thinking,
• flexibility to work whenever is best for you,
• durability of work-products including supporting artifacts like working notes, outlines and sketches.

The main challenge of async is keeping individual work well connected. To make our work available for others to use. To enable everyone to meaningfully help each other. To ultimately tie it all to our common goal.

Async is not about a meeting prohibition. We still want to be able to talk to each other in smaller and yes, sometimes bigger groups. The main idea is to keep the right balance.

Inspired by the Nozbe communication pyramid here’s a simple model that can help you figure out the right balance for your team:

1) The foundation of this pyramid is individual focused work.

2) When we’re done with a focused work session we should be able to capture and package the results of that work. It could a shared document, a comment on an internal blog or your favorite ticketing system. The main goal is to allow others to give thoughtful feedback and also to use your work in their own efforts.

3) When we want to go back and forth quickly we can have conversations in chat or voice.

4) And when we need to connect more people at the same time we run a meeting. But since we’ve focused on the other layers of the pyramid first those are fewer and more deliberately optimized for a specific purpose.

That is the pyramid of healthy communication based on focused work.

And how is it for you?

What kinds of communication dominate on your team? How well is that balance working for you?

See you soon, Michał

* Library photo by Monika Kozum via Unsplash

Use email or chat to direct attention,
use a team wiki to store information.

Email and chat usually carry a high-level of urgency, but make it pretty hard to refer to key pieces of information later. This makes it that much harder to develop useful knowledge over time.

Systems like a Wiki or internal Blogs are much better for storing information and enabling knowledge to grow over time. It does take some librarianship, but in my experience it can be well worth it.

One key factor is making it easy to capture information into packages that are individually addressable.

This makes it easy to curate tham – to make connections, collect related packages and combine them into new, higher-level ideas.​

So use semi-ephemeral channels like email and chat to direct attention and tools with a better information architecture to store information.

* Pointing hand picture by Artem Beliaikin via Unsplash.

​

When you have something to say, say it in a way that makes it easy for people to understand you.

Lack of clarity causes problems

If you leve things unclear or ambiguous some people might just ignore the rest of you message.

Opportunity lost.

Or they will ask clarifying questions.

More work for you.

And if your communication lag is significant (e.g. communicating across time-zones) the added delay might be costly too.

Or worst of all: they might act on their incorrect understanding.

Get ready for problems later.

Make things clear, unambiguous and easy to digest

1) Loyal readers of will be familiar with this: make your communication CCM – Concrete, Concise and Meaningful (to your intended audience).

2) Use simple words and grammatical structures:

• Instead of “indicate” write “show”
• Instead of “perform” write “do”
• Instead of “optimal” write “best”

Test your writing using the Hemmingway app.
(This article gets a “School grade 4 level, good” where a lower grade means easier to understand).

3) Write as if you were talking to your colleagues. As Kathy Sierra put it “Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass“

4) Use headlings & lists to make things skimmable. Start with the most important point. Make details available but not required for people to get the main point. as appropriate. That applies to the message as a whole as well as each part.

5) Make references concrete. If you’re talking about an external resource link to it. Avoid context-dependent references like “they”, “that”, “those”. They non-obvious references are a common cause of misunderstandings and at best require additional efort to untangle.

Clear writing will save you time (and pain)

If you build a habit of writing clearly and make it easy for people to understand:

• you will save time on clarifications,
• you will suffer fewer unpleasant surprises,
• and people will correctly assume your thinking is as clear as your writing.

What do you think? Is it worth some deliberate practice?

* Mountains picture by Tobias Rademacher via Unsplash

If you don’t know what you want, you’re probably not going to get it.

So to help you figure things out here are three things that helped me:

Exploring Personal Priorities

Please find a calm place, take some time and ask yourself:

1. For 2021 to be your best year ever it would be like what?
2. For 2021 to be like that – you’d like to be like what?
3. For 2021 to be like that and for you to be like so – what support do you need?

Write down your answers and explore a bit:

• What kind of …?
• Is there anything else about …?
• How will I know?
• And when …, what happens next?

I’m sure it will help you clarify your priorities.

Seeing the Big Picture

In order to have a big picture overview of my whole life and make more detailed planning easier I like to keep a list of highest level priorities against which all other ideas can be judged.

For each area I add 4-10 statements describing what I want to have happen (or keep happening) in that area.

For example mine are:

1. Healthy & Fit
2. Happy Family & Good Friends
3. Satisfying Career Pursuing Freedm, Purpose and Relationships
4. Responsible Upkeep = Taking Good Care of Things
5. Having Fun, Playing Games, Exploring

Some areas contain a checklist of sub-areas I need to take care of individually. For example Healthy & Fit contains:

• Healthy, delicious, ethical and ecological food
• Movement: strength, energy, flexibility
• Mental health
• Sleep
• Teeth
• Healthchecks

Some areas have more general aspirational statements like in Career:

• I’m enjoying financial and creative freedom.
• I’m energized by several productive partnerships with high-competence and high-integrity professionals.
• We’re making people’s lives observably better.

What this is doing for me is that it makes other decisions easier and lowers my overal anxiety about things.

When a topic comes up I put it in the appropriate area and relate it to the main outcomes that I want in that area – a lot of the time that thing I was worrying about is in one of the lower categories or is not an obstacle to the things I really want, so I don’t need to ruminate on it too much.

Also when I scan the whole list it gives me a sense of calm that I’m not forgetting something important.

What about you?

1. What are your top areas that you want to take care of in 2021?
2. For each area: what are the main outcomes or sub-areas you care about most?
   1. If you have many, what are the top 10?
   2. … top 3?
   3. … top 1 in each area?

Breaking Down Ambitious Goals

Another tactic that I’m playing with is the concept of progressions simplified to three levels as described by Mirek Burnejko.

It helps bridge the gap between ambitious goals, and achievable milestones on your way to that ultimate reward.

For example in fitness my fantasy is to be able to do a full press to handstand, but if I just think about that goal it seems too far away and I end up not doing much. So I broke it down and now I’m working towards a much more realistic 60 sec wall handstand. After I hit that goal I can take on the next challenge and in that way build momentum on a multi-year journey that the full press will take:

• Level 1) 60 sec wall HS (I’m close)
• Level 2) 30 sec free HS + HS Pirouette (I’ll be happy to hit this in 2021)
• Level 3) Press to HS (this will likely take multiple years)

Another example is the three levels of aspiration for my coaching & teaching work:

• Level 1) Help individual people be happy & effective
• Level 2) Help teams create and learn together
• Level 3) Foster thriving communities

The ultimate expression of success in this areas is thriving communities, but it’s helpful to focus on the building blocks first which is individuals and then teams.

How would you break down your most relevant ambition?

1. …
2. …
3. …

See you in 2021!

Michał

What do pro athletes do all day?

Barbell picture by Victor Freitas via Unsplash.com

Let’s say you want to become a world-class athlete.

You wouldn’t expect to get strong from lifting a barbell once and you wouldn’t exect to win games against competent opponents after practicing for an hour or four.

No.

You start with an intro and then practice, practice, practice for weeks, months and years. In fact while you’re playing at a pro level you never stop practicing.

You don’t just show up at games and expect to perform at a high-level. You spend most of your time preparing so that when it’s time, you’re ready to kick ass.

And it’s not just any kind of practice. You practice deliberately.

You reflect on your current strengths and weaknesses, you pick a target just outside your current ability, you try it, you get immediate feedback, you reflect, and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Train for creative knowledge work like an athlete trains for their sport

As creative knowledge workers why do we so often settle for a 2-day training here and a book there? Why do things like sitting down to read at the office seem so strange in most organizations? Or to meet in a group and just practice together?

To get good at professional skills I believe we need to adopt an athlete mentality.

If you want to communicate well so that people understand you and want to work with you.

If you want to run meetings that lead to meaningful insights and decisions and not burn time on aimless discussions.

If you want everyone on your team to know everything they need without being overloaded with less relevant details.

If you want to do all that and more I suggest you need to at least:

1. Define the skills you want to improve – What outcomes are you looking for? What concrete actions lead to those outcomes? How do you know how well you’re doing?
2. Practice those skills over and over again. By all means, learn from experts but while you’re doing that extract concrete actions and deliberately practice the ones that make the biggest difference for you. Use spaced repetition to reinforce key skills while leaving room for adding new skills to your training roster.
3. Find others who are interested in the same skills and practice together.

What’s one rep?

Before we can train we need to translate abstract skills into concrete actions.

It’s useful to group those actions into progressions and do the one that is most appropriate at your current level.

Let’s take a single leg squat:

1. One rep at level one might be lowering yourself on one leg until your ass touches a chair.
2. Level two might require you to do a full single leg squat while holding on to a post or door handle or another solid support.
3. And finally at level three you might do a complete, freestanding single leg squat.

When you can do 10 easy reps in one level, move on to the next.

Now let’s consider writing. What’s one rep?

Starting from absolute basics and building up:

1. Write a sentence summarising something you’re reading or thinking about.
2. Write or improve an evergreen note on a subject you care about.
3. Write and publish a short piece about something you learned recently.

It’s not enough to know that good writing is this or that. Let’s practice it. In various contexts, with various kinds of people on the receiving end.

Practice.

How to practice understanding people

Using the LAO framework introduced in 💛 Make Your Communication Meaningful (For Your Intended Audience)

Listen: Don’t talk. Just listen. If there’s a lull in the conversation then ask a short question and listen some more.

One rep is one instance where you’re leaning towards a judgement but you swing to curiosity instead.

Ask: Direct the spotlight of attention to explore without introducing your own assumptions. Ask clean questions like What kind of … or Is there anything else about … or And then what? Ask them gently to encourage the speaker to share more or even discover new things about themselves. Don’t let it turn into an interrogation.

One rep is one thing you find out that you didn’t know before.

Observe: Notice behaviors and decisions. Stop short of interpreting or judging or at least separate what you saw and heard from what you interpret it to mean.

One rep is one concrete action noted separately from your analysis of it.

—

And what what skill would you most like to practice, practice, practice?