Summary

When: you’re struggling with something (big or small), reimagining your temperament can help you overcome it.

How: speak to yourself like you would a friend and remind yourself that obstacles happen and mean you’re making progress. Avoid rumination and self-blame. Reimagine your temperament and identity using labels, teaching and secular rituals.

Why: our thinking style can make a big difference to how we overcome adversity.

Examples & Stories

Towards the end of 2020, I had a lot of late work meetings that often dragged on until midnight. Afterwards, it was hard to switch off and I found myself randomly channel-flicking on TV or thumbing my way through Twitter until the small hours. I’d also been trying (but failing) to get more sleep. At the time I was managing a team of over 50 people and they in turn were feeling the strain of a prolonged period of working-from-home. In the context of Covid-19, this was a relatively small issue compared to the situation other people find themselves in.

Somewhere in the mists of time I got the impression the brain was just another muscle that can get tired and willpower can run out. Eyal Nir had the same impression and after a long day’s work, used it to self-justify hours eating ice cream and watching Netflix. It turns out this is an assumption that has leaked into our mental models like carbon monoxide. This is at the core of what Indistractible is all about - believing a thought can actually make it true for us - and therefore thoughts and assumptions need scrutiny.

Eyal discovered the generally accepted theory of ego (willpower) depletion was subject to “publication bias”. Carol Dweck discovered cause and effect were mixed up and ego depletion only occurred in people who believed willpower is limited. The theory provides an excuse to quit when we should persist. New theories believe, willpower is more like an emotion that ebbs and flows. A lack of willpower is temporary.

Another example Eyal mentions is addiction, specifically nicotine, alcohol and meth addiction. Those who believe they have no control over their urges or addiction, are more likely to relapse when they try to quit. Mindset seems to matter as much as physical dependence.

In a later chapter (25: Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts) Eyal suggests that if we can alter how we see ourselves, this can affect future actions. For example, in a scientific study on “priming”, subjects were asked if they were “voters” or if they were “planning to vote”. Those asked if they were “voters” were much more likely to vote because it was an “expression of self” rather than a behaviour.

Insight: our perception of who we are, changes what we do in both positive and negative ways.

A good friend has a relatively negative view of themselves. I don’t know what to say or how to advise them. I’m hoping what I can learn from my struggles, can help me help others with bigger obstacles.

When?

If you’re struggling with some issue and you find yourself starting to spiral. You might have a self-limiting belief, “I can’t do X”, “I’m useless”.

How?

Nir suggests:

We can change how we talk to ourselves to harness the power of self-compassion.

Notice and question negative self labels. If we notice these thought patterns, we can remember to cut ourselves some slack, treat ourselves with compassion.

Remind yourself that the current struggle is just an obstacle along the way and it’s natural to feel this way as you make progress. Eyal suggests we tell ourselves the following:

• “This is what it’s like to get better at something”
• “You’re on your way”

Imagine a friend in a similar situation. What advice would you offer to them? Take the advice yourself.

If you are feeling a lack of motivation or willpower, remind yourself it’s temporary.

Insight: we often assume our identity is fixed but in fact it can be shaped. We can change our identity by labelling, teaching or rituals.

In Eyal’s specific case he recommends labelling ourselves as “indistractable” rather than feeling powerless to distraction. He has gone so far as to make “indistractible” t-shirts. We can “become a noun”. This reminds me of the book which helped me stop smoking many years ago. I realise now that Alan Carr’s “Easy Way to Stop Smoking” refactored my identity into being a non-smoker.

Teaching others provides more motivation for the teacher to change their own behaviour especially if we admit to our own struggles. In my own experience, it was only when I started teaching agile development practices a few years ago that I really started to understand them properly. A year or two ago, I was invited to deliver a guest lecture in UCD and prepared over 100 lessons-learned from my 30+ years of experience as an engineer & manager. Maybe I’ll convert them into blog posts in the future (and learn by teaching).

Secular rituals can help us build personal discipline. Elsewhere in the book Eyal explains scheduling rituals to help us become Indistractible. I’ll probably summarize these in a future post.

Eyal also recites collected short mantras before he starts work every day because these help reinforce his identity. For example:

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” - William James

I also gather quotes. Here’s a great one I found recently:

                    I may live on
              until I long for this time
                  as I remember now
              unhappy times in the past
                    with fondness
            — Fujiwara Ujiwara No Kiyosuke

Recently I found an app called Bright Notes that can deliver quotes/notes randomly during the day.

In summary, Eyal recommends:

“Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.”

Why?

Eyal provides links to a number of academic papers and articles.

In short, people who can speak to themselves with self compassion are happier. Reducing self-blame and rumination can “almost completely mitigate” anxiety and depression.

To be honest I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading the papers, articles and the others they referenced. Some seemed to contradict Eyal’s points and each other. I’ll return in future posts when I’ve had time to read, understand and summarize them.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Photo by @jessbaileydesigns on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

In post 1 and post 2 of this series, I outlined earlier sections of this book Deep Work by Cal Newport. In this post, I complete the series by outlining Newport’s Rules 2-4:

• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

As before, I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

Example: Orthodox Jews spend time every weekday studying the religious texts such as the Talmud. Some read alone. Others discuss the text in pairs or bigger groups.

Insight: concentration is something that must be trained.

Insight: Clifford Nass a behavior and communications researcher, discovered attention switching has negative effects on the brain. People who multitask find it hard to filter irrelevance.

While Rule #1 (Work Deeply) helps one reach the peak of concentration, this rule helps extend that peak or limit.

Guideline: take breaks from focus rather than breaks from distraction. Taking a whole day, an Internet or technology “sabbath” won’t help. Schedule your breaks in advance and deep work until then. As I write this, my iPad is disconnected from the internet. I’ll take a short break in 19 minutes. I usually work in pomodoros, but that’s another story for another post.

Guideline: work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer. I now have 15 minutes to my next break and I hope to have this section finished by then.

Insight: artificial deadlines are like interval training for the attention centers of your brain.

Guideline: meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically (walking, driving, showering). When your attention wanders, gently bring it back to the problem you’re trying to solve. This requires practice.

Example: Daniel Kilov is a memory athlete. He wasn’t born with a strong memory but he worked on it and over time this training helped his general abilities.

Insight: memory researchers discovered the elite memorizers direct their attention. They don’t use rote memorization. They’ll use techniques like representing a card as a person then imagining that person in a place in their house.

Guideline: practice focusing your attention. Memorization, meditation, playing music and reading the Talmud are all examples of attention training.

I finished this section with 90 seconds to spare so I’m going to go back and check spelling before a 5 minute break when I’ll stretch my left achilles and make a cup of tea.

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Right, I’m back for another 25 minutes.

Insight: electronic communication and social media, fragment our attention and erode our ability to concentrate. Social media is designed to keep our attention and get us to consume things.

Guideline: accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using them.

Insight: throughout history, craft workers carefully selected the tools they worked with.

Guideline: use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use.

• Identify your top level goals
• List 2-3 activities that help you achieve each goal
• Assess each network tool for it’s positive and negative impacts

Example: Newton mentions Twitter and the author Michael Lewis.

Guideline: assess whether the tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.

Insight: the “law of the vital few” (or Pareto principle), 80% of an effect is due to 20% of the possible causes.

Insight: social media services are products from private companies that have massive funding & revenues. They employ talented people who capture and sell your attention (and personal details) to advertisers.

Guideline: be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Modern humans have access to so much good content. Don’t use social media or the auto suggestions of an algorithm to decide what to consume in the moment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Insight: Newton quotes Arnold Bennett discussing structured relaxation:

“the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in sleep.”

My 25-minute timer just went off. Time to take a break and check the news (I have notifications turned off).

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

Insight: most knowledge work needs some amount of shallow work (checking email, meetings).

Insight: deep work is exhausting. It pushes you to the limit of your cognitive abilities. Researchers like Anders Ericsson (of deliberate practice fame) have estimated the upper limit to be four hours a day.

Guideline: schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot. I work in half hour blocks of time (pomodoros) and move things around as I work through the day (because no day runs perfectly to plan).

I just realized I forgot to restart my pomodoro timer after that “news break”.

Insight: on some days you’ll rewrite the schedule multiple times. The goal is not to stick to a rigid schedule but to be thoughtful and deliberate about what you’ll do with the time remaining.

Guideline: if you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.

Guideline: quantify the depth of each activity. This can be hard to do. Newton recommends asking yourself - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?

Guideline: ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%. Below 30% you could become a hermit who thinks big thoughts but doesn’t communicate.

Insight: this limit frees up time for more important activities and stops shallow work from filling up your day. We tend to fall into shallow work moment by moment and not see the cumulative impact.

Guideline: don’t work after 5:30pm. Newton calls this fixed-schedule-productivity.

Guideline: beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary. When saying no, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason. For example, “that sounds interesting but I can’t do that because of scheduling conflicts”.

Insight: fixed-schedule-productivity is a meta-habit that switches you into a scarcity mindset and attunes you to disruptive requests for shallow work. It makes the default answer “no”.

Guideline: become hard to reach. Email is impossible to avoid but anyone with your address can send a message that consumes more time than it took to write. Newton has some specific guidelines for those who want to be open to contact from the general public like a form or FAQ with checklists.

Guideline: do more work when you send or reply to emails. Newton calls this the process-centric approach to email. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps. This can reduce the number of responses and time spent rereading the thread in future, saving time in the long run.

Guideline: don’t reply if:

• The email is ambiguous
• It’s not a question that interests you
• Nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

On the latter, Newton quotes Tim Ferris: “develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences.”

Personally it drives me crazy when I receive a long email and the key information or the important action I’m expected to take, is hidden in the second sentence of the third last paragraph. I have developed some standard replies like…

“Thank you for your detailed email. It’s not clear what action you expect me to take, so I’m assuming none is required. If some action is required, please reply to let me know.”

I’m a big believer in action-based communication but that’s yet another story for another day.

Insight: deep work can be intense and cause uneasiness. It’s easier to be artificially busy and swim in the shallows. As you get closer to producing your best work you can become nervous that your best is not yet good enough.

Insight: deep work can generate a life rich with productivity and meaning. Newton finishes the book with a quote from Winifred Gallagher, “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

Postscript

In the time since reading the book I’ve been finding some of Newport’s rules or guidelines have made their way into my daily work. I’m using a work-shutdown ritual and scheduling the day with tasks from my GTD projects. In some cases I’ve modified guidelines I’ve been using for years. I schedule deep work for 2-3 hours every second day. I’ve started using the Pomodoro technique again because it seems to resonate with some of Newton’s ideas.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Credits: photo by Devin Lyster on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

I purchased Deep Work by Cal Newport a couple of years ago. Soon after, it must have strayed off the first page of my Kindle and I forgot about it. Recently, I was talking to a good friend about juggling many projects and priorities at work. He suggested this book and then I remembered I had already bought it.

In the book, Cal Newport explains the challenges many knowledge workers face and strategies we can apply to find time to do more meaningful work.

I’ve written this post to better learn and share what I’ve learned. I’ll summarize Newton’s book as a set of:

• Insights: his astute observations
• Examples: people or stories
• Guidelines: tips, patterns or principles you can use to work more deeply

I have organized these insights, examples and guidelines within the framework and headings of the book. In a way, these are my detailed notes from the book.

Of course a summary is just a map, not the territory. I highly recommend you buy and read Newton’s book.

Introduction

Insight: Newport defines deep work as

“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Examples: he cites Carl Jung, Peter Higgs, JK Rowling, Bill Gates and Neal Stephenson as people who have leveraged deep work to accomplish extraordinary things.

Insight: modern communication tools have fragmented knowledge workers’ attention “into slivers” and 30% of their time is spent in email.

I have seen higher estimates in other places. In my previous role at Goshido, our mission was to redefine communication and replace email. Unfortunately we didn’t succeed, but that’s another story for another day.

Back to the book.

Insight: meaningful work that needs deep thinking, gets dispersed into “distracted dashes” and the quality of the outcomes suffer.

Insight: to be valuable in this fast moving economy you need to be able to learn hard things fast. This means you need the ability to do deep work but it’s becoming rarer and harder to do.

Newport neatly condenses his approach in one paragraph which I’ll break down as a guideline:

Summary: “I’ve invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up.”

How: “I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

When: “Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out…”

Why: “...can produce a lot of valuable output.”

First Newport describes the problem and explains how deep work is valuable, rare and meaningful. The rest of the book explains four high level “rules” for how to do deep work:

• Work Deeply
• Embrace Boredom
• Quit Social Media
• Drain the Shallows

Guidelines

My first draft of this post was 12 pages so I’ve decided to break it up into 3-4 parts. In the meantime here are all the guidelines I noticed in the rest of the book.

Out of context these guidelines might seem a bit abstract but I’ll go into more detail in future posts.

How Deep Work is Valuable, Rare and Meaningful

• In a company or team, communicate best practices around use of chat applications.
• Find the emotional “leverage point” to convert a negative event into a more positive outcome.
• Redesign jobs so they resemble flow activities.
• As an individual, seek opportunities for flow because that will lead to deep satisfaction.

Work Deeply

• Develop rituals to minimize the amount of willpower needed to switch into and maintain concentration.
• Decide your “depth philosophy”, how you will integrate deep work into your schedule. Options include: monastic, bimodal, rhythmic, or journalistic.
• A deep work ritual decides: where, how long, how you’ll work, how you’ll support the work.
• If designing an office space, make sure to include spaces for deep work.
• Apply “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX): 1. focus on the wildly important, 2. act on the “lead” measures, 3. keep a compelling scoreboard & make it visible, 4. create a cadence of accountability.
• Use a shutdown ritual at the end of the work day. Say a phrase to provide an explicit cue to your mind, for example “shutdown complete”.

Embrace Boredom

• Take breaks from focus rather than work-breaks from distraction.
• Work intensely like Teddy Roosevelt. Identify a difficult but important task and give yourself less time to do it than you’d normally take. Set a countdown timer.
• Meditate productively. Focus on a problem you’re trying to solve while doing something else physically.
• Practice focusing your attention.

Quit Social Media

• Accept social media can be useful but set a threshold for using it.
• Use a structured process to identify the communication tools you’ll use. Assess whether each tool’s benefits outweigh it’s drag on your attention.
• Be deliberate in selecting your entertainment. Create lists of quality alternatives in advance.

Drain the Shallows

• Schedule every minute of the day. Don’t spend the day on autopilot.
• If you uncover a promising insight, rework the schedule.
• Quantify the depth of each activity - how long would it take to train a recent college graduate to do this activity?
• Ask your boss for a shallow work budget. For most knowledge workers this should be in the region of 30-50%.
• Don’t work after 5:30pm.
• Beware of saying “yes”, the most dangerous word in the knowledge worker’s vocabulary.
• When saying “no” to a request, be clear in your refusal but ambiguous for the reason.
• Become hard to reach.
• Do more work when you send or reply to emails. Identify the process (or project) the email relates to then the current and next steps.
• Don’t reply if: the email is ambiguous, it’s not a question that interests you, nothing good/useful would happen if you responded and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

In future posts I’ll explain how to implement some of these guidelines and why they work.

Thanks for reading.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks again for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Credits: photo by @pascalvendel on Unsplash

When you’re trying to get someone to make the right decision or take the right action, provide concrete instructions because that will make it easier for them to do the right thing.

Examples & Stories

At work I’m currently putting together a field guide for change management based on our experiences with a number of change programs. During my research, I read the following story in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath.

Researchers at Stanford University conducted an experiment to find the factors in getting students to donate food to charity. They first asked students to rate their perception of their classmates’ willingness to donate to charity. In effect, the researchers categorized the students as either “saints” or “jerks”. They then provided each student with one of two sets of instructions.

Basic instructions:

• A well known location on campus to bring some tinned food

Detailed instructions:

• A map with the location of place to bring the tinned food
• A specific request - a tin of beans
• A suggestion to the student to think of a time when they would be near the location
• A follow up call to remind them where and when to donate

Of those who received the basic instructions, 8% of the saints and 0% of the jerks donated food. This was not entirely surprising. Of those who received the detailed instructions, 42% of the saints and 25% of the jerks donated food.

That’s right, jerks who received detailed instructions were more likely to donate than saints with basic instructions. If you’re hungry, you’re more likely to get food from a jerk with a map than a saint without one.

When?

… you’re trying to get someone to do something or change their behavior in a specific way...

How?

Provide detailed instructions. Anticipate decisions the person will need to make and give them concrete options. Make it easy for them to take action or make the right decision. The Heath brothers call this “Shaping the Path”.

This experiment is also mentioned in Bob Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst. In a section titled “Be Repetitive and Concrete” he suggests providing checklists which were used during World War 2 by B-17 pilots. Early in its lifetime, the B-17 was considered difficult to fly but a set of checklists for takeoff, flight, landing and taxiing tamed the complexity. Checklists were also used in medicine by Atul Gawande to reduce to number of infections post surgery.

Why?

As the Heath brothers say, “what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” People only have capacity for a finite number of decisions in a day. The less thinking they need to do the more likely they are to take action.

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• patterns
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

If you’d like to write for LearnShareDo, please send an email to (write at learnsharedo dot com).

Thanks for reading! If you have any other examples or feedback please comment/follow/share below or on: twitter, medium or linkedin.

Photo by Dave Mullen on Unsplash

Disclosure: some links in this post may use Amazon affiliate links.

Summary

When something goes wrong, do a learning review as soon as you can. This can be useful for teams in a work setting or for you as an individual (i.e. school projects).

Examples & Stories

A couple of years ago I did some research on best practices for doing project/incident postmortems. This is a summary of what I learned.

The phrase “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill. It’s a phrase I heard a number of times in Ireland during the financial meltdown of 2008-2011. Ever since, if something goes wrong at home or at work, the quote pops into my head.

In my day job, we sometimes encounter situations that don’t go a well as they could have; a customer issue takes too long to solve or some process or product doesn’t work as well as it should. To learn from the situation, we usually do a blameless postmortem or a learning review. Typically, in work situations, more than one person is involved in the situation and the review.

I have also done a personal learning review when something goes wrong or I receive feedback on something I could have done better. In general, I am trying to focus on building on my strengths but if an issue causes a significant impact, I have found it is worth spending time to do a learning review.

Camille Fournier in her excellent book The Manager’s Path, suggests using the term “learning review” instead of postmortem. In the book Camille explains:

“the “postmortem” process is a critical element of good engineering. In fact, instead of calling the process a postmortem, many have started calling it a “learning review” to indicate that its purpose is not determining cause of death but learning from the incident.”

Etsy: an online marketplace, have published a postmortem facilitation process. Their 20-page process builds on blog post by John Allspaw in 2012. In the process Etsy describe:

“the goal is not to find the cause of an accident. The goal is to seize the opportunity for an organization to learn as much as they can, in a relatively short period of time, about how people normally perceive and perform their work. Because the people involved were doing their normal work on a normal day when the event in question happened.”

We’ll see more details on how Etsy run postmortems below.

Google have documented their postmortem process in the book “Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems”. Like Etsy they also strive for blameless post mortems:

“For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had.”

How?

At a high level I recommend doing a learning review in three separate phases:

• Document what happened at the time - an initial timeline. Try to avoid blaming yourself or others during this phase. Focus on the facts and rationale for decisions during the event.
• Decide what to do - find remediation actions to resolve the issue or change processes to reduce the likelihood the issue will happen in the future.
• Implement the remediation actions and follow-up later.

A learning review is more effective when you separate the reflection about what happened (past) from deciding what to do about it (future).

If you’re trying to understand a personal issue, use a notebook (paper or electronic). Ask anyone who might observed something during the issue, to provide input.

When documenting what happened for a group learning review, you can use a shared electronic document. Ask everyone involved to add to the timeline of what happened. Remember, the people involved did what they thought was the right thing at the time.

Try not to ask “why” something happened because that could imply a judgement. Instead, ask “how”. What was the rationale? What data was the decision or action based on? This is a subtle but important distinction.

Camille Fournier makes the following recommendations in the The Manager’s Path:

• Resist the urge to point fingers and blame
• Look at the circumstances around the incident and understand the context of the events
• Be realistic about which takeaways are important and which are worth dropping

Etsy recommend a four step process:

• Gather the initial timeline - the people closest to the event gather objective data and construct a timeline of events.
  • Sometimes the data can be scattered in different places (support cases/tickets, emails, chat messages, phone logs).
  • The timeline doesn’t need to include every detail.
• Hold a debriefing meeting - to gather subjective data (opinions, judgments, assumptions, beliefs).
  • The attendees read the initial timeline before the meeting
  • Up front, the facilitator should try to establish a sense of trust with all participants. “We will be focusing on the HOW of what happened, not the WHY.”
  • Walkthrough the timeline - everyone asks questions. Look for descriptions not explanations.
  • “Pause at intervals during debrief discussions and ask people to raise their hands if they have learned something they didn’t know before.”
  • The facilitator adds additional notes to the timeline. The main focus is the timeline but if remediation ideas come up, note them to discuss later.
• Pivot towards learning
  • This can happen in a separate meeting or a distinct phase of the debriefing meeting.
  • Brainstorm “learning points” which may include remediation actions
  • Choose a small subset of the team to take the brainstorm list of “learning points” and reflect on them.
• Report on the viability of the “learning points” and remediation actions
  • Two or three days later, the sub-team reports back on the viability of the remediation points.

Google’s process has more suggestions on what to do after the “learning points” are decided. They also have ideas on keeping the process working:

• Review each postmortem (or learning review) later
• The Google example postmortem document has the following main sections
  • Authors/Date
  • Status
  • Summary
  • Impact - the effect on customers/revenue
  • Root Causes - “An explanation of the circumstances in which this incident happened. It’s often helpful to use a technique such as the 5 Whys”
  • Trigger
  • Resolution
  • Detection
  • Table of Action Items (each has an owner)
  • Lessons Learned
    • What went well
    • What went wrong
    • Where we got lucky
  • Timeline
• Add an interesting or well-written postmortem to the monthly newsletter.
• Get newly hired engineers to role-play a previous postmortem. Get someone involved in the previous incident to be the incident commander.
• Ask for feedback on postmortem effectiveness.

Why?

Things will always go wrong. We’ll learn more from mistakes or omissions if we can be as open and honest with ourselves as possible. This is easier if you can separate the activity of gathering the facts from deciding what to do.

Why ask “how” instead of “why”? In the Etsy guide they explain:

“Asking “how” enables us to hear other people’s stories. Asking “why” creates a story of our own and tends to elicit only the evidence that supports our story.”

This is somewhat ironic considering I am including this in a section called “Why”.

In finance Michael Batnick writes

"The difference between normal people and the best investors is that the great ones learn and grow from their mistakes, while normal people are set back by them"

Ray Dalio explains why learning is crucial in the book Principles: Life and Work:

"Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilarating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning—just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that most of my learning will come from reflecting on them."

The bigger picture

This is an example of a guideline that we use in this blog/publication. Guidelines are also known as:

• best-practices
• principles
• tips
• hacks
• mental models
• directives

In future posts we’ll curate individual guidelines or glean collections of them from articles, books and other content. We’re planning posts on:

• Productivity
• Starting a business
• Managing cash flow in a growing business

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