haruki zaemon

It’s important to develop a strategy to listen to and act on complaints, harness their benefits, and mitigate their destructive potential. When employees believe their manager doesn’t care about, minimizes, or ignores valid concerns, it can increase stress, decrease engagement, and ignite turnover.

“Telling employees to ‘put a lid’ on [their] feelings is both ineffective and destructive; the emotions will just come out later in counterproductive ways.”

Start with interest and curiosity, consider the intention.

Encourage and help facilitate constructive complaints.

(via Kottke)

(via Benji)

I used to drive one of these in Japan. The dojo had one as the primary means for the live-in students to move heavy goods and run errands beyond the local village. They are the perfect size.

Unlike new vehicles with onboard computers and complicated proprietary parts, Kei trucks are easy to modify and repair. […] “MotoCheez”, a mechanic from Connecticut, says his YouTube channel’s popularity soared after he started featuring his Kei truck.

[astronaut John] Glenn, with the help of NASA engineers, quickly modified the [$40 autofocus, mechanical] camera [he bought at a drug store] to make it usable with his bulky astronaut gloves. They flipped the camera upside down, attached a pistol grip with special buttons to control both the shutter and film advance, and even moved the eyepiece to the bottom, which was now the top of the camera because they had flipped it.

This is just MAD. He gets pretty confident towards the end.

It’s great for rental agents, but not so great for vulnerable renters who find themselves on the wrong end of the algorithms that are can determine who does, and doesn’t, win a tenancy in a tough rental market.

[…] some of the technology already in use is programmed to filter through the data and arrive at what the platform determines are the best prospects. 

It’s a process that leaves people who rent at the mercy of automated decision-making over which they have no control.

In many ways, online rental applications circumvent existing tenancy laws, effectively serving as a tenants check, in much the same way as tenant databases or ‘blacklists’.»

My new favourite background music.

These scenarios certainly resonated with me as in many ways they speak to reducing cycle time.

All organisations waste a huge amount of time believing that they are making progress on decisions, when in fact they’re just involved in the theatre of decision making. This happens through indirect actions that feel like progress is being made, but in fact contribute nothing to it. Small changes can speed up progress dramatically.

Tangentially related, I often need to emphasise with my Aikido students the importance of reducing intervals between techniques. Reducing a 15 second changeover to 5 seconds could mean getting in another 10 practice runs.

If, like me, you believe in iterating to learn, reducing cycle time is critical.

Counterintuitive research for 7 points, please:

Ruminants have lower feed use efficiency than monogastric livestock, and produce higher reactive nitrogen and methane emissions, but can utilize human-inedible biomass through foraging and straw feedstock. Here we conduct a counterfactual analysis, replacing ruminants with monogastric livestock to quantify the changes in nitrogen loss and greenhouse gas emissions globally from a whole life cycle perspective. Switching 12% of global livestock production from monogastric to ruminant livestock could reduce nitrogen emissions by 2% and greenhouse gas emissions by 5% due to land use change and lower demand for cropland areas for ruminant feed. The output from released cropland could feed up to 525 million people worldwide. More ruminant products, in addition to optimized management, would generate overall benefits valued at US$468 billion through reducing adverse impacts on human and ecosystem health, and mitigating climate impacts.

It only takes a few minutes to induce learned helplessness by exploiting our need for social acceptance.

This can happen through deliberate acts, and it can happen inadvertently as a consequence of poor leadership.

Starting from the point of view that this is probably a management failure – rather than something inherent to the person – correctly puts the onus on the manager for letting someone get into a situation like this. Sure, there are situations where there’s not much the manager could have done, but those are rare.

Well delivered feedback drives improvement, whilst poorly delivered feedback decreases performance and can cause real damage, sometimes lasting for years afterwards.

Good feedback is: Well intentioned; Non-trivial; Truthful; Consensual; Actionable; Timely; Specific; Private; Delivered from your perspective, not that of others; A two-way conversation; Focused; About behaviours and performance, not personalities or style; Combined with positive encouragement.

A quantum computer in the next decade could crack the encryption our society relies on using Shor’s Algorithm.

One of the things that many facilitators and hosts worry about with complex facilitation practices is the outcomes and the quality of the experience. It is the hardest thing to let go of and probably the last piece of “performative facilitation” that deeply experienced facilitators are able to release.

But that desire and drive for a particular emotional outcome can be as damaging to a meeting as a drive toward a particular material outcome.

Don’t tell people what they will experience. Don’t pre-determine their outcomes or their emotional journey on the day. Let go of that control and enable the environment.

the models tended to produce images of people that look white and male, especially when asked to depict people in positions of authority.

the models’ output overwhelmingly reflected stereotypical gender biases. Adding adjectives such as “compassionate,” “emotional,” or “sensitive” to a prompt describing a profession will more often make the AI model generate a woman instead of a man. In contrast, specifying the adjectives “stubborn,” “intellectual,” or “unreasonable” will in most cases lead to images of men.

In almost all of the representations of Native Americans, they were wearing traditional headdresses, which obviously isn’t the case in real life.

image-making AI systems tend to depict white nonbinary people as almost identical to each other but produce more variations in the way they depict nonbinary people of other ethnicities.

If you write more for internal consumption, consider how to write for two readers: the change for your ideal readers, and assurance for your secondary readers. You might have to change your ideal reader in the middle, but that’s practice. Start with the ideal reader, then add what’s needed for the secondary reader.

The Worry Police aren’t curious; they are concerned.

I frequently have front-row seats for their theatre. I am frequently accountable for unpacking their machinations and translating them into action while simultaneously cleaning up their wake of fear and confusion.

Leaders have real power because they understand how to build trust. They build their judgment with the people who understand the problem and have defensible opinions.

Leaders take the time to understand the situation entirely; they communicate clearly and consistently to their audience.

Leaders are intensely curious. This curiosity creates shared understanding and long-term purpose.

Designers often feel frustrated by seemingly off-topic or untimely feedback when presenting to other functions (product, engineering, marketing, etc).

It can also be hard to handle criticism in cross-functional presentations, especially after spending tons of energy.

Critiques force designers to set up the conversation so the scope of feedback is valuable to them at a given point in time, but in a safer space than an evaluative presentation.

Critiques can help designers foresee objections, strengthening their designs, and develop the ability to handle them with grace.

People find it difficult to give up control when they see their role and status as tightly linked to their decision-making authority and delegating responsibility as a diminution of their power.

Clarify decision roles, rights, and accountability. Write down the decisions you’re responsible for, individually and collectively—delegation shouldn’t be confused with dereliction of duties.

Coach people, encourage them to assimilate information, and to reflect on decisions, especially when the outcomes were not as intended.

Open up the decision-making process, invite people into critical meetings as an opportunity to observe and contribute their insights.

Structure meetings around decisions, encourage participants to share different perspectives and challenge each other, summarise the decisions and specify the people accountable for implementing them.

Communicate high-profile, critical decisions so that people can learn about how judgements were made. The scrutiny that comes from this transparency might even improve the quality of decision-making, too.

They had to see all the WIP, but then they made much better decisions.