(Via A List Apart.)

My favorite part of this brilliant essay is that he goes someplace positive and surprising. Twist!

(Via Rands In Repose.)

The planning fallacy: “

We blame bureaucracy for being wasteful and taking too long when things like the Denver International Airport or Boston’s Big Dig arrive years overdue and billions over budget. But it’s not just huge organizations and the government that mess up planning. Everyone does. It’s the ‘planning fallacy.’ We think we can plan, but we can’t.

Studies show it doesn’t matter whether you ask people for their realistic best guess or a hoped-for best case scenario. Either way, they give you the best case scenario. It’s true on a big scale and it’s true on a small scale too.

While I don’t agree w/all of the article, I do think it’s important to keep in the back of one’s mind that plans themselves have less value than a well oiled “planning process”, with feedback loops matched to the stakeholder or responsible party structure that should be clear at the beginning of every significant project. I believe one of the great strategists from WWII said “plans are useless, planning is priceless” (Eisenhower or Churchill?).

It’s also worth pointing out that while 37Signals regularly rants against planning up front, they do start w/a kernel of a direction, and document/communicate quite efficiently all along the way. So maybe rather than “don’t plan”, they should say “start with a simple idea, and document and communicate along the way”.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Project Management and Workflow:

If I move a muscle, I’m dead. Jane, who I’m pretty sure is a Werewolf, is jumping from one player to the next, testing will and looking for weakness. She’s looking for a sign of guilt or discomfort and it’s not just her. The room is full of people looking for someone to lynch.

The game is Werewolf and I’m both exhilarated and terrified, which is odd because I’m paid to play a real-life version of this horrific game every day.

Web professionals are often expected to be ‘always on’—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an ‘always on’ life can be debilitating.

(Via A List Apart.)

It’s not failure that companies need to avoid, but rather “failing expensively”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

‘Can I work remote?’

I cringe. It’s Ian and Ian is a senior engineer. He’s a rock. He gets it done. I never have to ask him twice and, after six years, Ian has every right to ask to work remote. But I’m still freaked because my first thought when anyone asks to work remote is, ‘This fine person is a year away from either quitting or being fired.’ Why? Because they’re asking to leave the Pond.

(Via Rands In Repose.)

(Via Slashdot.)

Some mechanisms that promote a drift away from invention towards convention could include:

1. People ‘sell out’ to become more influential.

2. As people become more influential, they are less interested in offending their new status quo-oriented friends.

3. As people become more influential, their opinion of the status quo rises, because they see it rewarding them and thus meritorious.

(Via Jason Kottke.)