Linked List: 2022-08-28

I originally published this post on Medium. I copied it here in May 2024 to keep it alongside my other content.

Journalist Bill Moyers once defined the job of journalist as learning new things while in the public eye. In that vein I’m sharing links that piqued my interest in the past week or so, and what I learned or thought along the way.

Leadership

• KJR: We’re using computing power for this?
  Bob Lewis goes after the recent NY Times story about companies using surveillance tech to analyze “productivity” of workers. He uses his prior rants about “metrics” in this savvy take-down of companies that do this. As I have said for years, you can’t use technology to solve a people (or leadership) problem.
• Hire the Best Folks, Even In a Crazy Market: The “First Ten” Rule
  Medium is surfacing all kinds of good stuff for me lately. This piece is great for leaders looking to raise their hiring game. Read this and start rewriting your interview questions.
• The Great Puzzle of Growing Organizations
  In this piece the author suggests when you cross over from a small to a medium business, you run into a three-point challenge, similar to the Project Management Iron Triangle. In this CAP model, it’s posited you can only optimize for 2 of 3 factors: Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance.
• How to Make In-Person Time Count
  A truly excellent guide from Microsoft on how to make the most of in-office days, for teams that are primarily remote. Very practical and actionable advice.

Productivity

• Ditch Your To Do List! — Do These 4 Things Instead
  Fellow Medium writer Carlos Caro had some advice that struck a chord — focus on outcomes rather than tasks. This is crucial for leaders or folks that need to do high-level thinking work in their jobs.

Software

• Agile Projects Have Become Waterfall Projects With Sprints
  I’ve witnessed this problem at work, too, so I was interested in the insights. The commentary on the piece was good, and I offered my own comment.

Government

• Pew Research Center – Public Trust in Government: 1958–2022
  We know there’s been an erosion of trust in government, but to see it over the past 50+ years is… sobering. Charts for entire U.S. population and then broken out by party affiliation, race, and so forth.

GX / Government Experience / GovCX

• Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government
  With trust in government at historic lows, what’s a government to do? Rebuild trust. And it’s the Biden administration’s view that this can be done in part by focusing on Customer Experience (CX). It’s packed with details addressing a long list of federal agencies and how they can improve their services.

Government must be held accountable for designing and delivering services with a focus on the actual experience of the people whom it is meant to serve.

• Putting People First: Building Trust in Government through Customer Experience
  It’s dry, but it shows there are those in government — beyond the White House — thinking about Government Customer Experience (CX or GovCX), and they got some advice from the private sector.
• Measuring and Justifying the Government Experience
  This Department of the Interior (Office of Natural Resources Revenue) page talks about what measurements they use when analyzing Customer Experience (CX) matters. They cite examples of how their work is demonstrating mission achievement.