2025 Weeknote 37 : The High Ground

September 8 – 14

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

• New Hybrid Schedule. This week launched a new Monday / Wednesday / Thursday in-office schedule for all management-level employees and up in our organization. It was definitely odd! But I do think it’s going to work out quite well. Tuesday is shaping up to be an almost-no-meetings-Tuesday, and I’m determined to keep it that way. This new model definitely made the week feel longer, though. But it’s just the first week. Let’s check back in several weeks.
• New Leadership Meetings. This week also launched a weekly “work review” meeting involving all managers and up that I host along with the manager of our project management group. We also started a monthly series for all management-and-up to discuss strategic matters. That one is going to be interesting, to see if our Chief of Staff can carve out enough time each month to prep a solid agenda worthy of everyone’s participation. I have no doubt in our intentions or abilities, I just wonder if we’ll prioritize the effort sufficiently to make it work. Because that’s the hardest part.
• Squad Model Rising. At the end of the week I shared some “squad model” articles with my management group. We need to explore some new org structures to improve the quality and quantity of the work our teams produce, and I think that requires refocusing our efforts around products and customers, rather than organizing around skill sets on the teams. I’ll be hosting a series of conversations through the fall to explore these ideas and consider whether we can make something like that work. And thankfully one of my managers has kept in touch recently with folks at CODE PA—who use a squad model—and they have agree to chat with us and share their insights. For reference, here are some sample Squad Model articles (in no particular order):
  • The Agile Hierarchy: How Pods, Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds Work Together
  • Squads, chapters, tribes, guilds – organizing people to improve motivation and networking
  • Discover the Spotify model (via Atlassian)
  • Understanding Squads, Tribes, and Guilds (via Wrike)
  • One Bank’s Agile Team Experiment—How ING revamped its retail operation (via HBR)
  • The Anatomy of a Successful Team Squad
  • Squad Health Check Model — let’s measure the health of our team
  • And then this article about how to roll out strategic changes… Building Employee Buy-In for Strategic Change (via HBR)

Professional Links

• Coaching for Leaders: What Really Matters for Team Success, with Colin Fisher. This 30-min podcast was an eye-opener this week. After hearing so much about coaching and managing people and their emotional states over the past couple years, it was refreshing to hear about some research-backed assessment that… actually… team structure matters even more. Worth a listen if you’re in a position to influence your team’s structure and focus. Because you can’t coach your way out of a bad structure.
• Strategic Business Plans are Awful. I was delighted to see this new Giles Turnbull post about the use of strategy papers or planning papers coming out of government teams. Because I’ve watched my organization generate shelfware strategy papers for 5 years and it’s cringe-inducing. We know no one reads them, and we also never refer to them again ourselves. (Okay, that’s an overstatement, but only slightly.) Turnbull recommends a work-in-the-open approach (because of course he does), and talking about what your organization plans to learn and discover more than just listing out accomplishments to collect. I shared it with our new comms person, and I hope it has a positive impact on how we do our annual papers, and then maybe it can infect the rest of the county. Imagine! What if citizens were actually interested in what county agencies were learning and how they were changing to address community needs? That’s not possible today. But it could be done if we can change our approach.
• Building Culture at a Team Level. I loved this HBR piece this week—Protecting Your Team in a Toxic Organizational Culture—not because I’m working in a toxic org, but because the advice in the piece works everywhere, and I’ve done most of what the piece advocates multiple times now. If you’re leading a distinct team (or it needs to be distinct), there are steps you can take to establish positive identity and feelings of ownership and membership for your employees. Read the piece, whether you’re in a toxic culture or not.

Personal weeknotes

• My parents visited us in the Columbus area this weekend, to get out of their house, chat, get a late lunch, and so forth. Toward the end of the gathering my father once again suggested that he buy a large house in the Columbus area and we all move in together because he believes it’s the right thing to do. So that’s causing some… tension. While he has the means to do what he proposes, neither I nor my brother or sister are willing to take on such a monumental task, especially when our mother is in need of nearly-24×7 memory care services and my father is exhibiting some minor mental health issues of his own. This is… stressful, to say the least. I’m trying not to dwell on it.
• The next 10 days looks to be absolutely nuts. I have normal work stuff Mon, Tue, Wed. Then I have to get my car serviced Thursday before I drive up to Toledo Thursday night. Friday is when I will meet movers bringing my parents’ stuff back from Tennessee to move into an assisted living facility in Toledo. I will help unpack and setup most of it on Friday. Then I have to drive home, prep the house and pets for a house sitter, work the following Monday, do final prep on Tuesday, and fly to California super-early on Wednesday. In the midst of all this, and before we leave for the west coast, we have new iPhones coming, so I have to do the data and plan transfers and pack up the old phones for trade-in before leaving. Sheesh!

Meanwhile, I had a few thoughts this week given all the current events out there.

Does political violence bring about change?

The Charlie Kirk assassination this week has been a roller coaster in the broader social media and news culture out there. I mention it here because it feels like this event is bigger than most gun violence episodes in this country (including the 3 school shooting deaths that happened the same day), and I may want to remember this week sometime in the future.

The quick recap (so far) is that on September 10 Kirk, the 31-year-old right-wing firebrand, was speaking at a college event in Utah and was shot through the neck and killed in front of a crowd. Awful stuff. In less than 48 hours authorities apprehended a very young man they believe did it. And rather than being a “liberal” like Donald Trump and his acolytes accused, it turns out he was from a hard-core right-wing family, had access to powerful weapons, and appears to have been exposed to even-more-radical influences than Kirk himself.

The Kirk murder and the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (both this week) got me thinking about violence and its use in movements for various political changes, like women’s suffrage, Irish independence, Civil Rights and labor movements in the U.S., and so forth. And for whatever reason, I was reminded of “The High Ground,” a 1990 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that dealt with terrorism and even made a controversial (at the time) reference to the “Irish Reunification of 2024.”

In the episode, Data is talking with Captain Picard and remarks, “I’ve been reviewing the history of armed rebellion, and it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change.” After some back-and-forth with Picard, Data asks: “Would it then be accurate to say that terrorism is acceptable when all options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed?” To which Picard replies mankind has never figured that out (even in the 24th century).

Now in the Charlie Kirk murder, it’s currently looking like this wasn’t organized terrorism in the classic sense. At best it was a young man with mental health issues being influenced by Nick Fuentes and the “Groyper” community. I wouldn’t call that organized. Typically terrorists are indeed quite organized as they attempt to effect political change of some kind. Going back to Star Trek, the entire Deep Space Nine series follows Major Kira’s ascension from being a freedom fighter (a terrorist in Cardassian eyes), to a peaceful statesperson for a revitalized Bajor, and then—ironically—she’s a terrorism professor at the end of the series, teaching terrorist cell structures and an ends-justifies-the-means perspective to the Cardassians to help them fight off the Dominion.

While Data and Picard were wondering whether terrorism is appropriate, the Star Trek writers were pretty clear that, even if it’s distasteful, it has a track record of at least some success.

So… is the Charlie Kirk murder a pivot point for right-wing extremism in this country? Will things get better? Worse? Only time will tell, of course. There’s a lot of bloviating about all this right now so it’s hard to know where this goes.

But, chillingly, perhaps absolutely nothing comes of this event. After all, if the Sandy Hook massacre can’t change things, I’m not sure what can.

About this week’s header photo