2025 Weeknote 47 : Lemon, it’s Wednesday

November 17 – 23

📆 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

Once again, I don’t have a lot of time to blog this week. It’s been nuts, and I’ve been working on a high-priority effort over the weekend, using up a lot of creative energy and time. But let me get out a few updates, for posterity if nothing else…

• This past week I announced a short list of staffing and structural changes that caught just about everyone off-guard:
  • 3 promotions, including one to a senior-level leadership role
  • 1 team of 3 jumped from one manager to another, and we changed the team name
  • 1 person switched managers
  • 1 recent departure turned into a new hire opportunity on a different team
  • 1 person started to split their focus between their current job and a critical project that needed extra help for a while
• Those changes were in response to several converging factors, some related, some not. It’s complicated, and because we’re dealing with peoples jobs and careers here, I can’t go into a ton of detail. Suffice it to say there were managerial changes needed, there were team focus changes needed, and it was finally triggered by the 3 resignations I’ve mentioned in my blog before.
• We’re still proceeding with the Team Topologies talks, which resume in early December. But I felt these changes were needed now, to address a few items that can’t wait for our conversations to resolve in 4-6 months.
• The team structures under my leadership now look like this:
  • GX Foundry (digital services)
    • Assistant Director, GX Foundry
      • GX Concourse (4 people)
      • GX Design (3 people) — formerly our Business Analysis team
    • GX Development (software development)
      • 1 manager, 3 developers
    • GX Platforms (platforms and products)
      • 1 manager, 6 product owners
  • Delivery Services (project management)
    • 5 project managers
• Just about all-day Wednesday was spent with folks from Business of People, again, this time talking about change management. It was a good session. Didn’t really have time for it, and it came right after I announced the above changes, so it was either really good timing or really bad timing—I’m not sure which.
• The first half of Thursday was spent with the execs talking about future staffing needs and current staffing challenges. We don’t anticipate any new headcount in 2026—or at least not in the main budget (we will likely get headcount to deal with ADA compliance matters). But we have a rule that every departure leads to re-evaluation of whether the headcount goes back to where it was or is re-purposed to a higher need. We expect more departures. Our return-to-office (3 days a week) policy takes effect January 5.
• Finally, we said goodbye to 2 great colleagues this week, including at a send-off on Thursday evening. Sad to see them go. But happy they are trying bigger, better, new things.

One More Thing: They don’t teach you how to handle a crisis

There’s a looming crisis on the horizon, and I’ve been in a few conversations about it over the last couple weeks. One conversation on Friday was particularly irritating because it was excessively negative, politically-driven, and nowhere near focused on solutions. I had to think about it a bit to understand why it bugged me sooooo much.

And I think I figured it out.

I’ve been working in IT for decades now, and one thing you learn to handle is a crisis. You get systems that go down unexpectedly, or a vendor that fails you, or a cloud service that goes offline through no failure of your own. People screw up. Software flakes out. As the French say, merde happens.

What I know from those experiences is that you can save your recrimination discussions for later. In the moment, dealing with the problem, you need to get to work. And the only way to get the best out of everyone that’s helping save the day is to dial the temperature down. Make the crisis seem less critical. No shouting. No jumping around. No hand-waving. And throw in shared joke of exasperation from time to time. Sometimes things go so badly, you just have to laugh.

If you don’t work to defuse the situation, everyone spends their energy trying to defend against political attacks (real or imagined) rather than keeping their eye on the ball: resolving the problem with speed, effectiveness, and hopefully durability.

But if you’re not from the IT world, this may be a foreign concept. Or at least you haven’t seen crises very often, so you may lack practice. And if you’re a literal or figurative politician (or politician-adjacent) it’s probably unthinkable that you might work on fixing the problem when you could work on fixing the blame instead. Heads must roll! That’s the solution, right? (This is parodied to the Nth degree in the HBO series Veep to great comic effect.)

For the really big messes, you may well need to do a round of, “Who’s fault is it?” But even if you have a name, you still need to consider whether the situation was malfeasance, incompetence, ignorance, or just an unfortunate nexus of bad luck. If responsibility must be assigned and penance exacted, okay. But do it later, do it surgically, and move on.

In a crisis—whether fast-moving or slow-moving—it’s crucial to dial down the rhetoric if you actually want to solve a problem. Because the people willing to slog through the muck with you are the most loyal on the team. If you treat them with respect, they will tell you the truth. They will own decisions and responsibilities. Keep them close. Show them support. Give them the benefits of many doubts, and they will reward you with solutions.

After all, mistakes are gifts of knowledge you didn’t know you needed. Set the finger-pointing aside, get curious, be supportive, and you’ll come out stronger on the other side.

Professional links

This week has been a blur of conversations and work. So I didn’t have time to pick up any new articles or resources out there.

Personal weeknotes

• I’ve been failing to keep up with my walking plan, nor have I been sticking to my eating plan. The stress of the last few weeks (which is getting worse, not better) is leading me to stress-eat or just not give a flying leap, with everything going on. I’m disappointed in myself and I want things to get better this week, but then here comes the Thanksgiving holiday…
• Good news, though—I won’t be eating a big Thanksgiving dinner this week, Whew! I’m working all 3 days and then traveling north on Thursday, but will miss out on all the fun of overeating. I’ll grab a dinner out somewhere on Friday or Saturday, with my parents, my wife, my sister, and her husband—up from Tennessee. But nothing formal for Turkey Day. And I’m fine with it. A little peace and quiet and a little time in a hotel room should let me decompress a bit. I’ll try to get some walking in, too.
• Meanwhile, this was Fiber Internet Week at the house. Finally, years and years after the City of Dublin announced a deal with altafiber to install fiber-to-the-home Internet services to every home in the community, it arrived at my house. I now have a piece of glass punched through the side of the house and terminated in my basement. I have as much bandwidth at my house—just for me and the wife—as the entire downtown high-rise at work, shared by a few thousand people. The power! Mwaahahahaaa!
  • I even installed a new firewall from Ubiquiti that can handle the symmetric 2Gbps link. Downloading stuff is marginally faster, but the uploads are insanely better—from about 25Mbps to 10X or even 80X that speed, depending on Wi-Fi and other factors.
  • I am looking forward to calling Spectrum—who has been slowly jacking up my rates for years—and telling them to eff off. I’m now spending about 40% less for 2X the download speeds and 80X the upload speeds.
• And one last thing. I got mad Sunday morning. I received an email from Microsoft letting me know my monthly fee for Xbox Game Pass had hit my credit card. A whopping $32 for just one month of service! What used to be $17, then $20 has now ballooned to $32 (for the top tier of service), and that just cheesed me off. So I got busy. I cleaned up files from my Xbox, shut it down, removed it from the living room, and canceled the subscription completely. Meanwhile, I ordered a Nintendo Switch 2, which offers a similar online service for about $54 for the entire year, not $384. Is it the same? No. Is the console as powerful? No. But it’s fine. I love a good top-tier game, but not enough to spend $80 a title and $384/year for all the bells and whistles. I’ll have the Switch 2 this week and report back.

About this week’s header photo