Trust beyond reason An Article by David R. MacIver notebook.drmaciver.com In this sense, trust is a polarizing strategy, and it's one that is important to apply early on in the relationship before someone becomes important to you. If you trust someone excessively and it goes badly, but they don't matter to you, you can just kick them to the curb. In general, trusting someone at a level that seems slightly excessive for their level of importance to you will help you sort people in your life who you want to be more important to you than they are from those who you want to be less important than they are. And it does need to be excessive. It needs to be trust beyond reason. Not beyond all reason, but somewhat beyond what currently seems reasonable. If it is not, then unless they are prepared to take the first move, you will never find the signs you need to move to a higher level of mutual trust. Sometimes this will go badly, but you need to be able to try bad things. trustlovefriendship
The management strategy that saved Apollo 11 An Article by Matthew Ström matthewstrom.com In 1969, the people in charge of Apollo 11 trusted a 23-year-old engineer in a back room of mission control to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade-defining mission. And they did so in seconds, without deliberating or debating. Next time you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself: how can this decision be made on the lowest level? Have you given your team the authority to decide? If you haven’t, why not? If they’re not able to make good decisions, you’ve missed an opportunity to be a leader. Empower, enable, and entrust them. Take it from NASA: the ability to delegate quickly and decisively was the key to landing men on the moon. Central planning gives poor resultsBeware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness managementdecisionstrust
Scales of cities, scales of software An Article by Linus the Sephist linus.coffee American cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything. Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code. …But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit. urbanismsoftwarescaleindustry