Hiccupps

I was talking with a colleague the other week and we got onto the topic of framing our work. This is one of my suggestions: I want to help whoever I'm working with build the best version of their thing, whatever 'best' means for them, given the constraints they have. That's it. Chef's kiss. I like it because it packs in, for example: exploration of ideas, software, process, business choices, and legal considerations conversations about budget, scope, resources, dreams, and priorities communicating findings, hypotheses, and suggestions helping to break down the work, organise the work, and facilitate the work making connections, pulling information from outside, and sharing information from inside It doesn't mean that I have no core expertise to bring, no scope for judgement, no agency, and no way to be creative or express myself, and it specifically does not mean that I'm going to pick up all the crap that no-one else wants to do.  Of course, I might pick up...

Questions are a powerful testing tool and, like any tool, can be used in different ways in different scenarios with different motivations and different results. A significant part of my role is generating questions and I will generally have a lot of them. I will rarely ask them all, though, and I've put a lot of time and effort into learning to be comfortable with that. A couple of examples: I was in a meeting this week where the technical conversation was too deep for me to give a perspective from a position of knowledge. I could have disengaged, but I didn't. Instead, I asked occasional questions, not wanting to derail the discussion or disrupt the flow. Some were detail questions, to help grow my understanding. Some were scoping questions, to help understand motivations. The one that really landed, however, was about the focus of the meeting. Although I couldn't contribute at a low level, I understood enough to suspect that we were not discussing the key problem tha...