There’s a couple weeks backlog here.
I went scuba diving for the first time a few weeks ago. My son liked it so much we went twice. I was worried at first - I don’t take well to learning new things at all, I fear it. But this time it was great and, even, relaxing. There’s a lot of garbage voices that fill my head all day long: I have that thing where, though it’s easily provable that it’s the opposite in my life, I can’t ever focus on good things - I can only see good when I look outside of myself.
When I was concentrating so hard on breathing (a completely unnatural and panicy feeling underwater at first, even with the respirator!), just trying to move, and then trying to enjoy the bizarre world of being in the ocean, I couldn’t think of anything else but diving. It was great!
Maybe that’s a good way to get over a fear of learning: it’s more relaxing than listening to myself.
Enjoy the links!
I recorded a rare, delightful episode with my friend Charles Lowell. He’s worked with kubernetes on a recent project, and being the epitome of “developer,” I wanted to get his take and tips on it. Have a listen, if only to relive the sounds of DrunkAndRetired.com, our old podcast from when we were young.
I’m building up my kubernetes knowledge, as you might guess, so I also talked with Dawn Foster about the kubernetes community. She had some great insights and you should listen to the interview.
I was in the Pivotal London office a few weeks back, and did this short interview with Hannah Foxwell:
Hannah works on the platform operations team at VMware. Her teams helps organizations put platform teams in place that run their cloud native platform, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry. As she says, the platform team that delivers an internal platform as a service to the developers. Hannah has spent a lot of time finding and working with those operations people who end up being SRE-like, coding folks. They’re running those centralized cloud platforms in large organizations. We discuss some approaches to changing ops people’s work, working through resistance to change, helping ops people become systems programmers, a bit of SRE, and putting in place a friendly culture.
Also, while I was at the beach a few weeks back, Matt and Brandon recorded on over on Software Defined talk:
We try to make sense of the latest Google news, discuss who’s spying on whom and a few hot takes on the latest M&A. Plus, Matt Ray teaches us about hippos and wombats.
Brandon is always an excellent MC when I’m away, he drives the agenda and fills in the role of asking questions the audience might have.
Last week, we got to talking about white papers and silly AMI pricing, as well as a some brief kubernetes from me - take a listen!
When Kurt first showed me that song, I was thinking more about how we were gonna do it. The meaning of the words didn’t come to me until way later. I still get new things out of it now. That song just gets better when you bounce it against the world.
For example, in one of their many failed experiments, the team tried to analyze the impact on conversions by showcasing “WiFi Signal Strength” for all properties. Their hypothesis was valid; guests, especially business travelers, prioritize Internet speed as one of their primary booking criteria. The test tried to measure conversion impact by displaying a banner “WiFi Strength – Strong” on the listing. Much to their surprise, the test failed to deliver conversion uplift. But the experimentation team did not stop there. By interviewing consumers in their Research Lab, another fascinating insight stood out—guests wanted to know if the hotel’s WiFi would allow them to watch Netflix or deliver emails without interruption. In scientific parlance, the team approached the problem from the Jobs To Be Done standpoint. Internet wasn’t important—jobs done through the Internet were. Almost immediately, the team ran another test; this time with labels like “Fast Netflix Streaming.” The new test drove the team back to its winning ways by delivering comprehensive wins against the control.
From “[CRO Best Practices] Insights From eCommerce CRO Apex Predators: Booking.com”
Listening to someone means asking what they are saying, not using them as a source for what you’re thinking:
Here’s the different question that is at the core of really excellent listening: “What is this person’s purpose, intent, hope in delivering this message? What does this message mean to him?” This is as opposed to everyone’s normal question: “What does this message mean to me?”
This sounds very nice. But what about all those ideas I have while they’re talking, things I want to say, questions I want to ask more, that are fleeting and will run over each other like a wall if bodies, each disappearing in the pile.
Nonetheless:
here are the different questions we want you to ask: • What if this person weren’t a problem for me to solve, but a key knowledge holder for me to understand? • What is it this person knows about the situation that could shift or change my mind and how might I find this out?
And:
the question we want you to carry (here and elsewhere) is this: what do I have to learn here?
This is advice for “giving feedback” in work meetings, managing by having conversations with staff. It’s good advice, and generally good listening advice. It’s similar to the advice in the non-violent communications world: a system of discourse and life that I don’t really understand well, but that looks effective, if only caring.
Both from Simple Habits for Complex Times. It’s surprising good, so long as I skip through the fictionalization story through out - a trick of business book writing I loathe.
Speaking of, more from the same book.
First, the method and it’s good intentions:
Socratic questioning—Here, you leave people to draw their own conclusions by simply asking a set of helpful questions to take them to the realization that there’s an issue (and the hope is that they’ll then ask you for a solution or even stumble on your solution and offer it up as if it were their own). This, we’re told, increases ownership of the issue because the other person—the person needing to change—came up with the idea himself.
Then, how it often doesn’t work out as exploration, more as pointing to an existing point:
Socratic questioning—This one is trickier, because it often looks open and curious. You’re asking questions, so aren’t you already doing what this different-questions approach suggests? Our experience is that generally people who use this approach are not actually curious about something new they might learn from the other person. (This lack of curiosity starts, we’re sorry to point out, with the great Socrates himself, who was a smart fellow who might be forgiven for thinking he had the solution concealed inside his cloak.) Instead, the questioner leads the person down a familiar path (designed by the questioner) and entirely inside familiar (to the questioner) territory. We can spot this in our videos with leaders because they will generally ignore any new information that comes their way and continue their set of questions. When someone gives an unexpected answer to the question, the leader looks more exasperated than confused—because the other person is missing the point. The leader is using questions to search for particular answers, not to get more information on the table.
I always want Socrates to just tell me what he wants the conclusion to be and work backwards. Plato needed an editor, perhaps. But chopped down, Socrates proofs wouldn’t have seemed proofs.
Both quotes from Simple Habits for Complex Times.
A whole lot of travel has been canceled for me. VMware has a policy that you can’t travel across international boarders. Living in tiny The Netherlands, this means I’m grounded for awhile. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to catch up on the queue of work and ideas (I’m hoping to take some kubernetes courses and think up an outline of a new book - ‾_(ツ)_/‾).