Doctor's Note – Issue 30 – Busywork is Junk Food
In this issue: Busywork is Junk Food / Enabling vs Leading / Going Down the YouTube / Power of Ten / Book Corner / The Linkhole
Welcome to the final 2023 issue of Doctor’s Note. It’s customary to write an end-of-year review, detailing all the things I have learned and all the things I have done, plus my goals for next year.
But I’m not going to do that.
You’ve probably had several newsletters like that recently. You don’t need another. Here’s a video of me in front of Burger King instead.
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Busywork is junk food
Back to back meetings, clearing through email and Slack messages, admin might feel like work, but isn’t really purposeful. It’s just busywork and it’s the junk food of work. Very few of us have a role or career aspiration that is “doing lots of email and meetings.” Those things are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Doing too much of it leaves you feeling empty, just like junk food. And it’s equally as bad for your health. A sense of purposelessness, running on the hamster wheel and overwhelm lead to burnout.
I think we all secretly know when we’re doing it. We get to the end of the day and someone asks us what we did and we don’t really have a good answer. Or we’ve used busywork junk food snacking as a form or worthy-feeling procrastination.
The key, as with food, is not never doing it. That can be just as stressful and play into the cult of productivity. The key is being aware of when you’re doing it and curbing the habit.
Enabling versus Leading
Although I coach design leaders for a living the obsession and even the word “leadership” has always made me uncomfortable.
The kinds of articles you find in the Harvard Business Review tend to fetishise leadership, overplay personal brilliance and underplay the role of luck. Articles like 8 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders appear to assume you can run the tape backwards.
Sure, you can research successful leaders and extract a number of traits they may have (notice “lucky” isn’t among them), but then what? You can’t just try and ape those traits and assume you’ll be successful.
Plus most of them are so high level, they apply to all levels of people working in an organisation. As the exchange goes in The Incredibles, if everyone is special, no one is.
What behaviours are you enabling?
I prefer to think of leadership as being an enabler. Partly this is because the idea of a “leader” suggests there must be followers and that feels too old-fashioned, top-down, command and control. While teams do want guidance and leadership, I don’t know that many people like to think of themselves as followers.
It is all too easy to slip into a mode of leadership in which you say—or demand—a certain activity or outcome, but fail to enable it. Worse, you or the organisation’s structure prevents people from achieving what you are asking for. I hear of this pattern over and over again from my coachees. CEOs who want innovation, but also want to be 100% of success before setting down that path.
Or Product leaders who say a quality product experience is central to their value proposition, but then prevent design teams from delivering it because they do not want to be slowed down. “We’ll fix it later” is usually the mantra there. “But they never do,” is usually what I hear coachees lament.
It’s like they’re dropping subpar features off of the back of a speedboat and by the time anyone things about going back for them, they’re either too far away or have sunk under the surface (just enough for an unwitting customer to crash into it).
I like to use the word enabler because it is both negative an positive. Positive in the way that leaders can enable people to do their best work, remove structural barriers, enable healthy and positive work cultures. In that way I like to think of leadership as slow-motion faclitation. This is a particularly helpful mental model for design leaders, since they have often done a lot of workshop facilitation and understand the idea of reading the room, the vibe, the cadence, and so on.
We also understand the word enabler in the negative sense. Someone who enables an addict is someone who contributes to or exacerbates negative or destructive behaviours. This shows up as leaders expecting staff to respond to messages at all hours, expecting them to work at evenings or weekends because “the work has to get done”, passively or actively enabling a culture of bullying, inequality or discrimination, and, of course, gaslighting.
The tricky part is that so many “superpowers” or the so-called traits of highly successful leaders have a shadow side. You might have an amazingly analytical mind and an eye for detail, but over indexing on that becomes micromanagement. You might do the opposite and be a super-relaxed, hands-off leader, believing in your people’s ability to handle problems in the best way they see fit. But that can lead to directionless mayhem as everyone pulls in different directions or low morale because people don’t have a sense of purpose.
Positive enabling requires curiosity, intentionality and reflection. It requires actually Seeing people for the humans they are, being intentional about what you are trying to achieve and reflecting upon the context in which you are asking them to do it. You’re a gardener, not a military commander. Pulling the plants or shouting at them does not make them grow.
Going Down the YouTube
As you saw at the start with my short to camera on junk food, so cleverly shot in front of a Burger King, I have started a YouTube channel focused on the book I am writing on the Leadership Dip and my Power of Ten podcast.
I know that not everyone has budget for the one-to-one coaching I offer. Certainly early career leaders—or even senior leaders—who are responsible for projects and teams are often not in the corporate leadership track where they get given support, even though they need it the most. So, with the YouTube channel I wanted to offer up a lot of the tips, advice, experiences, and sometimes just thoughts around navigating the design leadership dips and put them out for for everyone.
Go ahead and subscribe to it to know when new videos go live and encourage YouTube’s algorithm to think nice thoughts about me. Another good thing about YouTube is that you can post comments, just like blogging back in the days before social media ruined it.
Power of Ten
After a slow release schedule early in the year, I’ve managed to pick up the pace. Most of the latest ones are also video interviews, but the audio archives are also available on the Power of Ten YouTube playlist (apparently listening to podcasts on YouTube is a thing).
Thanks to all my wonderful guests for giving their time:
Book Corner
Deep and meaningful, mostly. Plus one bit of fun:
- Wise advice in Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are by Jay Matthews.
- Unlocked: A 52-Week Guide For The Intentional Leader by Skot Waldron.
- A Life of Meaning: Relocating Your Center of Spiritual Gravity by James Hollis.
- You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet: The Sustainable Method for Driving Profits by Mark Shayler (expect a Power of Ten episode with Mark in the new year).
- So You Want To Be A Game Master by Justin Alexander.
The Linkhole
A bumper crop of links and holiday reading for you instead of watching James Bond movies and arguing about the Christmas tree decorations:
- This Jungian Life podcast with Deborah C. Stewart, Lisa Marchiano and Joseph R. Lee
- It is essential to question the premise that velocity is necessary. I really enjoyed Ship Faster by Building Design Systems Slower by Josh Clark. “Design systems should prioritize quality over speed” – take note Product Managers.
- Abby Covert is always an insightful, wonderful read. Leading from Your Values included.
- Can Stanford’s design school find a way to teach disruption and ethics at the same time? – probably not.
- End of year look back at the UCD industry, its history, and thoughts on why it’s not the golden child anymore by Robert Powell. Some useful history here.
- Hold it lightly by Ben Holiday: “So it’s a simple message, ‘keep going’, but also ‘hold it lightly’. Know how to let go, and how to accept the progress you’re making (or not).”
- Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet in an interview on the Finnish TV show, Kiljan by Cal Newport. It’s not that radical – the return of blogging.
- Oliver Burkeman has written a lot about using time wisely. You can’t hoard life is a particularly nice take.
- Everybody working in tech should read “Nobody could have known”: inclusive behaviors to counter short-termism by Elizabeth Ayer.
- While I complain about a lot of mediocre Product Management out there, Teresa Torres is one of the best brains on the topic. She wrote a deep dive post on Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Discovery to Stay Aligned and Drive Outcomes. Bookmark it and send it to your PM.
- Another from Cal Newport: On Slow Productivity and the Anti-Busyness Revolution
- Along the lines of Aparna Rao’s Power of Ten interview, this article by Jeffrey To argues The implicit bias problem won’t be solved by training alone. “[W]hile trainings, at best, can help raise awareness of inequality, they should not take precedence over more meaningful courses of action, such as policy changes, that are more time intensive and costly but provide lasting changes. If organisations want to effect meaningful societal changes on discrimination, they should shift our focus away from implicit biases and toward changing systems that perpetuate biased behaviour.”
- The Changing Role of Design - by Rei Inamoto. “It’s time to put creativity back into design again,” he says.
- When critical thinking isn’t enough: to beat information overload, we need to learn ‘critical ignoring’. Sorry, what were you saying?
- My friend Nicolas Roope offers a puntastic perspective on the nature of the EV transition in Renault-lutionaries
- Read the above alongside everything from Joe Simpson’s and Drew Smith’s podcast and newsletter, Looking Out, especially The EV Inferno episode.
- Most of us know of Sisyphus, but I recently came across the Greek Myth of the Danaïdes, the fifty daughters of Danaus destined to marry the 50 sons of his twin brother Aegyptus. All but one of them killed their husbands on their wedding night and were condemned to spend eternity carrying water in a sieve or perforated device. In the classical tradition, they came to represent the futility of a repetitive task that can never be completed. See also: the modern workplace.
- Writing to Think on Farnham Street.
- Writing with AI by iA Writer founder Oliver Reichenstein.
- The Product Manager Glut and How It Was Likely Caused by Management Consultants:A Speculation by Peter Merholz. Peter will be joining me on Power of Ten in the New Year.
- Dave Karpf wrote a brilliant riposte to Marc Andreessen’s stupid essay: Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new?. It immediately reminded me of The Californian Ideology, which I was delighted to see him reference.
- Let a thousand flowers bloom: why we need to be mindful of framework monoculture by Jaimes Nel who also talked about it with me on Power of Ten.
That’s it for this issue. Thanks for reading. If you liked it, please share it with a friend or colleague to sign-up. All the shares, feedback and new subscriptions apply a healthy pressure to write more frequently.
Happy Holidays and see you in the New Year!
Cheers,
Andy
❤️🎄🎅
Disclosure: This newsletter contains Amazon affiliate links which support my lavish lifestyle by, literally, cents.
Thanks for reading Doctor’s Note! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.