I bag on meetings because like any nerd I expect the universe to be efficient and orderly and there is no more vile a violation of this sense of orderliness than a room full of people randomly bumping into shit and calling it a meeting.

There are solid meetings out there. There are meetings that build a sense of structure, move forward for the entire hour, and finish with a sense of accomplishment. The question is: how do we make sure every meeting is like this? Let's start by understanding why meetings showed up in the first place.

You're sitting in your office eating a sour apple salt water taffy and you're fully in the Zone. It's great, forgetting there are other humans on the planet Earth; it's blissfully productive until Richard walks in the room and Richard Wants To Talk.

"Stan is one day away from totally screwing our performance..."

Maybe if I ignore him, he'll go away.

"No one is code reviewing his stuff..."

Maybe if I offer him a sour apple salt water taffy he'll go away.

"And he just checked into your component."

"He what the fuck what? STAN!"

Now, an important transition is occurring as you and Richard are running down the hallway to grab Stan. When Richard was rambling in your office, the two of you were talking, and talking is a conversation. Anything goes when it comes to a conversation. It's a simple negotiation: make a point, get a response, retort, retort back. A conversation is verbal ping pong: there are many different styles, but for two players, you bat the little white verbal ball back and forth until someone wins.

When you and Richard walk into Stan's office, the conversation has now become a meeting, and the core difference between a conversation and a meeting is that it needs rules so people know when to talk.

Alignment versus Creative

As I've mentioned before, there are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails.

Creation meetings -- diving into solving a hard problem -- involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.

I've documented many of the rules for meetings in other articles. In this piece, I want to talk about some of the obvious and non-obvious rules around meetings.

A meeting has two critical components: an agenda and a referee. Let's start with the obvious -- the agenda. The agenda answers the question everyone is wondering as they sit down: how do I get out of this meeting so I can actually work?

Different referees have different agenda moves varying from sending it out in email before the meeting to writing it down on the whiteboard at the beginning of the meeting. Whatever the move, the agenda exists in everyone's head - everyone can answer the question, "What do we need to do get the hell out of here?"

The other component is the referee. I originally thought the owner was the critical component, and while an absent owner is certainly a meeting red flag, the lack of a referee is a guaranteed disaster.

All active participants in a meeting can instinctively sense progress, and when progress isn't being made, they get cranky and start looking for the exit. A referee's job is to shape the meeting to meet the requirements of the agenda and the expectations of the participants. Style and execution vary wildly from referee to referee, but the defining characteristic is the perceptions of the meeting participants. A good referee is not only making sure the majority of the attendees believe progress is being made, they are aware of who does not believe that progress is being made at any given moment. And they're looking for one thing...

If they're doing anything except listening, they aren't listening. There are lots of exits from a meeting that look nothing like a door. Every single moment of a meeting is not going to be interesting to you. When Stan and Richard dive deep on that one piece of code you care nothing about, you mentally wander. You reach into your back pocket, pull out your iPhone, check your mail, and you think, "Let 'em wander... they'll be back to the interesting shortly." Two screw-ups here:

1. You're the referee and you're checked out. You're the guy running down the hallway to figure out whether Stan is going wreck your weekend with crap code. You're the referee because you have the incentive to drive this meeting to some reasonable conclusion and... you're checking your mail.
2. You aren't listening. This is what you're hearing "Blah blah blah Jira blah blah scales linearly blah blah". Thing is, there might be value in the blahs, but you will never know because you're checking your mail rather than understanding where this meeting is headed. Worse, when the meeting goes off the rails due to your lack of attention, you have less of a chance of bringing it back because... you were mentally elsewhere.

The rule is for everyone in the room: if their attention is elsewhere, they aren't listening. Frank, the guy who plays Plants vs. Zombies during staff and swears he's listening? He's not. He's getting 50% of what's being said, and worse, he's giving everyone else in the room permission to slack.

However, the problem here isn't with Frank, it's the referee. Frank is not sensing progress, so Frank has left. The referee has forgotten...

If steam isn't coming from their ears, they might stop listening. It is the responsibility of the referee to constantly be visually surfing the room to determine who is and isn't engaged. This is hard.

Referee. Solid agenda. Seven people. At any given point in the meeting, three of these people are verbally sparring about the topic. In addition to making sure the three active participants don't kill each other, the referee -- in real time -- needs to figure out whether the other four are mentally present, and, if not, what to do about it. This is really hard.

This is really hard because refereeing these meetings is incredibly situational. You've got seven people, each with their own personalities and agendas. You've got whatever mood they happen to be in at that precise moment. And you've got whatever topic merits this meeting in the first place. Given all of these fuzzy variables, what possible relevant advice can I give you to keep everyone engaged? Here are a few small tips:

• Pull them back. If they don't look engaged, steer the conversation toward them and ask them a question relevant to the current state of the topic: "Stan, no code reviews? Really?"
• Reset the meeting with silence. If several folks have checked out, one of my favorite moves is referee silence. When all eyes are on you, count backwards from 10 and watch what happens -- Frank is going to look up from Plants vs. Zombies and wonder, "Why's it so quiet? What'd I miss?"
• Change the scenery. Are you sitting down? Ok, stand up. Have you been writing stuff on the whiteboard? No? Try it. Small tweaks to the scenery might change nothing or they might give someone a nudge out of their mental haze.

A meeting's progress is measured by the flow, and the referee's job is keep it moving along at a good clip, which is why the referee sometimes needs to...

Own it. There is a variety of meeting denizens you're going to encounter as both a referee and a meeting participant. The one I want to talk about is the person who believes it is their moral imperative to contribute to the meeting simply because they were invited. Yes, talking is a sign of active engagement. Yes, you never know what random verbal curveball is going to magically improve a meeting. Yes, this person always talks... every meeting... like forever.

There is a point where the referee becomes the dictator and owns the meeting. They own it. They actively demonstrate control of the meeting, and when you're the person who gets owned, it stings a bit, but this meeting is not about you. It's about each and every person sitting in the room wanting to get out of this meeting where real work is done.

For the referee, the decision to step in and shut someone down during a meeting isn't one taken lightly. A good referee knows that abuse of the dictator role eventually results in everyone shutting down, which is just as inefficient as that one person who never shuts up. Summoning the dictator effort is a last ditch effort geared at fixing the problem right now, but doing it in such a way that the problem doesn't show up again. It's a gut referee call that you're going to screw up before you perfect, but an important and immeasurable part of running a good meeting involves...

Improvisation. The solution to whatever the hard problem might be is going to show up in one of two ways: random brilliance or grindingly hard work. The path to either involves a competent referee doing everything I describe above while also knowing when to ignore it.

A good referee knows:

• The meeting is nowhere near the stated agenda, but everyone in the room is showing all the non-verbal signs of progress, so screw it, let's see where it goes.
• This person who appears to be rambling and wasting everyone's time is onto something that might lead to random brilliance, so let them ramble.
• The glaring danger signs for a meeting that is doomed whether it's a lack of preparation, the absence of a key player, or the fact the team is wound up about another issue entirely.
• The courage it takes to stop this meeting five minutes into the scheduled hour because there is no discernible way to make progress.

Meeting management, like people management, is often the art of managing a moment, which means that the only rule that applies is entirely dependent on the snowflake-like context of the moment.

A Culture of Meetings

Somewhere in the evolution of a growing company, meetings take over. At the time, it seems like a good idea because the product roadmap is all over the floor, key people are quitting, or there's lots of yelling in the hallways. Whatever the disaster, a single well-led, efficient meeting with the right people provided a solution to a hard problem. Those who were watching noticed and thought, "Alright, we now have a new tool to solve problems -- it's called a meeting."

With this fresh sense of validation, meetings spring up all over the place. They become the fashionable solution to problem solving -- to making progress. More folks are invited to these affairs because everyone believes that if you're invited to a meeting, you are somehow more professionally relevant. People start becoming scarce around the building, checking someone's free/busy schedule becomes part of the culture, and suddenly we're worrying more about the care and feeding of meetings than getting shit done.

Meetings must exist, but meetings cannot be seen as the only solution for making progress. If you must meet, start the meeting by remembering the definition of a successful meeting is that when the meeting is done, it need never occur again.

I'm not sure who the magicians are who are responsible for building this index, but it's an unexpected glimpse into a book that you thought you knew, but actually do not.

This is a welcome perspective because at the end of a book, you've been in your head far too long. You're sick and tired of how you mentally sound and how you construct thoughts. All of the delicious moments of discovery have long been forgotten among the endless writing and editing whilst lumbering towards an immovable deadline.

And then the index shows up and you realize you might've written something cool.

It's Done, It's Cool

I wrote another book and it's called Being Geek.

The first book was for managers -- this book is for everyone. If you've ever wondered how to negotiate an offer letter, whether your boss is brilliant or a doof, or if you've ever thrown a book providing career advice against the wall, this might be the book for you.

The goal of Being Geek is to provide ideas and stories for the complete lifecycle of a gig -- from looking for a gig, loving it, hating it, and then looking for another. While there is more to a gig than 40 chapters, I touch on the trickier aspects of your gig, including:

• What to do with toxic personalities
• How to get your head around an interview
• Figuring out your professional worth.

One of the complaints regarding the prior book -- Managing Humans -- was the lack of book-specific original content. While Being Geek does republish some articles from the past few years, there is a significant amount of new content available only in the book, including chapters such as:

1. How to Win
2. Managing Managers
3. The Issue with the Doof
4. The Curse of the Silicon Valley
5. Bad News About Your Bright Future.

As with the prior book, existing essays have been lovingly updated and sometimes augmented. I'm particularly happy that The Nerd Handbook is touched up and now in printed form.

Unlike Managing Humans, Being Geek is readily available in a variety of formats. These digital formats, I hope, will get the book in front of a wider variety of eyeballs, but I remain fond of the printed version. See, you finish a book by writing it, but in my head, it's not really done until it's sitting in your hand.

Don't write a book. Even better, stop thinking about writing a book. Your endless internal debate and self-conjured guilt about that book you haven't written yet is a sensational waste of your time. My guess is if you took all the time that you've spent considering writing a book and translated that into actual writing time, you'd be a quarter of your way into writing that book you're not writing.

So, stop. It's the only sure-fire way to begin.

The Weight of Big Decisions

The theory about big decisions is that they require a tremendous amount of thought, and that investing in all this thought results in better decisions. There are many classes of decisions where there is a right move. Where deliberate planning around complex issues involving different people with varied goals is essential to making a correct decision.

Your unwritten book is not one of these decisions. Stop debating it.

I'm just about done with my book, Being Geek. This is my second book, so having gone through the process once before has given me experience that I am using for planning. There was an arc that I wanted to write about and a table of contents eventually did show up, but, by far, my most productive move regarding writing a book was -- wait for it -- writing.

A blank page. A scribble in a Moleskine. That tweet that captured your thought better than a chapter ever would. Quietly crossing out paragraphs you loved. These are the acts that comprise writing a book, not talking about it, not announcing that you're going to do it, and certainly not reading an article by a blogger who at this very moment is procrastinating finishing his own book by writing about how you should start yours.

The Journey is the Book

There are scenarios where you're going to want to plan the hell out of your book. If you're writing the definitive medical book on the treatment of West Nile encephalitis, I would like to encourage you to plan the hell out of this book. These are books where the structure and the data are essential to this book's success.

This is not the book that you are writing. In fact, if you're a frequent reader of Rands in Repose, I would suggest that even if you have a book in mind, that is not the book you'd end up writing. Having done this twice now, I can confirm that the only part of my planning process that made it to the published work is the title.

It's not that I ended up with an entirely different book than I intended. I wrote the book I intended to write, but the majority of the writing involved discovering ideas randomly, without planning, and in some of the strangest places. The following is the documentation of tools, strategies, and mind games I use to remove barriers and create a book.

The Title and the Pitch

If you're going to obsess about something early on, my recommendation is to obsess about your title. Giving clever names to people, places, and things is my schtick -- I know when I've succinctly and adeptly identified a thing, and once I've done it I stick with it. There wasn't a moment during the writing of either book when either title was debated or at risk.

As for the pitch, well, if your title ("Managing Humans") has done its job, you don't need a great pitch. However, the other title ("Being Geek") doesn't always define your arc like you'd want, so you need the pitch. "A career handbook for geeks" is the pitch for the second book and it came straight out of early discussions with my editor.

The title and the pitch aren't just the backbone of your book; they help define the literary space that you've chosen to write within. While I think it's important to define some constraints up front, I'm more interested in your writing, so if you haven't fallen in love with your title, don't sweat it. Take your best shot and get back the writing.

Mobility, Pt. 1

Once your brain is engaged with your book, ideas are just going to show up randomly.

I make it a practice to keep a travel-sized notebook and pen with me at all times. When I forget these essential tools and my iPhone is nowhere to be found, I have no qualms about asking a stranger for any type of writing instrument in order to capture the relevant thought on the nearest portable writable surface.

The rule is simple: if you don't write it down, it never happened.

Environment

Haphazard notes are then transcribed into TextEdit.

The entire first draft of both Managing Humans and Being Geek was written in TextEdit. I eagerly test-drive the latest gorgeous, time-saving, writer-specific tool, but after each evaluation, I always return to TextEdit.

Why? Barriers. I'm uncertain if it's a nerd perspective or a writer one, but once you've begun a book, the world transforms into a menacing place intent on distracting you from doing what you love -- writing.

See, you're chasing an elusive high where the story just pours out of your fingers, and it occurs so infrequently that you start to wonder: is there a system? Is there a perfect sequence of events that conjure writing nirvana?

I wrote four effortless pages sitting on that high bar stool in the Los Gatos Coffee Company. And I had a black coffee, a 10% Kona blend... in my favorite mug... on a Tuesday.

What was a random sequence of events becomes your writing religion and suddenly you're obsessing over the seating arrangements in your local coffee shop rather than doing what you love.

Humans, especially nerds, are creatures of habit. Often, these habits are designed to make the world a predictable place so that our brains can focus on the creative task at hand. The reason I continue to end up in TextEdit is because my favorite feature is the lack of features.

Here's just a slice of one of the preference dialogs in a great writing tool called WriteRoom:

Do you know what I see? I see hours of gleeful distraction tweaking features and defining the perfect writing environment. In TextEdit, there are no knobs and dials for me to fuss with in order to optimize my writing experience.

Features create choice and choice is a dangerous distraction and the last place you want to find distraction is in the tool you use to write. In TextEdit, I set one preference - body text: Sentinel 15 pt and then I start writing:

Momentum

I have two writing states when generating new material. A fresh thought and an edited thought. The fresh thought state is when I'm staring at a blank page and starting a new article or chapter. The edited thought state is when I'm firing up an incomplete article and picking up where I let off.

Starting, in both states, is tricky, but it's trickier picking up the editing state because I'm lacking the original raw motivation that caused me to fire up TextEdit and attack a blank page. My move in acquiring my train of thought is to re-read what I've already written and then retype the last two or three paragraphs of the existing work. This is usually enough of an exercise to kick off the mental dust.

My other momentum move involves the [square brackets]. The writing zone is a tenuous one and sometimes the thought just can't be expressed in words, yet. Rather than getting lost in a single sentence, I put my best effort in [square brackets]:

• [Something about writing being hard]
• [You can say this better]
• [Blah blah blah I can't be eloquent in a chair where my feet touch the floor].

[Square brackets] get those niggling thoughts out of your head and onto the paper so you can focus on moving forward.

Mobility, Pt. 2

Given that you can't predict your writing mood, you need to have the entirety of your book at your fingers regardless of where you are on planet Earth. Better yet, I'd prefer if you had every single version of your chapters at your disposal.

This used to be a daunting requirement before Dropbox. Not only can you now have every single word you've written available on any computer on seemingly any platform, you also have access to every saved version as well.

As I've written before, the magic of Dropbox is that once you've started dumping chapters into your folder, you simply forget about it. You forget that your writing is seamlessly copied to all of your computers. You forget about that chapter you had to rewrite after accidentally deleting it from your USB thumb drive. Once again, you have a tool that eliminates distracting barriers.

Chapter Evolution

You must become comfortable with incompleteness. At one point during the latest book, I had seven chapters in various state of doneness. When I began Managing Humans, I'd get panicky if I didn't complete one chapter before starting the next. This is your brain, once again, trying to organize where it shouldn't.

The reason I have simple, readily available tools is that I can never tell when I'm going to be able to write. I'm on a deadline and my editor is breathing down my neck, which means I do have a weekly writing schedule that carves off mornings three days a week. As I settle into one of these mornings, it's just as likely that I'll write as it is that I'll count the number of folks in the room who've chosen to drink from ceramic mugs versus paper cups.

A singular focus on finishing a chapter is just another barrier to writing. By browsing all my chapters in various states of doneness, I'm more likely to pick one that is going to tickle my writing fancy: Oh hey, I have something to say about this today. Those ceramic mugs have to wait.

A Table of Contents

At some point, it's a book. This moment is entirely dependent on you, and the best advice I can give is that you'll know when it happens. Perhaps it's a critical mass of chapters. Maybe it's the discovery of one key thought in one paragraph. The point is: you're no longer actively thinking about not writing a book, you're writing a book.

Congratulations. It's time to get organized.

Once you feel you're actually writing a book, it's time for a table of contents. I exclusively use a spreadsheet for this task because it's flexible as well as being good at math. My table of contents starts with three columns:

1. Chapter Number
2. Chapter Title
3. Notes

I then dump whatever chapters I have into this spreadsheet in whatever order feels right. There. Now, you have a table of contents.

There are all sorts of interesting ways to stress yourself out with this spreadsheet. Word counts, chapter counts, percent completes. There's going to be plenty of time to do this when your editor starts with their kind yet passive aggressive threats, so my advice is stick to three columns for now.

Like many of your chapters, your table of contents is a work in progress. When you finish a chapter, when you're inspired, or whenever the mood suits you, fire up the spreadsheet and read your table of contents. Are the titles right? What chapters are missing? Which ones don't make sense?

As we'll see in a moment, the closer you get to a final first draft, the more your table of contents becomes an essential specification for your book.

See It

Ok, it's really a book now. 20 chapters, right? Feel like you're beginning to repeat yourself? Getting annoyed by the sound of your voice in your head? Thinking about writing an article about How to Write a Book? Yeah, that's pretty sweet.

There's a painful threshold when you're roughly two-thirds of the way through the book where you need an extra shove. My advice is to not write an article about this experience, but rather print out the whole damned book. That's right. Every single page. If you haven't already invested in a home laser printer, now is the time. You're almost an author, dammit.

Seeing all of your work spread out on the floor of your office is cathartic.

You've spent the last few months (sigh, years) staring at the words and being lost in the paragraphs, so there's a good chance that you've forgotten what you were up to. Look, there on the floor, you are writing a book.

Now is also a good time to make another pass at that table of contents. The sense that you're repeating yourself in your writing is a good sign that you're begin to tie up whatever stories you were intending to tell. The combination of the ready availability of all your writing on the floor and the structure of your table of contents makes for a constructive opportunity to see precisely where you're at regarding your book. Does it fit together? Is it obvious where the holes are? Are there plans to fill those holes? Do you actually have an ending?

Patience

This is the last piece of advice and you don't want to hear it because what I'm about to tell you is depressing. If you haven't written a word of your book -- if it's just a great title -- you are two years away from being anywhere close to done. I base this opinion on entirely unscientific evidence of (almost) having published two books.

Two years is forever, but I'm going to turn it into an opportunity.

Writing is a game of inches. No author I know sits down every morning in their home office and steadily produces three pages a day. I'm sure they're out there, but these annoyingly efficient and profitable authors aren't doing this on the side. They're doing this because they've written enough to make it a career.

While the idea of writing books for a living is appealing, my impression is that if I stopped being a software engineering manager, my voice would quickly become an echo of how things used to be rather than how they are. Thanks, no.

You have time. In fact, you have lots of time. There will be weekends where all you will find is a paragraph. There will be a week where all of your progress will circle around finding precisely the right title for chapter 12.

In writing a book, you're going to find all sorts of interesting ways to mentally beat yourself up. You're going to consider new tools and different writing schedules. You'll discover that inspiration can be encouraged, but never created. You're going to find constructive ways to procrastinate and your friends are going to stop talking to you because all you talk about is that damned book.

Super. In the meantime, let's write.

After a particularly bad July, the girlfriend at the time suggested, "My Mom does biofeedback, you should give it a whirl," to which I responded, "Does she sell mood rings, too? How about pet rocks? Hulu hoops?"

She ignored me. "It's not like that. She can show how your body reacts to different stimuli."

"Do I have to sing Kumbaya?"

"No."

I Think I'm Breathing

The process of being wired up for biofeedback is intimidating. A variety of sensors measure brainwaves, heart function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature. Once wired, you can literally see the collection of systems that is your body working in concert.

It gets interesting when you start ignoring the feedback. "Rands, we're going to try different relaxation techniques and see what works. How do you relax?"

TV? She turned the TV on for ten minutes. "Yeah, that doesn't relax you. Your brain is working."

Closing my eyes and breathing deeply? Five minutes later, "Again, it looks like you're thinking too much about not thinking. You're not relaxing."

What about reading? She pulled a book off her shelf and I started reading. Within a few minutes, all of the feedback pointed out that my body was diving into a deep relaxation.

"Rands, reading chills you out."

Weeks later, when the next migraine began to creep up the back of my head, I grabbed Ender's Game and read. In 30 minutes, the tiny tendrils of pain began to vanish. In an hour, the migraine was gone. Reading was never a cure-all for every migraine, but reading gave me shot at by-passing a crippling day of pain.

Chilling Out is Essential

If my prior report that a third of high school graduates never read another book didn't freak you out, here's a different pitch on why we want people to pick up a book: reading chills you out.

I've no idea whether my biochemistry is indicative of the rest of the planet or not, but I know if the world is freaking me out, reading calms me down. The act of pulling words off a page and constructing a thought forces me to clear my head, discard stress, and find my mental footing. In a world where whomever is screaming the loudest sound bite is considered to be providing information, I think the act of chilling out is essential.

And you can help with the chill. I offer you the second Rands in Repose benefit t-shirt.

This year's logo is designed by Victoria Wang, who designed the shirts for the now scuttled C4 conference. The shirt itself is a product of the Continental Clothing Company and is constructed of insanely soft 70% bamboo. If you haven't given a bamboo shirt a try, you haven't really chilled out. Once again, the folks at buyolympia.com have made finding, printing, and selling shirts a simple process.

As with the previous shirt, 100% of the proceeds from each shirt go to First Book, a nonprofit organization with the mission to give children from low-income families not just the opportunity to read and to own their first new books, but a chance to learn how to chill.

This is pick-up hockey. If you were to arrive with skates, stick and protective gear, you would discover a chill game where the expectation is that you're going to sit, stare at the game for a few minutes, figure out the rules, and then start playing.

This is chill hockey. We don't keep score. There is bumping and nudging, but rarely a fight, and the rules few:

1. Offsides are enforced.
2. If the puck leaves the surface, whoever gets it, gets to play it.
3. Don't be a jerk.

Hockey has a slew of other rules regarding tripping, high sticking, and cross-checking, but in the pick-up game, those rules fall under #3 -- don't be a jerk. When new individual players arrive and they deviate from these rules, they are quickly and efficiently educated. Yeah, we don't play that way.

This was organically understood until Campbell showed up.

The Campbell game wasn't 14 years old, but it had been around. I'd played at their converted parking lot a few times. Slightly faster game, more testosterone, and a bit more yelling, but most certainly hockey.

The Campbell game was shut down when their parking lot vanished. We'd seen the occasional Campbell player at the Netscape game, but when their rink vanished, they showed up en masse and that's when our game went to hell.

In a game where I could count the number of fights in a decade on a single hand, we had two fights in a day. Arguments erupted regarding offside enforcement, whether to use a puck or a ball, the proper timing of line changes -- it was a mess. What had been a decade of reasonably chill hockey transformed into a tension-filled game where we were suddenly... keeping score?

The reason the chill hockey game remained so for so long was due to social momentum. The collective will of the 14 veteran players already on the rink far outweighed the will of Joe the New Guy. When he showed up, he listened, he watched, and he quickly discerned the rules of our game because he wanted to play.

When 14 Campbell players showed up on the same Saturday morning, they brought the Different and the manpower to enforce it. It's not that they didn't care about local customs, they were willing to adapt, but there was enough of them to represent their version of the Different so they had less incentive to adapt, so arguments and fights erupted regarding unspoken rules.

As Keeper of the Chill, your role as a manager or just the guy who wants the game to go down without fisticuffs requires you not only to publicly define the rules, but also understand why they exist and how they evolve.

Uncomfortably Different

Whether it's one person or many, when new folks join the team, they are in social shock. Everywhere they look, there are new faces that are speaking a strange language full of curious proper nouns and baffling acronyms. Every single detail is slightly, annoyingly, and uncomfortably different.

In an environment where everything is new, a short set of rules can go a long way to giving new recruits both structure and context about their new home. These rules are designed to give the new folks a basic operating manual for the team to make everyone's day a little easier.

Now, I have an irrational knee jerk reaction to bad rules. In my head, a rule says, "You, sir, you can't do your own thing. You must do it this way," and that is not what a good rule embodies. My negative reaction is due to rule abuse. See, I'm a nerd and I'm predisposed to fucking love rules because a logical and well-followed rule keeps the well-defined system functioning smoothly. It keeps us on the same page, it sets expectations, and it makes the world a more predictable place.

Problem is, people abuse rules. They think because they have authority, they can define a rule to support their particular agenda. People think "This is way we've always done it" is a reason to continue to do so in perpetuity. When these folks are cornered and asked, "Why does this rule exist?" we all discover their unsatisfying crappy answer and rules get a bad rep.

A Defensible Rule

My first bit of advice in defining a rule set is to not get lost in the process. You're likely already a company of 10 or more people, and many of these rules are already understood by the existing team -- they are part of your DNA. You do not need to form a committee and schedule seven meetings in order to define a good set of operating rules. In fact, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to spin around in your chair and starting writing them on the nearest whiteboard:

• Anyone who interviews a candidate can veto the hire.
• We leave it to the developer to decide when they need a code review, but when they break the build, they're in the code review penalty box.
• If you have questions about the development environment, you look at the wiki before you spam the mailing list. When you find the answer to your question, you update the wiki.

These are examples off the top of my head and may not apply to your development organization. Just as each team has a different vibe, so will they have different rules, but as you're considering your list, think about this:

• In your day, where are there points of friction?
• Where would clarity make you less angry?
• What critical parts of the day need to be explicit?
• Where does the team constantly screw up?
• What meeting do you repeatedly have that could be killed by simply defining a rule?

For items on this list, you have two sanity checks.

#1 Is this rule defensible? Can you explain in great detail to anyone who wants to know the current and relevant reasoning for this rule? The reason every single bug has an assigned milestone is so that we know when we expect to address it. A blank milestone not only means we don't know when the issues will be addressed, it means no one has taken the time to triage the issue and make a call. We value completeness and quality.

#2 Is this rule obvious? You'll know you've hit the mark on a rule by vetting it with the existing team. If you've successful defined the rule, their reaction will be, "Duh, everyone knows that".

Values, Not Rules

It's worth noting that in many years of software development, I've never seen this type of list written down. The unspoken expectation is that new hires are expected to discover and understand this list via social osmosis. As a means of understanding a team, it's an essential exercise, but defining this list does not replace the exercise of discovering what it means.

These rules are your values. These rules might not be mission statement-worthy, but then again, you're not defining these at the senior management junket at the Half Moon Bay Ritz-Carlton. These are rules that affect your every day.

- Anyone who interviews a candidate can veto the hire -- We value everyone's opinion. We take hiring seriously. If you're part of the interview team, you're responsible for building this company.

- We leave it to the developer to decide when they need a code review, but when they break the build, they're in the code review penalty box. We value your judgement and we understand that people make mistakes. If you make one of these mistakes, we're taking reasonable action to prevent future mistakes because your daily actions affect the productivity of the entire team and the quality of product.

- If you have questions about the development environment, you look at the wiki before you spam the mailing list. When you find the answer to your question, you update the wiki. We value communication and we value efficiency. While we want you to move as quickly as possible, we document our collective knowledge because documentation scales better than our time.

Just because you made a list of rules doesn't mean you've explained their value. The new folks still have to discern from the group why the rules matter. In the meantime, these rules keep them on the rails.

They Didn't Know

After a particularly feisty Saturday game, I typed up the rules for the hockey game and stapled a copy to each of the benches:

• We play with offsides. If you don't know what offside is, ask.
• We don't do timed line changes, skate hard and then give someone else a chance.
• If the puck leaves the surface, whoever retrieves it gets to play it.
• Don't fight. This is pick-up hockey.

Rules are not constraints, they are optimizations and they are clarifications. They are designed to describe what is possible or allowable and rules are not fixed in stone. When Campbell showed up the next week, we didn't keep score, but after two weeks of ignoring the guy who compulsively and vocally kept score, we discovered a new rule -- keeping score is more fun.

What I heard:

• It's huge
• It's a maze
• You can't get out in less than three hours
• It's full of people.

While I guess I need flat-pack design furniture at affordable prices, this is not the shop I want.

You know, Everything

Back when eBay was novel, I played a game with the family before a Thanksgiving dinner. As a means of introducing the idea of eBay to them, I asked each member to describe a thing they wanted that they believed would be hard to find. The sister wanted an antique printer's box, the Mom was looking for a vintage lens, and the Dad, an electrical engineer, requested a now forgotten device that I will dub a hibblygizmo.

"Ok, so these are things you want that you believe would be hard to find, right?"

Collectively, "Yes".

"And how would you go about finding them?"

Again, collectively, "No clue".

I spent the next ten minutes confirming what I already knew. All of these items, however esoteric and including the hibblygizmo, were readily available as active auctions on eBay. I printed out each of the auctions and handed the paper to each member of my family, saying, "Happy Thanksgiving. You now live in a world where a shop exists that has everything."

Unfortunately, this is also not the shop I want.

Regarding Abundance

The shop I want is owned by a person I know and respect. Inside of this shop are two button-up shirts, a pair of jeans, three pens, a desk, and a small white marble polar bear. Each of these items is picked out specifically for me, and more importantly, they are items that, given my own devices, I would never choose or possibly even discover for myself.

As I walk in this shop, the proprietor sees me and grins. "Rands, I have the perfect desk for you."

"I don't need a desk."

"You need this desk. It's vintage Stow Davis. It's walnut with solid brass and wood handles. It's the perfect size for your Cave."

"I don't need a desk."

"Stow Davis. Founded in 1879. Did you know Frank Lloyd Wright commissioned them to produce furniture in the '30s?"

This mythical person is not going to stop until I've purchased this desk because this person knows me and knows that this desk is perfect for me.

I Said, Everything

We're in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there's a lot of everything. Google was created and thrives attempting to solve the everything problem for us. Google has made it wonderfully simple to find a thing, but just because you find a thing doesn't mean you care about it. As you stare at a PageRanked list of stuff, you have a choice:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others. Many of the people who are making these decisions are not evil. They are well-paid, well-intentioned, bright people whose publicly traded companies have built astoundingly profitable businesses building and marketing things they want you to think you need.

These people think they know you because they've done the math. They believe you fall into the Stow Davis-inclined IKEA-fearing writer slash surfer demographic, and that's a strong demographic. Knowing this demographic, they can answer the question: "How can we move 72,000 more of those things on this demographic? How are we going to give the impression the mundane is unique?"

Or...

You can have an opinion. It sounds like work, but it's really not. An opinion is not the definitive view or judgement regarding a thing; it's you staring at that desk and saying, "You know, I like the look and the feel of those brass handles. I also like the drawers that squeak just a bit when you open them. It speaks to the character of the whole desk."

It's not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it's that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won't fucking shut up about them.

Half the fun of having an opinion is the quest to find one, but the everything problem remains. You don't have the time to have an opinion about everything, but someone has the time.

My Shaving Cream is Crap

It is. It's waxy pumpkin-smelling crap and when I ran out, I thought, "Good riddance". I am now faced with two problems: first, I need new shaving cream, and second, my instinct is to spend the entire goddamned weekend researching shaving cream in a compulsive quest for complete understanding of all there is to know about the shaving cream world.

While I want to have an opinion, I do not have time for this exquisite shaving cream expedition, but someone has already completed this quest and has an opinion I can trust. I just need to find them, so I do:

An amazing thing happens when you ask for help, people respond. In their response, not only do you get their opinion, you also get brief glimpse into how they tick, and whether or not that ticking is aligned with yours. When I asked on Twitter for shaving cream help, not only did I learn more than I ever thought possible about wet shaving, shaving cream, straight razors, and a bevy of other shaving topics, I also found five more people to follow because in 140 simple characters, they told a story that reminded me that the best way to search the Internet is with someone you trust.

The Shop I Want is Full of Stories

The shop I want does not exist because this impossible shop is full of people spread across the planet. There's Tasha who can explain anything about grammar. Scott can tell you anything about the Smashing Pumpkins and he also makes a Mac'n'Cheese for which I will fly across the United States to reverse engineer his recipe. Boris is in this shop and he'll talk about scuba diving until I ask him to stop. I've collected each of these people and placed them in this impossible shop because, at some point in the past, we discover a common trait or idea that tied us together - we discovered that together we could explain the world to each other.

I don't need flat furniture nor do I need a desk. I have enough pens and journals. My closet of full of shirts and while I still wonder what a hibblygizmo is, I'm certain I don't need one. What I need is shop full of people with opinions -- because it's not what I know that I'm worried about, it's what I don't know that's really interesting.

The shop I want is full of people who are dedicated to their opinion. Who are happier understanding a thing rather than wanting it. These people will happily tell the story of happened upon this opinion and I want to hear it because the opinion of someone I trust is just as valuable as my own.

Slide reviews are conducted via email, rehearsals are performed, and demos are fine-tuned. When the day arrives, the room fills, nervous glances are exchanged, and it begins. Your practice pays off. Expected questions appear and are quickly answered. The project is solid; perhaps there is no need for that massive decision. We're in good shape, except Allison, the SVP, has a question. Allison?

"Has anyone talked to Roger's group about this? Can they support this load?"

Shit.

The Screw-Me Scenario describes the amazing silence in the room when everyone understands the colossal gap that Allison's questions unexpectedly illuminate. That's a good article to read if you want to figure out how to react. The question I want to answer here is how in the hell does a SVP who isn't even a part of this project, who was invited as a courtesy, and who has never even see the project proposal find the biggest strategic gap in our thinking after staring at our slides for 13 minutes?

She had a Twinge.

Twinge Acquisition

As a manager, you manage both yourself and your team, and the simple fact is there will always be more of them than of you. Unless you're the guy managing a single person (weird), you've got multiple folks with all their varied work and quirky personalities to manage.

Rookie managers approach this situation with enviable gusto. They believe their job is to be aware of and responsible for their team's every single thought and act. I like to watch these freshman managers. I like to watch them sweat and scurry about the building as they attempt to complete this impossible task.

It's not that I enjoy watching them prepare to fail. In fact, as they zip by, I explicitly warn them: "There is no way you're doing it all. You need to trust and you need to delegate." But even with this explanation most of these managers are back in my office in three weeks saying the same thing: "I have no idea how you keep track of it all".

I don't.

In addition to trusting those who work for you by delegating work that you may truly believe only you can do, management is also the art of listening to a spartan set of data, extracting the truth, and trusting your Twinges. When you do this well, you look like a magician, but when you screw up, the consequences can be far ranging and damage the project as well as your reputation with those involved.

How to Build a Twinge

Before I explain how this truth extraction and Twinge construction can really screw things up, let's first understand why these managers aren't listening to me and why I'm ok with that. Remember, I'm talking about engineers here. A class of human being that derives professional joy from the building of things -- specific things. Things they can sit back and stare at -- look there! -- I built that thing.

The building of things scratches an essential itch for engineers. It's why they became engineers in the first place. When they were six, their Dad handed them two boards, a nail, and a hammer and they started whacking. BLAM BLAM BLAM. Even with the nail awkwardly bent in half, the wood was suddenly and magically bound together: a thing was built. At that moment, this junior engineer's brain excreted a chemical that instantly convinced them of the disproportionate value of this construction. This is the best wood thing in the world because I built it. And then they looked up from their creation and pleaded, "Dad, I really need more nails".

Dad handed them three more nails, showed them where to hold the hammer, and demonstrated how to hit the nail. More whacking. BLAM BLAM BIFF. This time the nail wasn't bent, this time on the last hit the nail slid effortlessly into the wood. This engineer in training had now experienced two essential emotions: the joy of creation and the satisfaction of learning while gaining experience, perfecting the craft.

Engineers are wired to learn how to build stuff well, and as they continue to do that someone eventually thinks it's a good idea to promote them to become managers. These new managers initially believe the essential skills of building that made them successful as engineers will apply to the building of people, and they don't. It's their experience that matters.

Management is a total career restart. One of the first lessons a new manager discovers, either through trial and error or instruction, is that the approaches they used for building product aren't going to work when it comes to people. However, this doesn't mean all of the experience is suddenly irrelevant. In fact, it's that experience that creates the Twinge.

A Day of Stories

As a manager, think of your day as one full of stories. All day, you're hearing stories from different people about the different arcs that are being played out in the hallways and conference rooms. As these stories arrive, there is one question you need to always be asking: do you believe this story? Before you make that call, there are a couple things you need to know.

First, this story is incomplete, and you're ok with that. Here's why: for now, you need to trust that those who work with you are capable of synthesizing a story. Part of their value is their judgement in presenting you with the essential facts, and until they prove they can't synthesize well, you assume they can.

Second, and contradictorily, while I believe that folks don't wake up intending to construct lies, I also know that for any story you're hearing, you're getting the version that supports their chosen version of reality. As a story is being told to you, the opinion of the storyteller is affecting both the content and the tone. Their agenda dictates what they are choosing to tell you. Again, malevolent forces are not necessarily driving the storyteller. They are hopeful, they want to succeed, but this story needs judgment, and that's where you come in as a manager. I'll explain by example.

A Familiar Nail

"Ok, Project Frodo -- we're two weeks from feature complete. Our task list is down to seven items, but as you can see from this chart, the work is spread out among the teams. I'm confident we'll hit the date."

This sounds like good news. This sounds like the truth. Nothing in those three sentences is setting off any alarms in my head, but I'm a manager and it's my job to sniff around.

"Is the design done?"

"Yes, except for items six and seven."

Ok, so it's not done. "When will they be done with design?"

"In a week and half."

"And you can get the tasks done in the two days after we receive the designs?"

"I, uh..."

Sniffing around pisses people off. Sniffing around is often interpreted as micromanagement, a passive aggressive way of stating, "I don't believe you can do your job." While there are a great many managers out there who pull this move as a means of pumping up their fading value, this is not what I'm doing -- I'm trying to figure out if this story is familiar.

I've built a lot of teams that have built a lot of software. I know that what we receive as complete designs is usually 80% of what we actually need. Because I was the engineer sitting there staring at the Photoshops in the middle of the night with two days to feature complete, thinking, "It's sure pretty, but what about internationalization? And error cases? You know that's work, right?"

It's not that I know all the intricacies of Project Frodo and I don't want to know them. It's a team full of personalities, tasks, and dependencies that I could spend my entire day trying to understand, and I've got two other projects of equal size that are running hot. As I'm listening to this story, I'm listening hard and trying to figure out... have I seen this nail before? I have, haven't I? I don't remember when, but I do remember the Twinge...

Do you remember every success and failure? No. You can recite your greatest hits over a Mai Tai, but I don't think you can actually recollect them all. However, this doesn't mean you don't remember the experience. I've long since given up trying to understand why one story rings true to me while another triggers the Twinge. My belief is that my brain is far better at subconscious analysis, pattern matching, and teasing out apparently essential details from the noise than I'll consciously ever be. My belief is that my experiences drive my sometimes subconscious instincts, and this is why I've come to trust the Twinge.

A Twinge Catastrophe

A Twinge is your experience speaking to you in an unexpected and possibly unstructured way, and while you don't want to base your management strategy on these amorphous moments of clarity, I do want to explain their importance in the organization.

This story telling, the careful selection of facts, ideas, and data, is going on everywhere in the company. Everyone is building a story about what and how they're doing, and they're often optimizing in their favor.

While many of these stories involve the mundane day-to-day operations of the company, some of these stories are terribly important. While it might not sound like it right now, that story Bob just explained about a small performance issue on one server is actually a massive performance debacle in the making. Joe's story about that annoying interaction design problem is actually the description of the absence of a feature you don't even know you're missing.

When these seemingly benign stories are not judged, when they are not questioned, the story is over. Bob's conscience is clear because he gave you a heads up. Your conscience is clear is because you listened to Bob's concern, and, yeah, you had a Twinge, but Bob's delivery record is impeccable, so Twinge be damned, it'll sort itself out in the end.

Your failure to heed your Twinge is a management failure.

It gets worse. This story optimization is happening at every layer of management and in every group of people. Each time an unheeded Twinge story jumps from one person to the next, a lie is being propagated throughout the organization. And if the story started in your group, it's your fault this misinformation is running amok. Now, there are other people in the building who might get a Twinge and save your team's collective professional ass, but again, if it's a story that originated in your group, the responsibility was yours.

Just Another Nail

New engineering managers wrestle with the gig because they miss building stuff. The powerfully addictive act of building is no longer part of their day and they bitch: "You know, I don't know what I actually do all day." Finding other ways to scratch this itch is a topic for another article, but for now one of your jobs is to listen to the stories, map them against your experience, and when there's a Twinge, you ask questions and you need to believe the asking of these questions is a form of building.

As a manager, when the story doesn't quite feel right, you demand specifics. You ask for the details of the story to prove that it is true. If the story can't stand up to the first three questions that pop your mind, there's an issue.

You don't run a team or a company on a Twinge. The ability to listen to random stories and quickly tease out a flaw in the logic or the absence of a critical dependency is just one of the skills you need to develop as a manager. Like building, both the discovery and the asking of these questions is an art; it's just another nail you need to figure out how to hammer.

See, good program managers speak all the regional dialects of the company, so when engineering says, "It's done," they jump right in and translate: "Done pending function testing, production testing, and final documentation review," so that product management doesn't tell sales, "It's done," and they start selling something which actually isn't done.

In this well-attended multi-lingual meeting, a decision is on the table and it's a decision that's happening in every single software company right this second. It's not really a decision, it's a negotiation, but it's on the table and people are tense because this decision is under heavy scrutiny:

Product management: "What's it going to take get this feature done?"

Program management: "What he's asking is..."

Engineering: "Quiet, I know what he's asking. The answer is, do you want to sacrifice TIME, QUALITY, or FEATURES?"

Program management: "What HE's..."

Product management: "Yeah, I've heard this before and I still want it all."

More talking. More translating. Action items are assigned, which gives everyone the illusion that progress was made. And we all return to our respective regional offices and wait until we have the same meeting again, where we attempt to communicate intelligently with each other. But all we really do is schedule meetings... when what we need to do is figure out who makes decisions.

That Damned Triangle

Time. Quality. Features. It's usually described as a triangle, which somehow represents the state of your product or your feature. I believe the idea is that in a perfect and unattainable world, this triangle is perfect, equilateral, and seemingly at rest. There is balance among the time you have to release, the quality you are seeking to attain, and the features you want to ship.

In reality, this triangle is never at rest. It's constantly shifting and, well, I don't think it's actually a triangle. It's just a mental model that gives you just enough ammunition to lie. The conversation goes like this:

Product management: "We need this feature to be competitive."

Engineering: "Ok. We need four extra weeks to do that feature since it's new and you're asking late."

Product management: "The date can't shift, we made commitments."

Engineering: "So did we. Listen, something has to give. You're adding more work or features, which means we need more time, or, if you want, less quality. Make a choice."

These black and white arguments don't hold water. The idea that there are three simple levers that define a feature or a product is passive-aggressive professional absurdity. There are myriad levers the team can adjust, but to understand them you need to understand the people who are actually building the software.

Bits, Features, and Truth

Let's start with an exercise. I want you to think about the project that you're working on, or, if your project is ginormous, I want you to think of the feature that you're developing. Relative to this product or feature, I want you to walk up to your nearest whiteboard and draw three large circles:

Now, a name belongs inside each of these circles and it's the name of a specific role on your team. The traditional titles for these roles are engineering manager, product manager, and program manager, but I don't want you get to get hung up on titles. I want to you to think about the person who is best qualified to make a decision regarding the bits, the features, and the truth.

Bits: Who is the engineer who has the most influence on the bits? There are likely influencers, but who is the engineer that everyone goes to when they have a question. Your manager's name is a good knee jerk name to put up here, but just because they have "manager" in their title doesn't mean they know what's going on as well as where to go. I want the name of the person who not only gets the call in the middle of the night where there is a bit-related emergency, but also the person who makes the large bit-related decisions. I want to know the name of the person who, when they say no, the debate stops. Got it? Ok, next.

Features: Who is the person who defines the content for the product or feature? This is the name of the person who is constantly asking for more without regard for cost. This is the person who can eloquently and calmly explain the need for this feature with an argument stronger than, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?

Truth: This might be the hardest to define because it's a role that could live anywhere in the building. While it took years to form this opinion, I believe the person who is responsible for the process is the one most likely to be the keeper of the truth.

There's a constant ebb and flow of information in any group of people. Important decisions are made in the morning that can take hours or days to move to the other side of the building. Information is tucked away for nefarious purposes. Information is laundered, adapted, and misinterpreted.

The truth is the aggregate best set of information that exists in the building, and the person who consistently has it is the keeper of the truth. You know this person; it's the person you go to when you're wondering, "What the hell is going on here?" This is the person who knows the politics and the players, they know the real reason the product is late, and this is why this is usually the job of the program manager.

The complaint I hear most about program management is the same complaint I hear about managers: What do they do all day? What do they actually own? Practically, the most important part of the product they own is the schedule, but their larger contribution is information management.

Yeah, I know you start-up folk believe you're doing just great without a semblance of program or process management. You believe that these types of folks are going to slow you down with their agendas and to-do lists. Here's the deal: just because no one has the title in your garage doesn't mean the role doesn't exist. In any group larger than one, someone has taken the role of keeper of the truth and their key skill is information wrangler. They constantly gather the information from the group, synthesize it, translate it, and, sometimes forcibly, present this information to the folks who are busily lying to themselves.

Me: "We have six weeks to shipping, we're good."

Keeper: "Feature complete was two weeks ago and we're still writing code."

Me: "But the team is fired up, working weekends, and..."

Keeper: "Steve and Ryan are on vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow."

Me: "Oh."

A good program manager cares about the program and the product, but they also have a calm professional ambivalence. They have to -- they're always uncovering and then surviving the worst-case scenarios. These discoveries often give them the most complete picture of how the product is doing. Their ability to survive them has made them unflappable - they don't freak out because they've lived through it and know there's always a way out... somehow. All of this experience is why they usually end up owning the schedule. I'll explain why when we get to analysis.

So, who is this calm, truth-oriented, well-informed person on your team? Who is the person who doesn't lose it? Who is the person you go to to understand the intent of the other parts of the organization? They very well might not have the title of program manager, but they are there.

Circle of Comfort

Before I analyze your circles, I need you to do one more pass where you ask yourself two questions.

Great, you've got a name in each circle. Maybe the same name is in two circles. We'll talk more about that in a moment. My first question is: for each name, what's the person's circle of comfort? It's fine that you put Ryan in both Bits and Features, but where does his heart lie? What is his professional background? Which circle is he going to instinctively optimize for? For each circle, if you think the occupant's natural circle is different, write that name underneath their circle.

My second question is: have you picked leaders? Look at the Bits circle. The name you put in there is the brightest engineer in the building, and any time anyone needs someone to explain the architecture, he's the guy paraded across the building, but is he the leader? Does he make decisions about the direction of the product? He has incredibly strong and informed opinions about where it's going, but when it comes down to the commit, is he the guy? No? Ok, who is?

Leaders have deep experience in their circle. It's not chutzpah, it's not spin; it's the knowledge and analytical skills developed from doing the job. It's because you can walk up to them, present a hard problem, and have an immediate, informed, and comforting answer. That's the name that belongs in the circle.

Leaders make decisions. Sometimes it appears they're doing it with little data. Some decisions are great, others are crap, but for the purpose of this circle exercise, you need to identify the three leaders relative to the Bits, the Features, and the Truth.

Circle Analysis

Ok, what've we got? Let's walk through different circle scenarios:

- Something is empty. We don't have program management, nor do we have any product managers. Again, don't get hung up on titles. Just because your company hasn't hired these folks doesn't mean the work isn't happening. Someone is picking features. Someone is designing the schedule. In fact, if you're really small, there's a chance the same name fills all three circles. Let's talk about that.

- Same Name. All three circles. Edgar is the man. He's our one-stop decision machine. It's awesome. While I appreciate your velocity as well as your enthusiasm, I have concerns.

I believe an effective team eventually needs each of these roles clearly defined and owned by three separate people. Rands, where's QA? What about design? HELLO SALES. These are essential parts of the business. WHERE ARE THOSE CIRCLES? This model is not about describing an effective business; it describes an effective team. Sales, design, QA, marketing, customer support -- the list goes on. You need some version of these in order to have a business, and yes, they feed essential data into the product, but my assumption is that one of the reasons you wrote Mitchell's name in the Feature circle is that he has a solid relationship with the design team; he knows that an essential part of his features is the design.

Three leaders. One who makes decisions regarding the bits, another who is responsible for the features, and another who cares about the truth. The theory is, these leaders are sitting in these circles because they have the ability to make good decisions relative to their expertise and the reality is these folks do not get along.

Program management believes engineering will never ship, product management believes the product would be nothing without them, and engineering thinks everyone else is useless because they don't know how to code. It sounds pretty hostile, except when it comes to these three leaders. See, in addition to decision-making authority, these folks have healthy tension with their circle peers.

I divide healthy tension into two equal and opposite beliefs:

- First, there's the reality-affirming belief that most everyone in the building shares. It's the belief that my job is the most important job in the building and in my absence it'll just fall apart. It's a quiet belief that we tell no one, but it's a silent strengthening belief that gives folks the confidence to make a decision. I'm an expert, I'm brilliant, and I'm right.

- Second, and specific to our circle denizens, there's the grudging respect for the other circles and the trust of their expertise. This is a tenuous arrangement given the first belief, but part of leadership within the circle is the ability to step back from a massive decision and say, "He knows better than I".

The idea is that the ability, skills, and experience that define each of these leaders are fundamentally different. An engineer who has seven years of coding experience has a vastly different perspective regarding features and products than a product manager who has transformed an MBA into a product management gig. You can fake it -- an engineering leader can have a passionate opinion about a feature or a product -- but there is a skill to defining, explaining, and justifying a feature that years of development won't give you.

If you're staring at your three circles and the name is the same in all three, I have two questions:

Are they all that? Can they consistently make correct bit-related decisions along with feature decisions while realistically balancing the truth? Really? If it's the two of you in that garage, I get it, but if it's 100 of you and one person is responsible for all three circles, I bet they are optimizing for their circle of comfort and that means two other circles aren't being represented.

Who do they argue with? Without the healthy tension between Features and Bits, there's no debating feature roadmaps and technical realities. A diversity of opinion takes any idea and hopefully shapes it into something unpredictably better. We can see good examples of this by looking at two other circle configurations.

- Bits and Features are the same. So Ryan, an engineer by training, is making both engineering and feature decisions. Great. That gets rid a lot of those pesky feature prioritization meetings, right? What other meetings aren't happening? Where else is the feature set of your product not being debated because Ryan is making unilateral decisions as owner of the bits and the features?

Again, I'm being an alarmist and I'm exaggerating, but I believe you cannot effectively (and don't want to) remove yourself from what you do to make a well-informed decision outside of your circle. Think of it like this: is Ryan the customer or does he have direct access to the customer? If the features are for engineers, there's a solid argument that he could make decisions for both the bits and the features, but if the product or features aren't targeted for engineers, why do we believe Ryan can make informed decisions about them?

I'm not saying that anyone outside of the feature circle can't have an opinion about the product. You want a culture that encourages everyone to care deeply about the product you build, but if you're developing software for regular human beings then you need a regular human being to speak to their needs.

Let's look another variant.

- Truth is the Same as Features. Tony the business guy owns both the features and the schedule. This is a pretty common configuration because the belief is that those who make feature decisions for the user should also make scheduling decisions. We need feature X in May. What's the hitch?

Well, you've got the truth bundled with the features and I'm uncomfortable with that because the truth needs to be neutral. The truth needs to be unbiased, and with Tony's name in both circles, you've got the guy who is calling the shots for the features almost making the schedule decisions. He might have solid healthy tension with your Bits circle, but how is Bits going to argue with the guy who owns the levers for both content and time?

The healthy tension created by having three distinct leaders creates diverse debate about your product. Yes, this is the same debate I talked about at the beginning of this article, but the difference is when you have three leaders equally representing a well-defined viewpoint along with a sense of ownership, it's a balanced debate where the needs of the technology are weighed against the desires of the customer and the realities of the schedule. When one leader is representing two circles, their two votes are pushing decisions in their favor.

Let the Negotiation Begin, It's About the Debate

This is just another model. I've replaced the Time/Quality/Features triangle with circles. There are just as many ways to screw up and misrepresent this model with politics, inexperienced people, and poorly defined features. The difference here is I believe this model not only realistically describes the forces that pull your product in different directions, it also gives those forces a proper name.

Let's go back to the endless debate where the Bits, Features, and Truth are equally represented:

Features: "I want feature X and I want it on the same schedule."

Truth: "We need more time and since I know all the moving parts, I know that we're ahead of schedule of one feature. I think we've got two weeks of wiggle room."

Bits: "Two weeks isn't enough. Can we cut this one feature that we haven't started and no one cares about in half?"

Features: "I can live with that."

Truth: "Sold."

Software is built by people. The best Gantt chart only tells you half the truth about the schedule; the most complete marketing requirements document can never describe why a feature is compelling; and the most detailed technical specification will never tell you what makes for beautiful code. These are only tools and they tell little about the people who are building the software.

These people have names and they've earned them by not only making consistent great decisions for their area of experience, but also knowing when to ask someone else for advice.

Leo: "Vincent, are you on track to ship the tool on Wednesday?"

Vincent: "We're on schedule."

Leo: "For Wednesday?"

Vincent: "We'll hit our schedule."

Leo: "Wednesday?"

Endless passive aggressive verbal warfare. Two type A personalities who absolutely hated to be told what to do. My 1:1s with each of them were productive meetings and when I brought up the last Leo'n'Vincent battle of the wills, they immediately started pointing at their counterpart: "I really don't know what his problem is."

I do. They didn't trust each other.

On the Topic of Trust

There's a question out there regarding how close you want to get with your co-workers in your job. There's a camp out there that employs a policy of "professional distance". This camp believes it is appropriate to keep those they work with at arm's length.

The managerial reason here is more concrete than the individual reasoning. Managers are representatives or officers of the company and, as such, may be asked to randomly enforce the will of the business. Who gets laid off? Why doesn't this person get a raise? How much more does this person get? Profession distance or not, these responsibilities will always give managers an air of otherness.

Here's my question: do you or do you not want to be the person someone trusts when they need help? Manager or not, do you see the act of someone trusting you as fitting with who you are?

Yes, there's a line that needs to be drawn between you and your co-workers, but artificially distancing yourself from the people you spend all day every day with seems like a good way to put artificial barriers between yourself the people you need to get your job done.

Is that who you are or who you want to work for?

The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You're not striving to be everyone's pal; that's not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other's reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.

It's awesome.

And it's something you can build with a card game.

BAB

It's pronounced how you think. Rhymes with crab. It's an acronym for a game which, with practice, will knit your team together in unexpected ways. It's Back Alley Bridge. Here are the rules, but before I explain why this game is a great team building exercise, you need to understand a few of the rules.

BAB isn't bridge. The game does have a few important similarities. First, it's a game for four players, involving two teams -- the folks facing each other are on the same team and share their score. Second, it's a trick-based game where the goal is for each team to get as many tricks as possible. A trick is won when each player turns up a card and the highest wins, unless someone plays a trump suit, which, in the case of BAB, is always spades.

Bidding. Also like bridge, BAB has bidding, meaning each team bids how many tricks they think they're going to get after the cards have been dealt. Scoring is optimized to reward teams who get the number of tricks they bid and heavily punishes those who don't get their bid. Bidding is a blind team effort -- you have no idea what your teammate has in their hand other than what you can infer from their bid.

Decreasing hand count. Unlike bridge, the number of cards each player gets decreases with each hand. Each player gets 13 cards in the first hand, 12 in the second, and so on. Play continues down to a single card and then heads back up to 13. A work-friendly modification I've made is to only play every other hand (13-11-9, etc.) This number of hands fits nicely into a lunch hour.

Hail Mary. There are two special bids: Board and Boston. A bid of Board indicates the team is going to take every single trick. A board of Boston indicates the team intends to take the first six. Achieving a Board or Boston can be an impressive feat and is rewarded handsomely from a scoring perspective. Failure results in a scoring beat-down. Both of these special bids allow for wild variances in the score, which can be handy for teams who are falling behind.

Scoring, game play, and other information are in the complete rules. Now, let me explain why I picked this game as a recurring weekly lunch meeting.

In BAB, you talk shit. I've landed BAB in three different teams now and in each case, the amount of trash talking that showed up once players became comfortable with the game was impressive. This is a function of my personality, but it's also a byproduct of any healthy competition amongst bright people. It's also a sign of a healthy team. I'll explain.

Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking -- it's the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided. As I'm looking for candidates for my next BAB game, I'm looking for two things: who will be able to talk trash and who needs to receive it?

The art in talking trash is the careful exploration of the edges of truth. When someone effectively lays it down, they say something honest and slightly uncomfortable. The ever-present risk with trash talking is when that line is crossed. It's that one thing that is said that goes too far and offends, but it's the presence of that line which makes talking trash so much fun.

It's these honest and dangerous observations that form the basis of trust. When a co-worker makes a big observation about you and shares it with the other players, you take note - someone is watching. It sounds problematic, but remember, we're just sitting here playing cards. It's safe.

In a new BAB game, it takes players time to get used to the trash talking, especially in a situation like Leo and Vincent's. Adversarial co-workers playing on the same team need to learn to ditch the business for the game. They need to understand there is a relationship outside of the daily work and there's nothing like a comedic verbal beat-down to remind them to lighten up.

In BAB, you learn things unintentionally. Once you've got an established game with regular players who all know the rules, you'll learn two things: people get better at trash talking with practice, and information travels in unpredictable ways in groups of people.

It goes like this:

• Player #1: "I bid 3."
• Player #2: "I bid 1."
• Player #3: "Pass."
• Player #4: "Kevin's quitting. I'm sure of it."
• Player #1: "Yeah, I know."
• Player #2: "Sucks to be you."

Out of nowhere, in the middle of the game, you're suddenly assessing the departure of a co-worker. I see this as a sign of a thriving, healthy BAB game because the team has begun to trust each other more. In the safety of the game, they're letting the worries of the moment spill onto the table for all to see, which is impressive, since everyone knows that anything on the table at BAB is fair game for talking shit.

In BAB, you're having work experiences without the work. Relationships need time to bake. Trust doesn't magically appear; it's cautiously built over time via shared experience. The majority of these experiences are created during the regular work day and I'm certain there are a great many healthy professional relationships that are defined and maintained in this manner, but I want my teams closer. I'm not suggesting group hugs and voices united singing Kumbaya. I'm looking for each team member to have the opportunity to understand each other slightly more than what they see when they're at work.

The more you understand how your co-workers tick, the better you're able to work with them. You'll stop seeing them as the role, the title, or the keeper of a particular political agenda. They are just... Phillip. And you know what I know about Phillip? He's the manager who used to wait too long to speak in a meeting. He had plenty to say that mattered, but he used to be too shy to say it.

Two months of trash talking over BAB showed me his reservations, so I learned to pull Phillip into the meeting conversations as quickly as possible. After a few pulls, he started to do it himself. After a few weeks, you couldn't get him to shut up.

The Second Staff Meeting

The inspiration for the game came from a regularly scheduled bridge game at Netscape, and there's nothing special about BAB that makes it the perfect lunchtime game. I chose BAB because a team-based game that fits nicely in a lunch hour.

You bet I maneuvered Leo and Vincent onto the same team for weeks on end. There was no magical moment during one game where they suddenly understood each other. Leo and Vincent continued to bicker in meetings, but over time the tone changed from the passive aggressive to the playful talking of trash. They turned competition into something healthy and fun.

In the safe competition that is BAB, you learn not only how to work better together by understanding that winning doesn't always mean hitting your dates, getting paid, or receiving a promotion. Winning can be a simple, playful thing, "We were awesome as we kicked your ass."

More importantly, BAB is a regular forum for experiencing that relationships are not defined just by the work we do together, but who we become with each other when we aren't looking.

This hockey rink is a remnant of first Internet bubble. Built by Netscape, the rink has held a game every Saturday since 1996. A majority of the folks who show up know each other, so the game is mellow. Finesse, not fighting. A fight is an unusual once a year thing.

When Philly, who I believed was at fault for this whole situation, got the bench, someone asked him what happened. His answer, "Anaheim ran into me and I protected myself."

One Eighth of a Second

I want you to think of the last time you were surprised. Good, bad, I don't care. When was the last time you were really surprised? Got it? Ok, now think about the very first thing that you thought about the surprise. I don't want to know how you eventually handled it; I want you to think about your instantaneous first reaction.

How do you react when you're surprised? Is this how you always react when a surprise lands? My guess is yes.

On the hockey rink, Philadelphia puts up his shields when he's surprised. It's a natural reaction, protecting yourself, but what's interesting isn't Philly's very sensible reaction to the perception of being attacked, it's everyone else's interpretation. We all saw him hold up his arms in defense of Anaheim's unintentional attack and we all thought, "Man, Philly. What a goon."

In any group of people larger than one, these instantaneous reactions to unexpected situations happen a lot, and understanding their range and impact is important to navigating awkward, tension-filled, and professionally tricky situations.

The Jerks

These are knee jerk reactions, and the first thing you need to know about them is that they should be first viewed without judgement. I'm not a psychologist and I don't know why some people are aggressive knee jerkers and others are passive. I don't know if these reactions are a function of upbringing or genetics, but I do know that we as a species have little control over these initial reactions and there are many of them.

In my head, the complete set of reactions fit on a spectrum that is labeled Fight or Flight. The first step in understanding a knee jerk reaction is first figuring out where on this spectrum the reaction lies. Is this a person who is going to take on the surprise or are they going to let it wash over them? Will they bolt? Will they wilt? If there is one thing you want to know quickly about those around you, it's their penchant to fight the surprise or flee it.

Again, no judgement. A person who automatically has the fight instinct is not necessarily a jerk -- it's just the default instinct when the world unexpectedly and rapidly changes. I know who on my team will attack a surprise. They'll leap on it. I also know the ones who will silently digest the surprise. I know who is going to come back three hours or three days later with a totally different attitude because they'll have actually processed the surprise.

The base assessment of fight or flight gives you a starting point regarding what might first happen when a surprise lands, but there are other instantaneous reactions that occur and understanding them gives you an idea of what you need to do next, if anything.

For the sake of this article, my assumption is a surprise has landed and it's bad news. These reactions apply regardless of the type of surprise, but let's assume it's professionally bad news with negative consequences and it's being delivered in a group setting. Here's whom you might see across the table:

Dr. No. Denial. That's the reaction. Doesn't matter if the surprise is reasonable, understandable, or well explained. Dr. No's only reaction is a fighting "No".

• "No, I'm not going let her go."
• "No, I'm not moving organizations."
• "No, we're not shutting down this group."

Remember, knee jerk reactions are not rational, they are not considered, and while they are tactically interesting, they are not strategically useful. Dr. No's denial is not her actual thoughts on that topic, it's her reptilian brain reaction to a surprise.

No.

If this is a group surprise and Dr. No is sitting in a conference room full of people throwing down the No, there's a chance for everyone to go off the rails. Well, Dr. No said no and I agree, so NO AS WELL. The time immediately after the surprise goes down is not the time to take any action except to allow folks to react. There are going to be Nos as well as a bevy of other reactions and your job, if it's your meeting, is to let folks talk -- let them react. The goal with Dr. No and everyone else in the room is to get their reaction out so that we can figure out what to do next.

The follow-up: The good news is that Dr. No has got it out of her system. She's expressed her displeasure, which is half of the game. The next time you chat, there will be residual No, but Dr. No knows that she's been heard and will be willing to brainstorm what to do next about the surprise.

Raging Bull. Perhaps the most dangerous of the reactions, Raging Bull wants to fight. They're taking the surprise personally, they're going to say No, and they're going to pick a fight. The Raging Bull is Dr. No with attitude.

The move with the Raging Bull is to know that it's coming, to know that you've got a Raging Bull on your hands. If you have any control over the surprise, you want to put the Raging Bull in a safe situation where they can react to their heart's content without afflicting psychological damage on others or sparking a mob mentality where they infect a mindless horde of mini-Raging Bulls. If it's a pure surprise and it's a group setting, my advice is to end the meeting as quickly as possible. Like Dr. No, Raging Bull is expressing his shock. Unlike Dr. No, the Raging Bull isn't going to feel complete until they've got the emotional satisfaction of picking a fight with someone else.

The follow-up: Everyone needs time to contemplate a surprise, but no one needs time more than Raging Bull. Each knee jerk reaction scratches a particular psychological itch and in the case of Raging Bull, they believe that getting someone else to participate in their mental and verbal freak-out is somehow going to help.

It's not.

Of all the reactions, Raging Bull's behavior is the one that I've found to likely to repeat itself after the fact. Raging Bull will often continue to pick fights days after the initial surprise, which is why it's your move to get them thinking, as quickly as possible, about what's next. What are we going to do about the surprise? What specific thought does Raging Bull have which is crucial to successfully navigating this surprise?

Still Water. This reaction reads like flight because they're not fighting. In fact, they're just sitting there, but Sill Water is taking it all in. They're not missing a thing and in their complete silence, wearing their poker face, they are meticulously processing, they're evaluating all possible permutations, best and worst case scenarios, and potential impact on their day to day.

This processing results in one of two very different Still Waters. There's the true Still Water who is going to maintain the calm demeanor for the entire duration of the surprise. See, this Still Water's processing has resulted in a comfortable plan. They believe they know what to do about the surprise and this realization has brought them peace.

The second Still Water is mentally losing their shit. Sure, externally they look calm, but internally their processing has resulted in increasingly loony nightmare scenarios regarding the surprise. Without quick action, Insane Still Water will find reason to become a Raging Bull.

The follow-up: You want to get to Still Water as quickly as possible in a safe location after the surprise because Still Water isn't still. Unlike Dr. No and the Raging Bull who had their opportunities to weigh in, Still Water is still in their head and the longer they remain in the head, the higher the probability they'll tell themselves a tale that will drive them insane.

You need Still Water to say out loud how they feel about the world suddenly changing. Like Raging Bull, you need to engage Still Water in the surprise and move the problem out of their heads and onto the table where everyone can take action.

Distiller. This is my favorite knee jerk reaction because the Distiller attacks the surprise with questions. Why did this happen? How come we didn't see it coming? Ok, what's the impact? Right, what are we going to do?

This is a fight reaction, but a constructive one. The Distiller is as uncomfortable as anyone with the surprise, but their coping mechanism is aggressive understanding. They're not going to stop asking questions until they feel they've got a complete understanding of what actually happened.

In a group setting, I let the Distiller have free-reign during the landing of the surprise because their incessant questions are helping everyone in the room contemplate what actually happened. They focus the surprise on facts rather than feel.

The follow-up: You're going to feel you've got a good idea where the Distiller is at because of their endless questions, but now's a good time to explain that everyone comes down from a surprise in different ways, which is why everyone needs that personal follow-up. Yeah, a Distiller can turn into Raging Bull after a night's sleep. Still Water might go Distiller. You just don't know who is going to walk into the building 24 hours after the surprise. This is why most surprises are engineered to occur late in the week; there's a belief that all the knee jerks are going to calm down over the weekend. Maybe. More on this in a bit.

The Handler. The first flight reaction sure doesn't feel like flight. The Handler is not surprised. In fact, they're fired up to handle whatever the surprise might be. They make it appear that they knew this surprise was going to occur. How'd they do that?

The Handler is a calm facade. Where the Distiller understands via questions, The Handler's coping mechanism is the illusion they've got it all figured out -- that they're 10 steps ahead of everyone else. This is a convenient reaction when you've got the Raging Bull standing on the conference table challenging anyone to hand-to-hand combat, but The Handler needs help.

The follow-up: The Handler crumbles hardest. The Handler is actually Dr. No except without the denial. There will be a quiet moment in the middle of the night when The Handler realizes absolutely nothing has been handled and then you'll see their actual reaction.

My Bad. This flight reaction is one of accountability. My Bad's impression is that they've personally done something to incur this particular surprise. They believe that if only they had done just one thing different, no one would've had to deal with the surprise.

There's hope inside of My Bad's reaction. Their empathy regarding the surprise is constructive, as opposed to the destructive social tendencies of Dr. No or Raging Bull, but you don't want them wallowing in their overdeveloped sense of accountability.

The follow-up: My Bad is not responsible for the surprise. While their sense of responsibility is admirable, My Bad needs to understand the actual cause behind the surprise. They didn't cause it, so they shouldn't feel it. They more they focus on feeling responsible, the less energy and focus they have for making progress.

We're Doomed. The most common flight reaction is also the reaction that, I believe, everyone is going to experience as they digest the surprise. Despair.

In a room full of geeks hearing a surprise for the first time, one of their first thoughts is, "How does this surprise fit into my mental system of how things work?" Failure to map the surprise into the mental model results in an uncomfortable realization: "The world does not work as I expected. Therefore, other surprises are guaranteed to happen randomly. QED. I have no control whatsoever. Shit."

The follow-up: A perceived lack of control or understanding of our world is a confidence shattering experience for the geek, and the best way to attack this despair is with a project. Doesn't matter if the project is surprise-related or not, the geek needs something to do. They need the blissful distraction of building something. It's during this constructive distraction that they'll actually figure out how they feel about the surprise.

I Quit. The last knee jerk is our strongest flight reaction. An extreme version of We're Doomed, I Quit does exactly what you'd expect: they threaten to quit on the spot.

They're not quitting. Well, they might, but not right now. You need to translate "I quit" into what they're actually saying: "I am very surprised and I don't like being this surprised." It's unfortunate that this is their reaction, especially in a group setting, because I Quit's attitude can create mass professional hysteria, which means this needs to be handled immediately. You can't wait until after the weekend to explain to I Quit that their reaction at this moment might be vastly different after a night's sleep. You need to hold up a mirror in front of them and ask, "No matter the surprise, why in the world would you eliminate so many options by quitting on the spot?"

The follow-up: I Quit will calm down and land on another opinion, but their knee jerk reaction is a sign of a larger problem. I don't know what your surprise is, but I know if someone wants to quit that, first, it's a big surprise, and second, they value their job second to their peace of mind.

Stages of Jerk

With people, it's never as easy as just a name. These labels for the knee jerk reactions are deliberately simple, but people are conspicuously complex.

As I hinted earlier, I've found it commonplace that you're going to see multiple knee jerk reactions as a corporate surprise is comprehended. These reactions, like grief, have stages, and your job as a manager or a concerned co-worker is actually not comparably complex. Your job is to listen.

The reason there's a knee jerk reaction is because the unexpected occurred. It kicks off the process of assimilation and that's what we care about -- the understanding of the surprise, not the reaction to it. While everyone has a different reaction, they're all going to end up trying to figure out what just happened, and part of that process is having someone they trust sit there and listen to their assessment. Verbally walking through our thoughts is one of the ways we organize and understand them and begin the process of finding a comfortable constructive conclusion.

I'm just as uncomfortable with a Raging Bull as anyone, but I know this knee jerk reaction is not who they are, this is just how they react. Understanding these varied potential reactions is just the first part of digesting a surprise - it helps you understand what to expect so you can begin to figure out what to do next.

We're arguing... discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.

I say, "Information just keeps getting smaller. We're sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We're just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There's no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds."

"No one is learning. There's no work involved in knowing a thing, so we're becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more."

To which the Editor retorts: "I don't think you know what information is."

Hmmmm.

Information has a Hierarchy

So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:

• Data - The raw material of information
• Information -- Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge -- Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom -- Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.

If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.

Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.

• Data -- Raw material. Facts. Got it.
• Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why'd they do this? How'd they know it was the right thing to do? Let's keep moving.
• Knowledge -- Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, "Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick."
• Wisdom -- Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.

Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there's a point. Just wait a tick.

Take a look at this list:

• New York is a city.
• It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
• I've been to New York three times this year
• I never believe I'm in New York until I'm in a cab or smoking a cigarette.

Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you're interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?

There's another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you've started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.

I've begun to tell you a story.

A Shattered Narrative

The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we've realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?

The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn't the first indexing tool, but it's certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I'm looking for, but what's more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?

If you're buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there's no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There's no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.

Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it's presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn't knowledge or understanding, it's merely connective information tissue. It's small bits of information carefully selected by those you've chosen to follow and its value isn't in what they send, it's how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.

This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you'll think, "I don't understand why everyone goes to conferences". You won't act on this thought; you'll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you'll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it's not what you learn, it's who you find.

From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You're an information nerd, you're adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you've got a short attention span, and you might.

But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.

Rands' Story Hierarchy

As we've established, there's information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:

• You can understand the information -- What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
• You can explain the information to someone else -- Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
• You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that...

But Rands, I'm not a writer.

This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you're reading this and pick two random objects. Got 'em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can't say, "They're both in the coffee shop". What's the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?

But you don't have a story, yet. Just like information isn't knowledge until it's understood, your tale isn't a story until you give it someone else -- until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.

But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.

I understand what you're saying but I don't think that's what you mean. I think what you're saying is, "I don't think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought," and you're wrong. You've got two things going for you. You've got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it's the closest thing to magic you'll experience in your life. Second, you've got the entire planet listening and there's just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.

The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It's you and something new.

Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster

Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:

Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter

I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.

Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you'd have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don't know and probably don't trust.

We're in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, "Twitter: what's the point?" Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.

An Essential Skill

I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I'm doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it's never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.

Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase -- and increase in value -- as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.

In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?

Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch.

Their morning starts at 9am, and at 9:15 I got a call from HR: "Jesse's not here".

Bad traffic, miscommunication, there were a dozen good reasons he wasn't there, but I instantly felt a rock in my stomach: "Jesse walked".

A quick call to my recruiter and the mystery began to unfold, "Oh, yeah, he called just before 5pm on Friday and said he wanted to chat. I was off Friday, should I call him now?"

Yeah, call him. Tell me what I already know.

The recruiter discovered that Jesse was firmly ensconced in a cone of silence because his Friday call was his cold feet call. After three months of phone screens, interviews, offer negotiations, and acceptance of said offer, Jesse was calling to tell us that while he had resigned two weeks ago, a last minute counter-offer had shown up, and he'd decided to stay... at 4:45pm on his last day.

Jesse walked.

As I sat at my desk, lightly tapping the phone headset against my forehead, I thought how simple it would be to be pissed. In terms of respect, trust, and professionalism, Jesse had screwed me in just about every manner possible, but, in this case, the fault would be mine.

I had not explained to Jesse that he was wanted.

The Requisition Situation

This article is going to talk about the beginning and the end of the hiring process. I'm going to make sure you know two things. First, that you understand how urgent it is that you hire, and second, how to make sure those you hire actually show up. There's a huge pile work in the middle of this process involving phone screens, interviews, and offers, but for this article we'll just focus on the beginning and the end.

Let's start by understanding where this whole hiring process starts. We need to talk about requisitions.

In many companies, jobs are ruled by requisitions ("reqs"). These imaginary pieces of paper give you, the hiring manager, the permission to hire, but they serve two other purposes. First, they document and formalize the process of hiring a new full-time person, and more importantly, they give executives visibility into the state of the company's growth.

It varies by company, but reqs, specifically open, approved reqs, are one of the more popular organizational levers the execs have to control of the growth of the company. In software development, one of your larger corporate expenses is base salary, which means the moment uncertainty appears on you company's horizon, reqs (read: potential large expenses) are one of the first things to vanish.

This leads to the most important rule regarding requisitions:

Reqs vanish randomly, often without notice, without reason, and at the least convenient time.

In larger companies, the bureaucracy involved in actually getting an approved req is impressive. When the req is finally approved by the 17th person you don't know, you have a false sense of accomplishment. You believe this req is yours, but there is really only one way to make it yours -- make the hire.

It's not just corporate nervousness that causes reqs to vanish. Your boss, who you love, is a likely req stealing culprit. Anton's got a guy right now who is perfect for his team and we've only got one req. He can hire him right now and I swear we'll get you a req when you find someone.

You believe your boss. You trust your boss, so you give him your req and Anton's a happy guy and you feel like you've done the team a solid. Except when you actually find someone, guess what, you don't have a req. Neither does your boss because some time between when you gave your req and actually found someone for your position the first rule was invoked: every single req in the company was frozen.

I'm guessing 50% of the reqs I've managed to get approved in my career have resulted in a hire. Meaning, a flip of a coin would as accurately predict whether or not I'd be able to hire someone.

From the moment there's a hint of an idea of a req in your future, you need to work on improving your chances that you'll be able to hire. And that means, as quickly as possible, you need to: find the person, phone screen them, interview them, interview them again, negotiate an offer, get that offer accepted, and get them in the building. Think of that as you're staring at your shiny new req. Think that the industry average for hiring against an approved req is 90 days -- three months -- and each of those days represents a day that someone, somewhere can steal your req. This is why you need to...

Spend an hour a day on each req you have

We'll talk about how to make sure they'll show up in a bit, but to start you need to get the pump primed. A former boss helpfully suggested, "Spend an hour a day on each req on your plate".

An hour?

If you've got an approved req, you have approval to grow you team. To add new skill sets. To build more stuff. In your role as a manager, I ask: "What's more important than growing your team?" No, this isn't a draconian hour; this is a daily reminder that you need to grind away at this req until you've hired someone.

Rands, I have no candidates yet. The req was just approved. I...

Again, reqs vanish. Randomly. At the end of each workday, you need to think, "Phew, no one stole my req."

Here's how to start:

• Search the web for candidates. -- Show me a stranger who will be perfect.
• Mail friends who might know the perfect person. -- Know anyone? How about you?
• Annoy your recruiter. -- Where are my resumes?
• Ping folks who have turned you down in the past. -- Are you ready now?
• Scan your inbox and sent folders for folks you need, but may have forgotten. -- Really, are you ready now?
• Read your job description for additional inspiration. -- Do I actually know who I'm looking for?

But isn't this why I have a recruiter?

It's terrific that you've got a recruiter. They're going to streamline your entire hiring process, but you still need to spend an hour a day for each req. A quality recruiter is going to find candidates, do time-saving phone screens, and they can keep in-flight candidates warm. When it comes to offer negotiation, they're great at providing you essential compensation telemetry and they're good at playing bad cop, but as we'll see, it's your job to demonstrate that the candidate is wanted.

I found them! I'm done!

No, you didn't, and no, you aren't.

No really! He verbally accepted, he starts in two weeks. It's a done deal.

No, it's not. If randomly vanishing reqs are painful lesson #1 of hiring, painful lesson #2 is: people lose their flippin' minds during job transitions.

Think back to your last job transition. Think about the mental turmoil. When did you actually fully believe that you were going to accept the new gig? For me, it's about two months after I started.

You keep recruiting; you keep searching for the perfect employee until your new hire is sitting in their office. It's not common for an accepted offer to be declined, but it needs to happen once for you to learn the lesson, to suddenly realize, "Oh, I need to start over. Crap."

Until he's sitting in the seat, in the building, badge hanging from his belt, you haven't hired anyone.

Deliberate Want

Michele's team was embarking on a new technology direction and while she had the basic talent in place, she needed two more hires and we had the reqs. In a recruiting brainstorm, I sketched out the type of person we needed. "Ok, we need Alex. He's the Sr. Architect at this other company, but he's the right combination of technical brilliance and architectural jerk. We need someone with that technical ability and the will to enforce it because we're starting from the ground up."

Her: "Why not hire Alex?"

Me: "He'll never leave his start-up."

"Have you asked?"

"No."

"I'll ask."

She did, and while it took six months, Alex, the perfect fit for the team and for the project, joined the team. Halfway through the recruiting stint with Alex, when it looked like he might not budge, I threw another perfect candidate on her plate and said, "Maybe ask him, too?" Sean was on the team a month after Alex.

Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, "What's her secret?" and the answer is dangerously simple - deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.

Both of the positions we had were attractive. Senior engineering gigs working on a 1.0 product in a name brand company. But these guys were the top of the field. Recognized names. There were any number of opportunities across the Valley that would be attractive. How'd we win?

We continually and consistently explained that they were wanted.

The idea of a new gig, a fresh start, is appealing because of its simplicity. You know nothing about your future team; you have no idea about potential death marches, or that guy down the hall that just bugs you for no particular reason. It's simple to think about the future optimistically because the future hasn't screwed you, yet.

This optimism fades in the middle of the night when you open your eyes, startled, and think, "Why in the world would I leave a solid gig with people I know and a bright future?" The reasons are myriad, but that's not the point. The point is for any big decision, you're going to question it from every single angle. You're going to have endless inner dialogues with yourself. You're going to talk yourself into the gig and then you're going to talk yourself out of it.

It's exhausting.

Michele's message during the entire hiring process was, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." Remember that we're not talking about random, anonymous candidates; we're talking about handpicked candidates.

Before any interview, she'd drive to them, explain the gig, and begin, "You are the best person for this gig. We want you." After the first round of interviews, her message was the same, "See, this gig is perfect for you. We want you."

When we started the offer negotiations, she'd worked with the recruiter and knew exactly what we'd need to do to lure the candidates. She knew that base salary was a big deal for Alex. She knew Sean was going to be a stickler about stock. There was no offer negotiation because Michele constructed offers that were going to be accepted. She presented them: "This is the offer you wanted. This gig is perfect for you. We want you."

Once the offers were accepted, Michele didn't change her tone or message a bit. She'd had rockstars walk before and she knew the slippery inner dialogues that were going on. She knew that change begets more change and that the easiest time to lose someone was during that post-courtship purgatory between gigs. She had her team take them to drinks. She planted seeds of future work that would need to be done. She reminded them, "We want you".

This strategy reads like a massive ego-stroke for an attention-starved engineering rockstar, but it's not. Whether you have pre-identified a candidate for your gig or you're lucky enough to randomly find a great fit in a pile of anonymous resumes, the strategy is the same -- you consistently remind the candidate that they are wanted. In the mental chaos that is a career change, you and your gig are unchanging in your message. You're not coddling them; you're a constant amongst mental chaos.

Hire for Your Career

The strategy I'm proposing steps on a lot of recruiter toes. Recruiters are professional relationship people and their instinctive reads on candidates can be eerily accurate, but their job is the hire and once the hire shows up, the recruiter vanishes. The relationship is ended because the job is done.

Your professional relationship with those that you hire is never over.

If you're hiring well, you're hiring people not just for this job, but for your career. These are the people who, for better or worse, will explain to others what it is like to work with you. They'll explain your quirks, your weaknesses, and your strengths. When they eventually leave the group, they're taking your reputation with them. You may never talk to them again, but they'll continue to talk and my question is: what stories are they going to tell?

Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn't just going to improve your hiring process, it's going to improve your career because you'll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.

Jesse didn't decide to turn us down at 4:45pm on his last day. The decision began long before that and I wasn't listening. I didn't hear the parts of his current job he loved because I didn't do the phone screen. I didn't understand his concerns about leaving the first job he loved since college because I didn't build enough trust in the interview. I didn't hear him drifting away during the offer negotiation. The last thing I heard about Jesse is he walked.

As the creative burst subsided, I stared at those seven pages in the word processor -- Wordstar -- and I began to fret about line spacing, page numbers, and other formatting decisions. I was silently asking myself, "How am I going to make this palatable to the editor? To the publisher?"

My first story ever. Seven pages in and I'm worried that double-spacing is going have an impact on whether I get published.

Ambition. The great blind motivator. You gotta love it.

To God and Back Again was never finished, let alone published. It's sitting on a 3.5-inch floppy somewhere in a file format I'm certain will prevent me from ever reading it again, and, that's probably best. Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality.

Since high school, I've continued to write constantly. Journals, physical and online. There was a weblog way back when, and then there is this one, which, 15 years after my first foray into independent writing, actually resulted in published work.

The lessons I've learned in that time are myriad, but today I'm thinking about simplicity.

The Writing Tools

For first drafts, I use one of two tools: a Moleskine notebook or TextEdit.

The choice of which to use often comes down to location. Is where I'm currently sitting MacBook Pro friendly or not? If that answer is yes, I'll fire up TextEdit and get started. As sophisticated tools go, TextEdit is bare bones. It's just a simple text editor (Sentinel, 15 pt, FTW) that allows me to do rich text editing, search and replace, bold, italics, and the occasional underline.

That's it. No macros, no line numbers, no revision control, just pure writing simplicity.

This requirement of simplicity is rooted in my belief that choices are distractions and distractions are the leading cause of you not writing. And I think you should write more, which is why my holiday present for you is OmmWriter.

Let It Begin

Let me start by saying that I didn't write this draft in OmmWriter. I used that fine tool for a good two weeks before I returned to my pleasant, vanilla TextEdit, but that two-week journey is worth understanding.

OmmWriter is a full-screen text editor with an intense focus on simplicity, and when I say intense focus, I mean a maniacal focus on stripping away every distraction that might prevent you from writing... and then providing a subtle set of new distractions. Briefly:

• There's no menu bar. You must be in full-screen mode. If you leave full-screen mode, the full-screen window calmly fades away.
• In full-screen mode, there are three gorgeous white backgrounds to choose from: snow, white, and white-pattern. That's it.
• Applications preferences are built right into the writing area and are represented with glyphs. These minimalist preferences allow you to choose a serif, sans serif, or script typeface, and one of three typeface sizes.

My favorite feature of OmmWriter is the soundtrack. The application comes with seven chill songs, which are designed to stay the hell out of your writing way. More importantly, the application provides seven keyboard soundtracks. You pick the sound that occurs when you're typing, and it's not a solid, repetitive sound. The keyboard sounds have variation and generally don't annoy. My favorite is #7, which I call: "My old school typewriter and I sitting at the bottom of a well".

OmmWriter leads with a simple idea: creativity has a soundtrack. Think about how you begin an intensely creative act. You get your environment just so. You brew the coffee, grab the right mug, which you then place in precisely the correct location on your desk. Your feet flat on the floor in front of you, your spine is straight, and you look directly the screen. Let it begin.

And sometimes it does. It just starts flowing, and the number one rule regarding flow is: "Ignore it," because any observation of flow risks that flow making a run for it. Your goal is to just sit there and not listen to the music.

The folks behind OmmWriter are aware of this ephemeral soundtrack, and they've done everything in their power to give you a fighting chance to get in the creative flow. The experience of first firing up and using OmmWriter is akin to the sensation of putting your head on a down pillow; you can't help but say, "Ahhhhhhhh".

This divine experience, even if you're not a writer, is worth the download of the free beta of OmmWriter, but it's also the reason I've stopped using it.

A Peculiar Creative Flow

My test of OmmWriter was a holiday letter to a friend. After some tinkering, I settled on a clear white background and the bottom-of-the-well typewriter soundtrack. I sat cross-legged on my couch and began. The full-screen editing made sure I wasn't distracted by icons dancing around in my dock. The delicate soundtrack gently nudged me along when I stared at a half-written paragraph too long. An hour later, I had a comfortable first draft.

As I'm apt to do, I let this draft sit for a day. During this lull, I continue to write in my head. I know what paragraphs suck and I'm instinctually aware of what I have not yet written. My issue during this time was that I could not get the OmmWriter soundtrack out of my head. Rather than thinking about how bad the end of my letter was, I was craving the calming clickity-clack sounds produced by my keyboard while in OmmWriter. Rather than thinking about the writing, I was thinking about the tool.

Having been writing for close to two decades, I've learned that the more I write, the less I need. Every feature, preference, or choice that your application gives you is a ripe opportunity to think about writing rather than actually writing.

OmmWriter is a gorgeous experience that you can't miss. What they've chosen to strip away from a traditional word processor is impressive, but what they've designed to surround you in as a comforting, artistic, and inspiring experience is even more impressive. It's not a tool for everyone, but it's worth, at least, a first draft.

Happy Holidays.

The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation.

It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut you've taken, for every specification you didn't write, and for all the warnings from engineers that you've ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are skyrocketing while bug resolution rates are pathetic because, uh, well, engineers are still finishing features.

Like I said, grim.

The endless stream of bad news was grating on everyone. We were already three weeks into working weekends with no end in sight. A normally pleasantly pessimistic engineering staff had gone uncomfortably quiet. Everyone was staring at "the date we can't miss" and thinking, "I guarantee we're missing it".

I needed a game.

An Entertaining System

As I said before, geeks are system thinkers. We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs, which cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, and building systems. It's also why we love games -- they're just dolled up systems -- and the more you understand this fascination with games, the better you'll be at managing us.

As with all mental excursions with geeks, there's a well-defined process by which we consume a game, and it goes like this:

• Discovery
• Optimization, Repetition, and Win
• Achievement

Discovery -- From confusion to control

The initial joy of a game for the geek is discovery. This is a delicate balance of confusion and progressive disclosure. A game is initially attractive because it starts chaotic and unknowable, but even in the chaos, there's always a hint of the rules... of structure. What are the specific rules that govern this game? And how might I learn them?

A geek is searching for a single source of joy in this initial state. It's the sense of discovery and progress toward a currently unknown goal. I want to see the engine that defines this particular universe... I want to see its edges. We're looking for those edges because as soon as we find this wall, we know this is a containable and knowable place and that is comforting because the game becomes a controllable thing.

There's creative flexibility in rule discovery and pacing, and it tends to be a function of the size and the intent of the game. The beauty of Tetris is that the initial rules are immediately obvious. But the wonderful curse of a massive online game like World of Warcraft is that while there are rules, they are vast and, as we'll see in a moment, they are changeable.

This discovery is the hook where a geek is going to know in just a few minutes whether this particular game suits their particular appetite. But getting past the initial phases of discovery doesn't mean you've successfully engaged the geek. The real test is...

Optimization, Repetition, and Win -- A paradox and a warning

With the basic rule set discovered and defined, the process of optimization begins. Ok, I get how it's played, how do I win? This is the phase where, now equipped with the rules, the geek attempts to use them to their advantage.

There's a discoverable structure to the rules. There's a correct order, which, when followed, offers a type of reward. It's the advantage of thinking three blocks ahead in Tetris or holding onto those beguiling hypercubes in Bejeweled. This is the advanced discovery of the system around the rules that leads to exponential geek joy.

There's a paradox and a warning inside of optimization and repetition.

The paradox involves the implications of winning. Geeks will furiously work to uncover the rules of a game and then use those rules to determine how they might win. But the actual discovery of how to win is a buzz kill. The thrill, the adrenalin, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game you can't let them win, even though that's exactly what they think they want.

Think of it like this -- does it bug you that there's an absolute high score to Pac-Man? It bugs me.

To get around this entertainment-killing paradox in subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, game designers freely change rule sets as part of regular updates. The spin is, "We're improving playability" which translates into, "The geeks are close to figuring it out and we can't have that because they'll stop paying."

This paradox does not apply to all games. It's hard to argue that there is much more to learn about Tetris, but folks continue to play it incessantly, which leads to the warning.

There's a socially frightening act inside of optimization that normal humans don't get and it's the calming inanity of intense repetition. In a game like World of Warcraft, many of the tasks involve an exceptional amount of repetition. Repetition like, "Hey, go kill 1,000 of these guys and come back and I'll give you something cool." Yeah, 1,000. If each kill take a minute, you're talking about sixteen hours of mindless hacking and slashing. This is not a task that requires skill or thought... and that's the point.

If you walked in and looked over my shoulder at troll kill #653, you'd think I'd dropped into a twitchy-fugue-like mental state and I have. I am... a machine. Machines don't have a care in the world, and that's a fine place to be. This is the act of mentally removing ourselves from a troubled planet full of messy people, combined with our ability to find pleasure in the act of completing a small, well-defined task. This is our ability to lose ourselves in repetition and it is task at which we are highly effective.

In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read "Go waste sixteen hours of your life doing nothing". They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.

As I've never designed and shipped a game, I can confidently and ignorantly say the compelling magic in games comes from the design in optimization and repetition. This is the portion of the game where we spend the most time and effort and derive the most pleasure. It is this abstract mental state we long for when we're not playing.

But there is one last phase to consider, achievement.

Achievement -- Who cares if you win by yourself?

Once a geek has learned the game by discovering how to win, they become interested in advanced winning. They're interested in how their win fits into the rest of the world. They want to compare and measure and answer the social question, "Is my pile of win bigger than yours?" They believe they've mastered the game, but reputation -- achievement -- is nothing unless someone else can see and acknowledge it.

Before the Internet, winning was a private thing. You entered your three-letter name into the local Pac-Man machine and then anonymously stumbled off in search of Donkey Kong. In an interconnected world, games became social, and once we discovered each other in these virtual worlds, we looked for a means to compare our feats. We began to understand that achievement was not just becoming great at a game, but being recognized for being great.

Achievement can be as simple as a score, a numeric means of comparison, but the more sophisticated the game, the more complex the achievements. In World of Warcraft, you'll be busily into your seventh hour of mind-numbing troll extinction when you see that night elf run by with... what's that? A staff... where the hell did she get that staff? It's sweet. My world will not be complete until I own that staff. Now, what was four more hours of troll killing becomes the quest for the staff.

There's no well-defined rule that says, "To win, you need this staff". Sure, it might make those next 200 kills easier, but that is not your entire motivation. For you, the staff is your own personal badge of mastery, and you don't wear a badge for yourself, you wear it for others to see.

Most achievements do have an empirical value, but that's not what makes them important. The point of an achievement is to have someone you know or don't know look at your Violet Proto-Drake and say, "Holy crap, do you know what he had to do to pull that off?" It's wondering exactly how far you'll go to get the Legendary badge on Stack Overflow.

In a world where we spend a ton of time with people we'll never meet, achievements are the currency of respect and identity.

The Rules of the Game

Now that we understand how games float the geek boat, we can tease out rules you can use to build your own business-centric games. This is will take a creative leap on your part because I don't know how your particular situation is grim. Perhaps your bug count is crap like mine? Maybe you can't hire fast enough? Maybe you can't measure how screwed you are? I don't know what game you need, but I know you need to follow the universal rules of games:

The rules need to be clear. Whatever game you design must stand up to scrutiny. Test the rules with selected geeks before you roll it out. Find the holes in your game before you're standing in front of the team describing a game that makes no sense. Ambiguity, contradiction and omission are the death of any good game.

The rules must be inviolable. Enforce rules with an iron fist. A rule not followed is twice as bad as a poorly defined one. A violation of the rules is an affront to a geek. They react violently to violations of the rules because it's an indication that the system is not working. Rules make a game fair, and when they stop being followed, the geeks stop playing.

The playing of the game must be inclusive, visible, and broadcasted. Include everyone on the team. Those not on the team should be aware of the progress and implications.

Only use money as a reward as a last resort. It's a knee-jerk management move to use money as an incentive. Problem is, money creates drama. Money makes everyone serious, and while you may be in dire straits as you design your game, you don't want the team stressing about who is getting paid; you want them to stress about the work.

This is not to say that rewards in a motivational game are verboten, but step away from the money and think about achievements. One of the best trophies I've awarded was a horrifically ugly ceramic blue rhino the size of a pit bull. The winner proudly displayed the rhino achievement in his office for years.

It's not a game. Just because I'm using the word game all over this article doesn't mean it's trivial, simple, or something not to be taken seriously. Your geeks will treat the game as a motivational tool as seriously as you choose to treat it in building and rolling it out -- because they want to win.

The Whiteboard Game

Everyone was working on a Sunday night as I stared at the blank portable whiteboard in my office. A weekend of hallway conversations, bug scrubbing, and informal testing confirmed what I already knew: the product was shaky, the bugs we were discovering were alarmingly bad, and there were too many of them.

Ok, a game. The game will be called Focus and it will concentrate and structure our attention on the worst parts of the product. I listed the 10 worst bugs I'd found during the weekend on the board. Next to each bug, I drew four boxes:

• Root cause
• Fix identified
• Fixed
• Tested

I grabbed a handful of dry erase pens and rolled the board into the architect's office and said, "This is all we're working on".

He stared at the board for 10 minutes and finally nodded, "Good, but each person needs their own color and you should assign points for each of the boxes. 10 points for root cause and fix identification, 5 for fixes and tests."

"Points for what?"

"Points for points. We're geeks."

"And everyone has their own color?"

"Yeah, so we know who has the most points. Give me a blue pen, I've already got root cause on bug #3."

"Blue?"

"Yeah, I'm always blue."

It's not just the daily burn of your gig, it's everything else involved in staying afloat in a valley which is constantly reinventing itself. You sign up for every new service and spend the prerequisite 3.7 minutes to determine "Does this matter?" You surf the web, you tweet, you update your Facebook, all of which brings a constant flood of new data that needs to be sifted, sorted, and assessed.

You have compatriots in this caloric consumption. They randomly walk into your office or your life and with them they bring additional reasons to burn more calories. Have you seen this? You have to try it. In fact, I'm not leaving until you're jumping up and down excited about this very important thing.

We are part of an industry that is addicted to enthusiasm, to getting things done, and discovering the new, but sometimes the right move is stopping and putting this world on hold. You need to learn how to build quiet moments of nothing as a measure of balance.

... Which is why I go to a bookstore.

An Essential Exercise in Inactivity

The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it's the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it's the social reverence for the library-like quiet -- you don't yell in a bookstore, you'll piss off the books.

A bookstore is where I rediscover that while I might be addicted to the non-stop calorie burning Silicon Valley lifestyle, I also need the serenity only found in the deep quiet of the consideration of nothing. Considering nothing takes work and practice, and the act contains a contradiction: the more I think about what I need to do, the less I'll discover the thing that I don't know that I'm looking for.

It's confusing, but you need these skills because you have days full of somethings. Your day is probably spent at one of two sides of a spectrum. You're either reacting to whatever is showing up on your doorstep or you're proactively looking for new things to place on your doorstep so you can figure out what to do with them. Reactive. Proactive. It's how you spend your entire day.

Excursions to the bookstore are essential exercises in inactivity where the whole world stops being a thing to do.

My most recent trip to my local Borders was in the middle of a two-week period where I'd spent time in both Tokyo and London. Forty hours of flying resulting in five days of meetings which required constant thought, creativity, and focus. During a brief stint back in normality in the States, I had instructions to acquire a children's book for a nephew.

Now.

The children's book section at my local Border's has been voted "Most Likely to be a Total Fucking Disaster" for three years running. Combining this unique cluttered chaos with a head full of jetlag means my head is overflowing with disorganized somethings and I'm predisposed to be annoyed. Even worse, I'm not looking for a specific book. I'm running on "get something he'd like" orders, which means I need a modicum of inspiration in order to be successful.

I need to discard everything in my head that's preventing me from looking and being inspired.

This is a surprisingly hard mental maneuver because you and I are both used to days that are not only full, but full with well-defined things to do. A lack of structure, direction, and measures throws your brain into fits and this usually when I throw my hands up in frustration and walk out of the bookstore. My brain is rejecting the unstructured ambiguity involved in the search for the unknown.

Look in my head when I start: Where I am? This looks like the children's section, but this part is full of toys and I need books. I haven't read a good book in forever. Ok, keep moving until something looks right. Since when did they sell candy at a bookstore? Edward Cullen Sweet Tarts? Please. You know, I don't even know what day it is. Ok, dinosaurs, he likes dinosaurs. Wait, can he read?

My analysis is: "this place is fucking confusing" and I think I'm talking about the bookstore, but I'm actually talking about my brain.

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you're doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you've suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that's still a known quantity -- I'm currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, "Why do we have leap years again? I forget." And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They're not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You've built this guilt into your office. It's why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You're worried: "They might see me doing nothing".

You're not up to nothing. You're aimlessly mentally wandering -- an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower. Think of that moment. Your body is busily on task with the cleaning and what does your brain do? Sure, if you're stressed about layoffs, you're going to worry about layoffs, but those mornings when nothing is pressing -- what happens?

Your brain builds something from whatever mental flotsam and jetsam is in your head. Perhaps it's a useful thing, an answer to a question you didn't know you needed. Perhaps it's just an interesting combination of thoughts put into a story. It's dreaming, but you're awake.

Back to the bookstore. Remember my orders, a good book for the nephew...

If I survive the mental rejection of ambiguity, the next moment I need is one of discovery. In order to ground myself in the silence, I need to discover a single bright and shiny thing and there's absolutely no telling what that thing is until it shows up. It might be based on my mood, the last ten things I cared about, a random word someone said to me, my favorite color... the list is endless, indefinable, and entirely locked in my head.

But there is nothing ambiguous or unclear about the discovery. It's obvious. It fills an immediate gap I did not know I had.

In this bookstore excursion, it's a black book. It's odd to see a black book in the endless rainbow of the children's section, but there it is. Black cover with masking tape surrounding what looks like a handwritten title: Wreck This Journal. Ok, interesting. I flip the book open to the handwritten instructions:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.
2. Follow the instructions on every page.
3. Order is not important.
4. Instructions are open to interpretation.
5. Experiment. (Work against your better judgment)

And there it. Exactly what I needed. A reminder of why I go to the bookstore in the first place -- to mentally stumble around, defying my better judgment, in a nourishing environment of nothing.

Wreck This Journal was created by Keri Smith, who calls herself a guerilla artist, and I've no idea what her book is doing in the clutter of the children section. It's a journal dedicated to its own destruction. One pages instructs you to Rub Dirt Here. Another asks you to scribble wildly using only borrowed pens (document where they were borrowed from). The journal is full of ideas to create unstructured moments of seemingly meaningless activity designed to get you to stop and let something else in.

Don't Look For It

Stop and let something else in. It's a confusing skill, which starts with a question: how are you going to find what you don't know you need by not looking for it?

A day in high tech rarely encourages the activity of doing nothing. Nothing is not cost effective. Nothing is not something you'll put in your review. Nothing gets a bad rap and the more I attempt to define it, the less useful it will be to you because what I need out of nothing is different than you.

Moments of nothing are not moments of creativity or consideration. (They might be.) These moments don't last long because your brain can't sit still; it's been trained to burn calories all the time. (The longer it sits still, the better.)

Your brain instinctively and naturally attempts to build something given whatever world it's currently in. In a bookstore, with effort, I can shed the somethings of my everyday and find the nothing that I don't know I'm looking for. (And that rules.)