All right, Toby, we made it another week.
We are to 11, which is very exciting.
Love it.
First thing that I'm very excited about is your meeting invite is create magically memorable
moments.
Yes.
I love it.
That's our goal.
Five minutes or more.
We never invite people to listen for less than five because we're getting started.
Yeah.
Magical moments.
Love it.
Well, last week we talked about trust and how it acts as this weird kind of buffer,
this buffering system like inventory works in a manufacturing plant.
Yeah.
And so we're going to drill a little deeper into that.
Chris, I want to go back to when we left off last week specifically, and we weren't talking
about cybersecurity, but you said we should be designing process as zero trust so that
we don't have a process that operates on faith, but simultaneously thinking about how we build
community.
And so as you often do, I'd love to hear just kind of like, what has been your reflection
on that?
What does it mean to create zero trust process when it comes to development work?
But also what are those elements of community?
Any musings on those?
I have some musings there.
So I think one thing, like you can't do one without the other.
I think a lot of times people will try, let's just go grow and not support the business.
There's always trade-offs.
And so I think it's very important in coming up with knowledge work and just what that
value stream is, which is like, look, if we had zero trust, right?
Then to your point, it's not an InfoSec issue, but it's really about what would we need?
What would I need if I had a brand new employee and I just knew that they were going to be
terrible out of the gate?
And what would I have to do?
And I think the natural response is to control that one person.
It's not to fix the system, but it's to control that one person.
And so I was thinking, right, we've been through that ourselves in our own career journeys
where you get started and you're like, why are you micromanaging me?
Well, they don't know what we don't know yet.
They're trying to find our boundaries a little bit.
But it is this natural thing, right?
Which is interesting because if they're doing the micromanaging, it leads to whatever, which
leads to a lack of trust, which leads to more control, right?
Which means from that community standpoint that we talked about, it means that that community
is threatening you.
Yeah, right, which is it's just it's interesting.
It's a really interesting dynamic that we run into in businesses.
And it's interesting too, because, you know, recognizing that our workforce is increasingly
diverse because we can operate globally.
It means that we're going to be working with people that don't look like us necessarily.
They don't have the same backgrounds, you know, are going to have a lot of different
perspectives.
And so these a lot of our coworkers may not be people that were part of our community
that we grew up in, depending on what that experience looked like.
And so, yeah, I like this.
I like where you're going with this, because we don't want to micromanage people, but we
absolutely need to figure out how do we create a process that people can lean into invites
more trust, the cultivator.
So well, and also like what you want is you want that community to own the process to
make it better.
Right.
Like that's that's the magical thing is when you have process with zero trust, right.
Well, you have people that are building the process so good that you have ultimate trust
in the system.
Right.
That's that's where it gets magical.
So where this led me to was just thinking about what really what is the value stream
of of knowledge work?
And so I came up with a little acronym as I would.
And the acronym is AXE.
And so the first is as a knowledge.
Are you talking about chopping wood axe or?
No, A-C-T-E-S.
Yeah.
How should you act in a meeting is really what we're talking about.
And it spells out absorb.
So absorb knowledge like you're either you're either learning, you're either you're absorbing
knowledge, learning, growing, changing.
You're either making a choice.
You're either taking something like taking ownership of something.
Or you're doing a status update.
Like those are the value streams.
But oftentimes we don't have collection buckets for each one of those.
Yeah.
Nor do we define nor do we define them.
I don't know that I've ever had a mentor or a lead say to me, your number one job right
now is to absorb.
Yeah.
You know, we talk about the fire hose effect like, yeah, hit me with more data.
Let me see what I can get in.
But if I'm not following some of those, I'm not moving through the A-C-T-S.
I never close the loop with the correct back.
Correct.
And then the other thing that happens for executives oftentimes is they're just they
want to they want to contribute to.
Right.
And they do.
And sometimes they're just making stuff up in their head like they would throughout their
career.
Sure.
But someone's like, they're like, oh, no, I was not telling you to choose to go and
take the thing that I just said.
I was just talking out loud.
But I did this to a former boss.
He said something.
And I just took it and I ran and I gave it to him and I could tell he was like, oh, really
good work, Chris.
But it was not my intention to go and steal two days two days of your work in order for
you to do that one thought that I just just kind of came out of my head.
Well, Chris, on that on that point, what I love, because it doesn't contribute to workload
debt.
It doesn't create.
It doesn't create that simple act when when we are working on a solution together, when
simply by saying I'm thinking out loud or hey, kind of brainstorming in the moment,
people I'm not assigning you an accountability.
All I'm doing is through my absorption, I'm playing out some choices in a directive.
So yeah.
Well, the other the other thing is like what happens in the meetings oftentimes is they're
like like you don't know what you're choosing and you don't know what you're taking.
Yeah.
And so it's just nebulous.
Right.
Like everybody says, well, that that could have been done.
That meeting could have been solved in an email.
It couldn't.
I don't care what you say.
I don't care who you are.
It won't.
And the reason is, is because there's no there's no closing the loop as far as what are you
choosing and what are you taking?
Now if you're if you're absorbing stuff, that's fine, but the reason you had a meeting is
because there's no there's no closed loop for that absorption.
Right.
If you're in the room, even if you're on your phone playing games, not paying attention,
there's a perception of absorption.
Right.
And so the reality is the meeting like everybody says this all the time.
I'm like, no, it won't.
It just doesn't work that way.
Because you're and it's not even about it's not even about the company.
It's not even about the people.
It's that you don't have a process that returns that circular response.
Yeah, it is.
It is interesting.
I mean, like playing playing tennis with a giant concrete wall between you, you can hit
the ball over, but you don't know when it'll come back, if it'll come back or where it'll
come back.
Yeah.
Well, and I think sometimes we want we want the perception and not the reality.
Right.
Which is why which again is why like people's people struggle with tracking time.
Yeah, like everybody does.
And everybody hates it.
And the reality is, is it because it's not used as a metric to drive efficiency.
It's used as a weapon.
It's not used as a driver of let's get better at our craft.
It's usually a working indicator or it's for billing and administrative purposes, which
is not a benefit to the person doing the work.
Yeah, it's the evidence that they've done it or and in case it's even poor evidence.
Right.
So so are you suggesting that acts as a way to engage when you're asking for knowledge
work or you're you're doing it that the thought is to clarify whether you're asking for an
absorb or a choice or inaction or a status.
OK, well, I think it depends on what your role is.
If you're an IC.
Yeah.
It's all about clarifying that communication coming down for management.
Right.
It's like, are you ask am I just supposed to are you asking me to do something here?
Yeah.
So if you're an if you're a manager, you are most likely asking your people to take on
stuff that you don't want them to and unintentionally.
Yeah.
And you don't have a place that's capturing the work that you're asks.
And so oftentimes it's just rapid fire asks and the poor ICs are just sitting there going
like, oh, my gosh, I got all these things to do.
I don't know what it is.
They're just they're just spinning their tails.
Yeah.
And you haven't you haven't like said, oh, well, this is you need to take this.
Right.
Or like or they haven't given them what the expected outcome is, because sometimes it's
like I need to take this, but I just need a rough draft.
Right.
Like, right.
There's been so there's been so many times where my boss is like, I need this updated.
And you're like, oh, shoot.
I'm like, where like where would you like this updated?
Because I don't know where this lives.
And it's like, oh, on this last thing that we did, and it's like, oh, you are not asking
me to go and dig deep and and basically like bolt the whole thing together.
You just wanted a executive slide to present to share.
Yeah.
So that that's that's been kind of that's been really interesting in my career.
What I really like about that, Chris, is that we started with this idea of a zero trust
process.
And what I'm really hearing you say is acts as a nice way to clarify what is the response
to the request you're making.
And so I'm even thinking about this on a personal level.
You know, sometimes it's do you just want me to listen or do you want me to help solution
or just run to the grocery store and get more like help me out?
I don't.
What are the parameters?
And so I really like acts as a way to just clarify what it is that I can do when you're
when somebody is presenting me with new information, a request.
So a CTS absorb, take ownership, take action and then at us.
Yeah.
Nice.
We made it through another one.
All right.
We're going to we'll come back to it one more week.
We always drop these on Friday.
So I like to think of it as fix it Friday.
It's the best day to actually work on your process.
Friday.
Yeah, because everybody's bailing early in your afternoon.
Hopefully quiet.
I never bail early.
And I know you don't either.
Some people.
Yeah, I've heard of those people.
I'm not pointing fingers, but I can from where I'm.
All right, man.
We'll catch you next week.
All right.
Bye.
See you.