Hey, what's up, Toby? It is Friday morning. It
is the Processed Debt podcast and today's topic.
You ready for it? Are you going to be able to
handle this one? It's a good one. I'll bring
it, baby. Is your work homeless? Is your work
on the street begging for change? That would
explain why I can't find the dog ate my assignment
kind of. Outcomes here. Is your work homeless?
Say more about that. It's an interesting framing,
Chris. What does your work live? If I was to
say, hey Togi, where does your work live? Right.
Scattered across half a dozen apps and email,
right? Plus my notepads and my post -it notes
of reminder. Correct. Correct. And where does
your team's work live? Unfortunately, a rhetorical
question. You're like, maybe in Microsoft Teams?
Can I answer Teams? Will that be right? Teams
for 500, Alex. Yeah. That's going to be a slippery
one. Well, Chris, you make a really good point.
It's not very discoverable if it's wandering
the virtual streets of our organization. Correct.
It's very interesting. Like I've been thinking
about this a lot because I'm like, where does
my work live? Like, and if I was, if I was just,
you know, get hit by a bus or win the lottery
or whatever, like how would someone come in and
just pull my, like come in on day one and be
like, well, what is, what work does Chris do?
Right. Yeah. And, and, you know, we've all been
there. Like it's been our first day on the job
or first day of my gig. And that first day is
like, all right, well, let's go through, through
some formalized training. That has nothing to
do very little of its tactical Yep, and then
the farther away it feels like the farther away
you get from your dev org and a standard like
a standard Deliverable cycle the more the work
just lives in people's brain and it lives in
right now and it lives in Slack it lives in teams
it lives in PowerPoints You know, Chris, I think
that that is the, in some small part, drives
the executive fantasy of these ERP systems, whether
it's truly an ERP or it's, this is our industry
standard solution that everybody in our business
uses. The idea that there's a room for everything
and everything has a room, you know, the promise
of that is alluring. Yeah. We just don't function
that way. It's hard for me to come over to your
house and cook dinner when I don't know where
the pots and pans are and I don't know where
the silverware is. And so it doesn't matter how
many times you tell me, if it's not intuitive,
it's hard to cook in your kitchen the same way
it's hard to organize myself into your shared
drive lodge. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Because
you know, like I may know how to cook a burger.
Right. But I mean, I do not know how to cook
a burger at your house. That's it. Maybe I can
figure out your grill, you know? Can I find the
spatulas? Can I find the... No, it's really true.
And I think to your point about homeless, you
know, unless we're feeling like we've moved in
and we get to arrange the furniture a little
bit, you know? Have you had, you mentioned development
teams and you and I've talked a lot about how
development teams... have an expectation of kind
of working in the public square and putting things
in a repository. Oh, it's fascinating. I don't
think the business could live like the dev work
does because the computer is doing the hundreds
or millions of repeatable things without complaining.
But the magic in what a developer does is that
the software that they write does the hundreds
or millions or trillions of things without complaining.
And we as humans, if we do three things in a
row, we're... Yeah, so large batch jobs, that's
when we go to heavier weight software. Yeah,
it's correct. Or the fact that they've got a
read -me, right? They've got a read -me file.
They basically, before they put something into
production, it has to go through a staging test,
and it has to be tested. and then it goes into
production. We were talking about this earlier,
you can roll that back if it doesn't work. You
were talking prior to kicking this off, I've
never had a process rollback ever in my career,
ever. What's more likely to happen is I find
out that I'm not doing a process that I'm supposed
to be doing. You're like, where did this come
from? This is who put bits in my silverware drawer,
right? What our spices go? Yeah. Yeah, so much
of it ends up being this like this Almost Tribal
knowledge me Yeah of What you're supposed like
what you're supposed to do? Yeah, but it's not
it's not it's not deliberate I think one of the
things you're touching on is there's how things
work, right? And if we're not putting it in code,
then we're trying to think about how do we make
a process repeatable? But then we have the work
of things or the transactional data that has
to move through a series of process stuff. And
I don't know that we always do a good job of
keeping those two things clean. And so the commingled...
certainly for new players coming in, they may
not understand what is about the process of doing
work versus what's the data or what's the deliverable
they're producing. It really does get murky.
So much of my work as a financial analyst years
ago was about one -off deliverables. It wasn't
about managing transactions and running them
through payment. It was about looking at the
business and working on the business. So how
you hold that information, is kind of irrelevant,
but oftentimes it means if you and I are doing
similar work, we may choose to keep very different
hierarchies, you know, and it's just what's logical
in our brains. So, yeah, park it on the couch
of whatever's handy. And it works and it works
for sole proprietors. Like if we're doing our
own little thing, like it doesn't matter, right?
But like you go back to your kitchen analogy.
I come over to your house and I try to cook my
family a dinner. It's not going to work. Whereas
if you go to a kitchen, like a corporate kitchen,
they can feed a ton of people at lunch and dinner.
Truly. Yeah, it's interesting. Even in Airbnb
for the weekend, there's no rhyme or reason to
how they've organized it. It made sense to the
homeowner or whoever's managing the property.
That's how they've set her up. And so, Lee, he
got to lean into it, just kind of let it go.
We don't want to keep that in our day -to -day
work life. Yeah, and I think the reason why,
you know, homelessness may or may not be the
right term here. Maybe it's completely wrong,
but the point that I was trying to kind of get
at is, like if you're in a production system,
there are bins that you go and you pull a screw
out to put in... put the screw with the nut,
right? And so there's places, there's always
places for things, right? So even going back
to the kitchen analogy, right? If you go to your
home kitchen or the Airbnb or whatever kitchen,
they're all going to be set up differently. But
if you have some sort of throughput that's required
and you go to a corporate kitchen, not that they're
all going to be designed the same way, because
they're going to be totally different, unless
it's a McDonald's that's built the same way.
But everything has its place. And everything
has a start, has a middle, and it has an end.
And what's interesting is if you think about
McDonald's, my son worked there for a long time.
It's a lot of people's first job. But it's the
fact that you can take someone and put them in
the process, in the area where everything has
its home, everything can be pulled from, and
you can serve thousands of people in a day. What's
interesting about that, Chris, is that the process
is about the transactions. The process there
is the production of burgers. You're not trying
to optimize it. You're not second guessing how
fries are cooked. Right. You come in and your
job is to understand how that process works.
And I think so often this idea of homelessness
is that we feel like we have a degree of latitude
when we show up and absent tactical direction,
we just start to kind of make up what seems intuitive
to us. Correct. And or you're looking for signals
from your coworkers on what's getting rewarded.
Yeah. you're following that reward and creating
chaos, right? So one of like a, one of, and chaos
is probably too strong a word, but you're literally
going into a, you're looking at a PowerPoint
and you're making it prettier and prettier is
winning on decision -making. But do you really
want to make decisions on pretty? Right. And
we you know, we buy if something's prettier we
will like it more and That doesn't mean that
that's the best business decision like financials
are not pretty but they're pretty much the same
Right. Yes. Yes There's that there's a structural
piece and I think so much of this conversation
gets at the idea to me of Is our goal pretty
you know, yeah, well consistent or is our goal
just about? Seeing the shared value in the adoption
You know, good matter other, if we all agree
that silverware belongs in the drawer immediately
to the right of the stove, then never guess where
to go find the silverware. Or if we always know
where to find, you know, the most recent analysis
that's been performed or the appease, you know,
the standard operating procedure, then we eliminate
a lot of the chasing. Then I guess that's like
that's the root of it is like we are constantly
like because we don't have Oftentimes, you don't
have a team or corporate like this is where you
go, right? Because like in any organizations,
you're gonna go to SharePoint You might go to
confluence. You might go to some other application.
You might go to some internal Wiki. Yeah, and
and even even those often times those internal
applications like SharePoint, like I've made
a joke all the time, like it's, it's hard to
share and no one gets the point. Like, it's like,
it's really hard. It's a powerful tool. Yes.
Unless you give it structure and unless you give
it, unless you have discipline and unless you
say, hey, look, we're going to put a stake in
the ground and do one thing well, then people
are doing 12 things poorly. And it just ends
up not working. So what's the solution here?
Even if we step back into the solution for a
second, I think the outcome that I want of giving
work a home is making it more readily discoverable.
If I've already done the work, I would love to
be able to leverage it. I'd love for you to be
able to find it when I'm on vacation or home
school or playing hooky. I don't want to be pestered.
I want to make it easy for somebody else to pick
it up and move it forward. And so, yeah, discoverable
is at the heart of it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah,
so what is the solution? What's your thoughts?
I think you gotta, I think you gotta clean your
room first. Like you gotta clean your own home.
And this is, you know, like, or hire someone
to come clean your home if you've got the budget.
Whatever your budget might allow. Yeah. One of
the things that I've been focusing on is how
do I focus on a project instead of a task? Because
my brain doesn't know the difference. But I get
significantly more value out of my work, and
I provide more significant value to my customers
if I focus on a project versus a task. And I
wish I had a really great solution on what that
would look like. I don't have it yet. But I do
think that like some of, some of these, this
thinking is helping me think about that and where
I have to be able to collect the tactical. Yeah.
But that ends up being distractible, which I
was trying to make up a word there, but I don't
know if I was distract a goal. Just anyway, do
your work. Yeah. Yeah. But like, if I'm working
on a project, I don't want to be distracted by
the tactical. I just want to work on the project.
And most of the time, like, human beings, we
are so flipping flexible, we can figure out almost
anything if we can just get started and if we
can not be distracted. Yeah. Well, in that point
of if we can get started, there's nothing worse
than being told it's out on the blank storage,
right? Yeah. And it becomes a fool's errand.
And so, you know, the real risk is a productivity
risk. Yeah. It's jamming us up trying to get
into flow. Yeah. the fewer decisions we have
to make, the more mind space we have for the
problems we want to solve. So this idea of chasing
work around, I love the idea of homeless. It's
like trying to find somebody to deliver mail.
It's really just grasping for straws, trying
to figure out what's next. And I think if we
were to truly be honest, I think that's a lot
of what our days are. Because we're looking for
that social signal for what's important. And
we're trying to intuit towards what that should
be, instead of being explicit and saying, look,
how can I do my job better? How can I communicate
to you? Because my communication style might
be different. How can I make this thing work?
Clarity, ownership, accountability, all those
things make it clear. work can actually be more
enjoyable. That's a really interesting idea.
If we did one thing, it was to give a manager
level resource responsibility for naming the
organizational schema. How do we hold our tools?
How do we hold our information? If we were the
keeper of that instead of introducing some random
guy to do corporate data governance, which never
makes sense outside. Outside of like data modeling
But that's really that's that's that person to
be on on point for calling calling around that
Keep her organized and help us be productive
Yeah, and I think you do have to be able to you
have to be able to clean your room first Yeah,
and that's and there's actually that's actually
as an IC you have to have a cleaner Yeah, and
I I'd love to say that my rooms clean all the
time. It's just on but I think I think as a manager
I think as a manager, you have to expect, you
have to expect a clean room. And I think the
easiest way as a manager is you just, if you're
running a scrum team and you have a daily standup,
hand it off to someone else to run it. You'll
find that people do stuff significantly different
than you do and you'll be shocked every single
time. Why'd you click that button? Well, that's
because that's how I do it. You're like, well,
there's a better way to do it. Or, oh, I never
saw that. Like, how often are you in a tool and
you're like, it does what? Great. A hundred percent.
That's not how I do it. That's not how I've done
it for 20 years, but you just showed me something
totally different. Like all those Excel quick
keys. Alt E does some? No. Chris, I love this
conversation and the idea of just being a little
bit more transparent, right? Somebody needs to
be the owner. Yeah. It doesn't have to be you
and then make the owner responsible for keeping
a clean room. And I think if I think if your
rooms are clean, right, you have a junk drawer
and that junk drawer is made for junk and you
don't really need to care about that. You hide
it or your kids have a dirty room, but that's
their room and they can do whatever they do.
But like, as long as you can keep your mental
ram clean and pull in the work. and make a nice
delicious burger that you enjoy or come over
and work with, like ask for things, you know,
where are we at in the kitchen? Make some nice
food, enjoy it together, because I do think knowledge
work can be incredibly satisfying. Yeah. But
it can't be if your home's a mess. Well said.
All right. Thanks, man. Another good session.
All right. Have a good week, buddy. Your kitchen
time. All right. See you.