Chapter 10: Discussion and Questions

[Scott]

Here we go.

[Ravi]

Everyone is annoyed at something. Some of us get more annoyed than others. I'm glad to say that I wasn't annoyed with reading this chapter. Scott stated that email, meetings, and team processes are three activities with the greatest odds of annoying someone.

I find email the most annoying especially if you work in a larger firm ( > 10,000 employees ). If someone did a study of how much time is spent on email, I would say at least 1/3 or more is spent composing, reading, and sending email. So these are the tactics I use when I'm annoyed with email or working with a new project team that use email too much.

1. When I'm really annoyed, I don't read email
2. I only read email twice a day. I've told my team members and senior managers that if they send email, expect a response within 24 hours not 2 hours. they can stop by my office or call me, if something needs to be addressed immediately
3. As Scott mentioned, highlight good emails. Also, I highlight poorly written emails and threads during some of my team meetings

I've had several senior managers annoyed with this tactic. But, I explained my rationale and told them the productivity loss with context switching with email.

My suggestion for this chapter is to develop a system on how to get out of the being annoyed mode.

[Scott]

This is a chapter for me that had some themes that didn't age well. The Year Without Pants (published 2013) was about an organization that didn't use email at all and I learned much from working there and how tools only matter so much - it's the communication habits people have that matter much more.

I've come to think that places that communicate well learn the behavior from leaders - it's their behavior that matters. And if they care about good communicators they hire for it. If the boss is a poor communicator and doesn't hire for it, no tool can fix the culture.

I'm currently fond of Slack, which is what Automattic uses now (they used to use IRC). It's a great example of how some of what makes email annoying on a team can be refit into a different tool for a far better experience.

[Ravi]

I agree on communication habits for the org. The problem is that I think leaders rely on one tool or process to do the communication for them.

Scrum, Kanban, and a number of the lean methodologies choose people over process. It's about discussions and openness regarding project state, progress, and trade-offs.

As processes become more detailed and tools more sophisticated, the focus shifted from the people to the tools and process. Focus should always be on the people and the communication between them. Processes and tools should be tailored to the situation.