Shape of the Work and Pixel Street Art
Hey friends,
Did you watch the Super Bowl? We did not. 😅
I love football, but without a strong stake in either team this year I didn't love it more than the cost of yet another streaming service... 🤷🙅💰
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
I've been thinking about something I'm calling the "shape of the work". The idea came from this presentation. (Go read it, it does a better job explaining than I will...)
As we specialize our work, the natural tendency is to create new roles within an organization and draw boundaries. But when we build up organizational boundaries we slowly lose our empathy and understanding for each other, which leads to bigger boundaries and bigger walls. These walls can become radioactive factories of extra work and territorial elitism — and elitism is a poison.
So, to counteract this natural wall building, we must take proactive steps to expand empathy, help others understand the 'shape of the work', and foster respect, curiosity, and collaboration.
At Viget, we have Pointless Corp which is a mini hack week where roles don't matter. Everyone clusters around and idea and explores it. Sometimes we produce something really neat, sometimes we just have fun exploring an idea, but we always gain some appreciation for different skillsets and people we don't get to work with regularly.
Our team is also setting up intentional cross-sharing sessions with other teams to break down barriers to collaboration and increase understanding. These meetings are a lot of work and a lot of time in 'billable' hours that don't directly earn any money. But what happens if we DON'T spend this time building inroads?
If organizational entropy results in walls, what are you and your team doing to try and build doors and connections?
Interesting Web Bits 🍿
- Pappas Pärlor is a street artist who uses perler beads
- Adrian Roselli explains why we shouldn't wrap a
figuretag in a link and that VoiceOvers are not the same. - Josh Comeau talks about uses for container queries.
- Andy Bell reminds us to check the output of our CSS Nesting.
- Is social media a trap? I'd argue both yes and no. I've seen both real value in the networks AND heavy predation.