Good Stories drive progress
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. This past weekend, we had the end of daylight saving time, and with that, the "it's too dark to be sitting by my desk" season started.
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Things I discovered in the past week
This past week, I got a Hiby R4, an Android music player, for listening to music. With a bit of gain, they can drive my DT1990Pro.
Someone at work shared this article about "glue people," which I always found interesting. While some people loudly hate those roles, in general, large companies need them to function correctly. link.
Last week, while wrapping up a migration project, an opportunity came to do another migration. At first, I felt tired, but then I thought about how it could benefit us. And that made me think about how we tell stories to ourselves and others.
Powerful stories are also how leaders rally people to follow along in a long journey.
On a personal note, stories are how we convince ourselves to do or not do something or work with someone or a team. We can tell ourselves positive stories to achieve more significant things at work.
Stories to start a journey
One important place where stories are essential is when starting a "transformative" journey. I dislike the word, but when you want a group of people to rally behind a significant change, you need a great story to kickstart the whole effort.
Recently, while talking with some managers, I noticed that a group of people wanted to make a big infrastructure change. To kickstart the effort, we started having meetings where we crafted the story of why we wanted to do this, reduced costs, less time invested in triaging every week, etc. Once the why and the story were there, we shifted our attention to keeping everyone in sync.
Stories to keep us in sync
As you progress through your career journey, it becomes more important to be able to tell good stories that will keep everyone aligned in the end goal.
Having a good story shared by everyone allows you to avoid getting in the weeds of the problems (sometimes slowing things down). Instead, try building trust and empowering others through the story, making them a part of it. When everyone understands and contributes to the story, we not only deliver better things, but we all feel part of the win.
Stories for failures
While telling good stories is part of delivering great outcomes, not everyone goes well because you have a good story.
But we must also avoid letting failures keep us down or stop us from achieving progress. Another aspect of stories for failure comes in stories about production incidents affecting customers. We need to tell ourselves a story about why these happen, either because we want to convince ourselves that "it's just a one-time thing " or because we'll fix it ASAP.
Some books
Some books I've read on storytelling that I would recommend are:
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth
If you can, I would also recommend attending The Moth event. They're amazing
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
Your turn!
Have you ever tried crafting a compelling story to advance your projects, kickstart them, or help your team overcome and move forward? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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