8 ms·

I agree regarding the usefulness of unpacking. I've been trying (with only limited success) to get better at verbalising thoughts/opinions and so on. It sounds

• xyzelement 4y ago
  I'll share two things that I think are immediately actionable. First, I literally tell people I work with that this is what I am like if I think we're about to have one of those conversations. I literally say "I have an intuition that we have a problem (or whatever) here. I don't have it articulated well yet, but I don't want to ignore it. This conversation might start messily, but please ask me questions / call out what's unclear so I can unpack my intuition." People respect this. Second, I find that forcing myself to write it out is helpful. I often find that by paragraph 3 or 4, I realize what I am actually excited or worried about, so then I can rewrite with that as the lede, or simply now talk about it that way. Example: I can start of writing something like "I realized that developer X spent 2 months on something I don't think is valuable to the business. What is wrong with X and his manager?" and as I write about that, I realize maybe that what we actually don't have is a well-articulated strategy for value delivery and we need to solve that." My observation of developer X was just the thing that chafed me when I noticed it, but the reason it set off the intuitive alarm is that other thing.
  • racktash 4y ago
    Thank you for the tips!