My kids both play instruments.  My daughter piano and cello, and my son piano and viola. In addition to their in-school and private lesson instruction, they each practice both instruments several times a week.

They also both play sports. My daughter tennis, and my son – well, its easier to list the sports he doesn’t play (shotput.) They each practice several days a week.

My own pastimes veer less physical. I have an affinity towards puzzles of all kinds. I have gotten good at all of these from years and years of practice working on them.

There is really no alternative to practicing to get better at something.  Much better.  Whether you believe in the 10,000 hour theory or not, nobody becomes exceptional by mailing it in. 

I learned this again when I attended a workshop at work last week.  On the first day, a high-energy and friendly colleague walked in to facilitate. I knew her socially but we hadn’t worked together much. Shameful admission: for the first ten minutes, I underestimated her.  She had several (what seemed like) kitschy ice breakers and activities for us to participate in though the two-day workshop. She was armed with whiteboards and Post-its and strict rules about Sharpie markers. 

About 10 minutes in, I had been completely engaged. As someone who regularly presents to large groups that aren’t always friendly, I was floored.  Her ability to draw in the group, and create an environment where we were immediately collaborative and productive was not like anything I had ever seen.

I had to knowhow she got so good at this. At the first break, I walked right up to her and said, “You are so good at this! How did you learn to do this?” She thanked me, demurring. But I pressed on, “No really, how did you learn this?” 

Her answer surprised me, thought it shouldn’t have. “Practice.  Lots of practice.” It didn’t even occur to me that someone could get good at that skillset through practice, rather than have innate talent or transferable skills from a different domain, (like performing arts.) 

Practice. Wow.

I love puzzles of all kinds. I love jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, and sudokus, and logic puzzles. I don’t just love jigsaw puzzles, I love big ones with lots of pieces;  I don’t just love crossword puzzles, I recently learned how to do (American) cryptics;  I don’t just love sudoku, I love sudoku variants, like knights-move.  My latest obsession (shared with my 10-year-old daughter) is a set of puzzles created by Japanese publisher Nikoli.

And one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how to start. The thing is – “breaking in” to a puzzle is the key to getting enough momentum to start solving and having fun, but it’s a different skill than actual mid-way solving.

This year, we had some major water damage in our home.  I became BFFs with my plumber and electrician, and one thing I appreciated about both of them was their approach to troubleshooting and problem solving.  Once the demo was done and it was time to rebuild everything, our electrician came by with his crew.

I was completely overwhelmed and panicked.  “Where do you even start?” I asked him. He smiled. This is a man who has texted me line diagrams in the middle of the night. He knows how I think. “We start with the wiring.  We take it down and see what kind of shape it’s in.” I loved how confident he was, and how with experience comes an instinct of where to start.

There are some confident rules I have like that around puzzle types I know.

• With a classic crossword puzzle, I look for something I can answer on the top row or down the left side.  That gives me the largest surface area of first letters to start with. 
• With a Fillomino, I look for spaces around the 1’s, because those are filled with the same number as one of the other adjacent spaces.
• Last night, I tried a Matsu – we learned that white circles on edges were good places to start.  (Go ahead – give it a try)
• I’ve been really enjoying the “Fog of War“ sudoku puzzles, and find that where to start is much simpler with them, because you have a lot less information in a more concentrated area. 

Sometimes this fails. Miserably.  My rule for jigsaw puzzles has always been to start with the edges and then work my way in.  I also am a masochist of sorts and complete jigsaw puzzles without looking at the picture.  So when I got going on this puzzle (a wonderful gift from my folks), starting with edges didn’t work, and it took me a while to understand why not.

So I am thinking about how this can be applicable to work. Where can we “break in” to a problem?  How do we develop an instinct or skill around where to start with problem solving?   And how do we understand what to do when our instinct or system fails because the ground beneath us changes?

First off, if you’re expecting a post about confidence coming from the metaphorical amplification of your voice into a metaphorical microphone, this is not that post.

This is quite literally about using a microphone.

Easy question: what goes through your mind when you are in a large room, and some person gets up front and says, “I’m good without the mic – you can all hear me, right?”  

Well, for about 10% of the population (myself included), it’s dread.  It’s dread that I’m about to spend 5-20 exhausting minutes straining to understand what is said.

I don’t know if it’s laziness, machismo, anxiety, or time constraints that cause people to wave away a microphone when it’s offered. But the thing is, it happens all the time. That is, someone sets up, configures, and probably pays for amplification.  All the speaker has to do is use it, and they decline.

Do you realize when you do this that some of us *quite literally* can’t hear you?  We may have hearing loss from an accident, from aging, from birth, or from illness.  We may have issues with auditory processing. We may have hearing impairment that is temporary (like from swimmer’s ear) or permanent.  We may rely on lip reading to help, which is challenging in an age of masking, or if the speaker is far away.

We may have hearing difficulties that are exacerbated by circumstances, such as crowd chatter or the hum of an HVAC system. It’s like driving in a city with tall buildings that block your GPS. You know it will come back on (i.e., the HVAC will turn back off again), but until it does, you’re grasping and aimless and may not be heading towards your destination.

You may indeed be a person with a loud voice who can project.  What you may not know is that hearing loss can vary across higher frequency and lower frequency registers – which means someone with a low or high voice trying to project ‘louder’ may not help, particularly because their voice may change register as they try to amplify their voice.  It’s also likely that the volume a speaker can start at isn’t sustainable (unless they are, for example, a professional opera singer. Pro tip: ask yourself, “am I a professional opera singer?”) 

What might start out as hear-able in a quiet room becomes more difficult as background noise rises (you do cross and uncross your legs after a few minutes, right? and grab a mint, or zip your backpack, or mutter something to whomever is sitting next to you, or take a note, or type something…), and the speaker’s voice gradually lowers in volume.    

What does it feel like to not be able to hear a speaker addressing the room? You know when you’re in a big group and someone in the audience asks a question and everyone shouts to the speaker, “can you repeat that?” It feels like that, for the whole time.  You may catch the gist of what was said or asked, you may catch a few words, you may have a sense of what’s going on. But you can’t actually hear it.

Here’s the thing. I expect this to happen at a restaurant or a cocktail party.  I can tell within about 30 seconds of walking into an event or dinner whether I will be able hear all night or not. Often I can’t. And if I can’t, I am disappointed but not surprised. But when it’s a meeting, a religious service, a conference session, or a town hall-style event, I have an expectation that there will be amplification and that I will be able to hear.

So the next time someone hands you a microphone and you’re inclined to wave it away because you “have a loud voice,” think twice.  I know wires can curb your TED Talk-style stage wandering ability, and that all kinds of mics can create awful feedback that nobody appreciates. It can be frustrating in the moment to take a minute and resolve the technical issue rather than just volunteer to use your “loud voice.” 

Do it anyway. There are people in the audience who will appreciate it.

As my team has gotten larger, my decisions around transparency have become more complicated.  Really this is a meta-post, because it’s likely some of my team members will read this and what’s more transparent than sharing my complex relationship to transparency.  Inception indeed.

I’ve noticed two kinds of transparency – information transparency and what I’ll call subjective transparency. 

Information transparency is how we make decisions about who learns what information.  When do we or don’t we share information about what the budget will be, whether quotas will be higher or lower, who in the organization is getting promoted, what the OKRs will be. 

I find information transparency pretty easy to manage.  I share as much as I am allowed to share as soon as I can.  While OKRs may not be final or rolled out to the entire organization, I share what I know with my leaders.  While we may not know the specifics of how something will be executed, I share what I do know with a broad audience. 

The other type of transparency is where the complexity comes in.  What I’m calling subjective transparency is how much of what I think and how I interpret things I share.  This is where I need to decide whether to share how I feel about a certain goal or organizational change; what my interpretation of the information is.

“I wanted that role and didn’t get it and I’m disappointed,” “I don’t agree with a focus on that,” “I think the new person they put in charge of that is finally the right person, but they have a lot to undo.”  And positive ones too: “He’s going to be a great leader,” “I really like this new process for approvals,” “This product strategy is the right decision.” 

This kind of transparency requires much more vulnerability and risk. My feelings and opinions are respected on the team, so if I’m sharing that I don’t believe in something or don’t like something, I’m basically setting the team up to follow.  And if I’m sharing positive sentiment I may be setting unreasonably positive expectations for the team. So why do I do it?

Trust.

I think a key reason people want transparency from their leaders is that it builds trust. Sharing quotas ahead of time might be appreciated, but it’s not risky.  Sharing that the quotas aren’t what I wanted to see but they are what they are, can be an empathetic choice.  Sharing that I don’t know whether an executive leaving is a good or bad thing brings me closer to my team by opening the door to discussions. It signals that I’m not an automaton towing the line but that I am interested in opinions, interpretations, and expressions of emotion.  By showing my leaders that I can dislike a choice while still liking my job, I give them the option to do the same.

Let’s be real: It’s not about sharing every opinion about every decision with every person.  That would be exhausting.  Also ineffective.  But balancing where I do and don’t do it is something I’m learning.  And the more I experiment and take risks around this, the better my relationships get.

Someone once taught me that the job of an executive is to perpetually project momentum.  I think it’s more complicated than that.  Indeed leaders need to drive momentum, but to do it, and only it, perpetually, can’t be right. 

Brainstorming has a bad reputation. Is there a way to make it more useful?

I first learned about the concept of Expansive vs Reductive thinking from Duncan Wardle, the former head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney.  (Career goals, #amirite?)  Duncan presented at our company’s annual conference in 2020, and held a private workshop for our team members.

The idea is simple: Expansive thinking is massive open-ended brainstorming.  How big can you think?  How can you encourage the free association that generates great ideas? How can you get past the “no reflex?”   

Reductive thinking is narrowing down a wild list of options. What won’t work because of resource constraints, market conditions, or bad timing?  What ideas have promise but need structuring or grooming?  And what ideas rise to the top? 

Separately, these are each recipes for bad brainstorming.  Expansive thinking can get impractical, and reductive thinking can be too constraining.  But used together, they create a structure that enables a diverse team to find great ideas collaboratively. 

I’ve tried this a few times with a few different teams.  (In fact, the first time it was wisely suggested by one of the leaders on my team.) And the best way to do it is in two separate meetings.  First, you have an expansive meeting.  Everyone contributes all their ideas of nearly any quality.  There’s no editing, no blamestorming, and no limitations.

Then you have a separate reductive meeting, ideally a few days later.  You remind everyone of the problem you are all trying to solve, or the goal you are all trying to achieve.  This meeting is about narrowing down the ideas to one or more that pass a “sniff test” the group agrees on. 

The beauty of separating these two phases out is that you immediately remove the anxiety that plagues the planners and the skeptics in the group.  You can say things like, “we have a meeting next week to validate this can actually be done, but for now, let’s just write it down,” and “that’s ok, we may not actually do this, but let’s capture it for now.” By giving their instincts and anxieties a place to go (the meeting next week), you make space for the dreamers and visionaries.

Similarly, when it comes down to brass tacks, you have already let those visionaries air their ideas.  Now, the thing we all know about visionaries is that they never run out of ideas – so you can say things like, “that would be cool – but today we’re narrowing down last week’s list of ideas,” and “you contributed so much last week, let’s see if we can execute some of those ideas first.”  

Different teams have different challenges with brainstorming, but this approach seems to have solved a few of ours.

The company I work for, Mendix, is a software development platform.  What’s unique is that it is based on low-code, a visual approach to delivering enterprise applications, and we’ve be at it for over a decade. Low-code is a hip buzz word these days, and for good reason: Gartner forecasts that by 2025, 70% of new apps will be developed with low-code, up from less than 25% in 2020. Even industries traditionally slow to adopt new technology, like Manufacturing and Insurance, are jumping on board.

Last week, I was chatting with a colleague about the intersection of low-code and diversity.  I made a simple comment – “Back when Mendix World was in person, there was a line for the ladies’ room…” – and their eyes widened.  They knew exactly what I meant.  It was a shibboleth for women at conferences – meaning, “this conference had so many women, you had to wait for the bathroom.”  To spell it out: this is incredibly unusual.

Since that experience, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which low-code might be a major catalyst to the long-overdue diversification of tech.  Was this bathroom line indicative of a shift in the tech population, or just an accidental moment that I’m reading too much into?

I am optimistic that low-code may be an area of tech – of software development in particular – that invites a more diverse population to participate.  There are a few reasons why: 

1. 1. The raison d’être of low-code is to democratize software development and its associated domains. The whole idea of this discipline (movement?) is that more people can participate in software development because it provides an additional layer of abstraction from the nitty-gritty.  So the barrier to entry is much lower than it has been with traditional software development.
   2. People who work on low-code projects are usually closer to, or at least more exposed to, the business need or problem they are trying to solve. This rewards delivering business value rather than rewarding lines of code or creating and managing esoteric complexity.  (A little diversion here – geeking out can be cool, too.  I like to reminisce about having written a Scheme interpreter in Scheme back in college, which is more recursion than most people want to deal with. But when esoteric complexity and geek cred become the only yardstick by which contribution is measured, a less diverse workforce rises to the top.)
   3. More low-code developers come from backgrounds either in a business discipline (like marketing or legal) or a data analysis background (like BI or Ops).  Both of these areas have significantly more women than traditional software development. If low-code is really the next wave of software development, the fact that it is sourcing talent from more diverse areas of the business is good news for the diversity of the future workforce.   

And lest we forget – the urgency to diversify software development has never been greater.  More software will be delivered in the next five years than had been in the last twenty years.  Even if all that software could be delivered by a mostly homogenous workforce (which it can’t, no matter how fast people can code), the increasing role software will play in every domain – from healthcare to education to finance – means we can no longer accept AI models trained on homogenous datasets or user behavior interpretations that tacitly assume demographics about their users.

Look, (most) software developers aren’t evil. I truly believe that most developers are trying to deliver the best code that they can. But someone has to be in the room to say, “that gender field needs to be perpetually editable” or “that AI model is assuming skin tone is lighter than eye color,” and low-code is a mechanism that opens the door for more people to enter that room.

Low-code is not a panacea – just like it won’t solve all the challenges of software development without accompanying cultural change, it also won’t unilaterally solve tech’s diversity problem. But it wedges the door open a bit more, makes a little more space at the table, and puts a broader set of people who want to participate in software development in a position to do so.

This week, dozens of my colleagues from across the US (and Europe) are visiting our Boston office.  I’ll be in the office several days in a row – in fact, more days consecutively since the pandemic started over two years ago.  There have been a few gatherings in person since March of 2020, but none this large or for this many days.

I’m excited – it reminds me of how I used to feel before attending a big kickoff or conference.  But, like the night before those types of events, I’m also bracing myself for the week – the social aspects of it. That is, not ‘socializing,’ but how exhausting what used to be a normal week of in-person interactions can be.

What makes this hard?  We’ve become accustomed to work interactions being scheduled, planned, scoped, and chosen (or declined) intentionally through calendar management. 

• This week, spontaneous meetings and interactions will be the norm. “Water cooler conversations,” hallway bump-ins, and overhearing colleagues discussing things will all be how we communicate this week.  I miss those things.  Also I dread them.  But I want them.

We’ve become accustomed to taking a break after a long, tough conversation with a walk outside, a tussle with the dog, or a moment with a loved one.

• This week, the set of interaction will be more immersive.  Sure, there’s the option of walking around the office to stretch my legs, or ducking outside for a quick walk.  Sometimes I even sneak the dog into work.  But it’s not the same as being in my own home.

Look, if I had to make a binary choice between perpetually working remotely, or returning to pre-pandemic office culture and travel, I’d choose the latter.  But we’re not choosing between those things.  We’re moving into a phase of perpetual, shifting, changing, lumpy, hybrid work. Different patterns of travel and of interaction.  And that’s new.

I know I’ll come out of this week satisfied and exhausted. I’m excited to meet new colleagues and team members I’ve only known over Zoom. I’m excited to have meetings in person with several people in the same room. I’m excited to celebrate recent accomplishments, and talk about future vision, in person. And I’m also nervous about adjusting to all of it.

As I write this, “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” is playing in the next room, and now that I stop to listen, it’s also playing downstairs, on two separate warring devices with about a 3-bar offset. 

So there are ways in which nothing can be too much compared to my current “workplace.”  

One of the top characteristics I look for in candidates is coachability.  It’s next to curiosity and analytical thinking on my list of what makes people successful.  

I used to think of coachability as openness to feedback.  And coaching as a cheerleadingly-oriented management style.  But true coaching is the skillset I’ve worked the hardest to learn in the past year, and true coachability is much more than just openness.  I believe it to be a secret power of successful teams.

To expand the idea of coachability past “openness,” the type of coachability I look for is that of a focused desire to perpetually improve, based on seeking, accepting, and applying external feedback iteratively.  It comes in equal parts from the coached and the coach.  It’s more Socratic than not.  It’s requires more vulnerability than other types of interaction.  And it’s kinda magic.

At its core, I think coaching is about teaching a person to fish.  That is, the simplest coaching is just asking, “What do you think?”  When someone brings me a problem, if I’m in coach mode (more about that in a minute) that’s my go-to first question.  Or, “Where are you stuck?” or “What have you observed so far?”  Because coaching is absolutely useless if the person being coached isn’t bought in.  

Tom Brady is not Tom Brady because Bill Belichick prescribed to him how to solve problems.  Tom Brady and Bill Belichick had a partnership where they each had an insatiable desire to get better, and they respected each other’s expertise to get there.

So the first piece of coachability is openness to it.  After that, though, I think the next piece of it is trust.  I have a lot to say about trust – probably a whole post’s worth at least – but in this context, I need to trust that my coach is completely invested in seeing me get better.  Trust is not easy, and trusting someone requires relinquishing some amount of control, and of surrendering some ego.

Now, say I’m open to being coached (I want to get better using this method), and I trust my coach.  The next component I need to be coachable is a desire to “participate in my own rescue.” That is, I’m the most responsible for my own success, even if my coach wants nothing more than to see me succeed.  Which, believe me, we whole-heartedly do.

Coaching is not prescriptive advice – it’s not “When you present, use fewer slides,” (although that’s almost universally good advice).  It’s “How can you better adapt this material to your audience?”  It’s not, “Your projects are always late, so I’m assigning a project manager to you,” it’s “Given your track record of missing deadlines, what can you try this time that could be more effective?”

Ultimately, the person being coached is seeking to get further on their own over time.  Being coachable means being both introspective and mindful. 

I said earlier that a lot of this is true, “if I’m in coach mode.”  A leader is not always coaching.  There are assignments that people are not ready for, vision that needs to be shared, tactical feedback to give, emergency situations, deadlines, and just plain old bad days.  There are plenty of good reasons not to coach every situation.   

But.  I don’t think there is ever a good reason to choose to add people to a team who are not coachable.  Not every day, not every situation, but generally, I only want people on my team who, every month, every quarter, are more invested than not in working harder to get better than doing anything else.  

For further reading, my manager suggested I read The Tao of Coaching, which I now recommend to you.

I’m a huge crossword puzzle aficionada.  On a typical week, I do the Saturday puzzle in the New York Times, the puzzles on Brendan Emmett Quigley’s site, the AVCX puzzle (which has recently expanded), the Inkubator puzzle, and the Hub crosswords.)

We’ll get into my sudoku, Wordle, and Spelling Bee obsessions some other day.

On New Year’s Day, 31A was clued as, “Start of many a Google search.” 

I penciled in “HOW.”

Nope, a few minutes later (OK, like thirty frustrating minutes later I realized that wouldn’t work – it needed to start with a “W”. 

“WHY,” I wrote, after erasing “HOW.”

I thought about how funny it was that my gut reaction was “HOW.”  I use Google to figure out how to do things: how to fix a dishwasher, how to choose a rug, how to sell a car, how to start a campfire.  But apparently, lots of other people use Google for WHY things are; autofill showed me ‘why is the sky blue’, ‘why is russia invading ukraine’, ‘why is my eye twitching’.   

Which, like my recent observations about bakers and chefs, made me think about the composition of a good team. Teams need some people who think about “WHY” we’re seeing a certain outcome, and then you need other people who want to focus on “HOW” to execute. It’s rare that the same individual is really good at both of those things, but I’ve never seen a great team that doesn’t have a mix of both kinds of people 

“Ask good questions” is my dad’s most durable piece of advice. And you need people who can ask different kinds of questions. WHY is this campaign underperforming? WHY is the conversion rate increasing? WHY don’t we sell more services. And also HOW do we get stakeholder alignment?  HOW do we run an experiment on home page messaging?  HOW do we get more feedback from customers?

Recruiting and hiring is a skill, and it’s hard, and it’s rewarding as all get out.  But building a team – it’s taking hiring and adding massive amounts of context to the process to take the existing team into account.  No small feat.

PS: I’d be lying if said that the crossword story ended there.  “WHO” ended up being the actual answer to 31A.

I like cooking, and most weeks I try to cook dinner a few times.  The more strategic my job has gotten, the more comparative satisfaction I get at the end of a workday from being in the kitchen and creating something that has a quick payoff. 

I tolerate baking. Every once in a while I’ll make banana bread, muffins, Nigella’s granola bars, or Mark Bittman’s onion pan bread.  But baking makes me nervous. You follow the directions, then you give up control – you have to trust that it is going to bake as planned, and you don’t have many ways to alter things once it starts baking.

Not so with cooking. With cooking, you can baste, salt, cover, uncover, add liquid, stir, skim fat, thicken with cornstarch, separate into a 2nd pan, dish, or bowl, and make numerous other adjustments.  Much lower-risk, much more control, and, for me, a much better track record in coming out good.

When I was in college, I noticed that people wrote papers in one of these two ways – some wrote papers all the way through, then went back to adjust what was necessary.  Others couldn’t let a single word be wrong as they went, so when they finished once through, the paper was done.  I was the former.

And at work I see a similar bifurcation. Some people like to tinker constantly with projects (the chefs), while others “set it and forget it.”  Take the example of a Google Ads implementation.  Chefs tinker with keywords daily, and get more feedback sooner.  Bakers let experiments run for longer and see more extensive results that are probably sturdier. Chefs are more agile, and bakers more strategic.

Gourmet restaurants have both, and increasingly I’m thinking good marketing teams do too.  Too many chefs, and you can miss the big picture.  Too many bakers, and you aren’t reacting quickly enough.

There are certain characteristics I look for in every candidate I interview: curiosity, passion, and coachability, to name a few.  And as my team has gotten bigger, I’ve also looked for particular skillsets that would complement those that my team members have.  For example, in the past few years I’ve actively sought out people who had a good grasp of core marketing tactics, and people who were good at execution, when I thought my team was short on those capabilities.

This baker/chef characteristic seems like a good thing to keep an eye on if I’m going to have a James Beard Award-winning marketing team.