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Does AI make you tired?
I have been using Glean and Claude and other tools and they are making life better. But I am now wondering about some of the implications on how I work and how I feel while working. Does AI rot my brain like doomscrolling? My first observation is that I can use AI to stop the…
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Goal, hypothesis or hopethesis?
I was preparing a roadmap for a team, or more accurately letting AI summarise what I thought we had agreed to. My goal was to share back what we had on our roadmap in the short term to align our action to the outcomes we have mostly committed to. My goal I guess that is…
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Dodgy history moments in lean thinking
I will let you decide how much of this history is accurate, but it seems right to me. Once there was a guru at a car company who noticed that people were making errors. He decided that he could tell them not to make mistakes any more, but that errors would still happen. The team…
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Reframing my identity as an editor
AI did not write this article. I did not ask it to edit what I wrote or to suggest content. But I am starting to ask Glean and Gemini to summarise things. They capture meeting outcomes and simplify my waffle when I write content. They also take over a lot of the creative work I…
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Opinion before evidence … or is it the other way around?
Have you ever had a day where you realised your mouth was moving faster than the evidence you base your informed opinions on? Today I told someone we need to improve how we do showcases to engage our stakeholders. Then I went to a near perfect showcase and though “yep that is what I am…
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Design thinking. I do not think that word means …
I am often fascinated by 2 unrelated things. Firstly, how often I use quotes from Princess Bride and Hitchhikers’ Guide to explain my serious thinking. Secondly, how often: So here is a quote from Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it…
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A near miss is a gift that we should make good use of
There is an old saying in process design. I think it comes from the Swiss Cheese theory of risk management. Every near miss is a gift, you should make good use of it Basically for every disaster there is almost always a history of So the gift is to learn from the near miss rather…
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Quoting Deming on measuring and managing
I asked Gemini to write a blog article for me. I think it failed to emulate my long-winded style, but I liked the article. So here is a view of management and the use of numbers. I do believe in evidence and using measures to make decisions and align people … and more. But I…
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Thinking about critical resources yet again
I was talking to someone about the people I want in my team. They are team oriented. They are open to conversations that involve both respect and conflict. They are willing to fill the gaps we have rather than referring to a job description. But “willing to fill gaps” carries with it two dangers: To…
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A long time ago we had an engineer sprint
A long time ago, people suggested doing “hardening sprints.” During these sprints, we would slow down to recover every 3-4 sprints. It’s an anti-pattern to make things worse as you sprint along and then hope to fix it later. Firstly people add stuff to the sprint because it looks like free time. Secondly everything that…
James King 