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- Coming April 24: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 1
- Knowing how to recognize just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can be helpful in reducing the incidence of problems. Here is Part 1 of a collection of communication antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure. Available here and by RSS on April 24.
- And on May 1: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 2
- Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of problems. Here is Part 2 of a collection of antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure, emphasizing those that depend on content. Available here and by RSS on May 1.
This page has links to articles from 2024. For other years:
April 17, 2024
- How to Answer When You Don't Know How to Answer
- People engaged in knowledge work must often respond to questions that test the limits of their knowledge, or the limits of everyone's knowledge. Responding effectively to such questions advances us all.
April 10, 2024
- Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
- A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging.
April 3, 2024
- Recapping Factioned Meetings
- A factioned meeting is one in which participants identify more closely with their factions, rather than with the meeting as a whole. Agreements reached in such meetings are at risk of instability as participants maneuver for advantage after the meeting.
March 27, 2024
- Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success.
March 20, 2024
- Top Ten Ways to Make Meetings More Effective
- Meetings are just about everybody's least favorite part of working in organizations. We can do much better if only we take a few simple steps to improve them. The big one: publish the agenda in advance. Here are nine other steps to improve meetings.
March 13, 2024
- On Anticipating Consequences
- Much of what goes wrong when we change systems to improve them falls into a category we call unanticipated consequences. Even when we lack models that can project these results accurately, morphological analysis can help us avoid much misery.
March 6, 2024
- Six More Insights About Workplace Bullying
- Some of the lore about dealing with bullies at work isn't just wrong — it's harmful. It's harmful in the sense that applying it intensifies the bullying. Here are six insights that might help when devising strategies for dealing with bullies at work. Example: Letting yourself be bullied is not a thing.
February 28, 2024
- Checklists: Conventional or Auditable
- Checklists help us remember the steps of complicated procedures, and the order in which we must execute them. The simplest form is the conventional checklist. But when we need a record of what we've done, we need an auditable checklist.
February 21, 2024
- Red Team Reviews of Uphill Briefings
- In preparing for uphill briefings, briefers can benefit from preliminary reviews. When we review the briefing early in development, the briefing team can address vulnerabilities and exploit opportunities. A Red Team review is one style of preliminary review.
February 14, 2024
- Briefing Uphill
- Briefing small groups is a common occurrence for members of most organizations. Briefing executives is one of the more challenging forms of such exercises. Here are 14 guidelines for briefing uphill successfully.
February 7, 2024
- Responses to Outrageous Demands
- From time to time, we might encounter a powerful person making outrageous demands, possibly accompanied by threats if we don't comply. At first, the choice seems to be between acceding to their demands or flat out refusing. There are other possibilities.
January 31, 2024
- Improvement Bias
- When we set about improving how our organizations do things, we expose ourselves to the risk of finding opportunities for improvement that offer very little improvement, while we overlook others that could make a real difference. Cognitive biases play a role.
January 24, 2024
- I Don't Know Where to Begin
- Sometimes we find ourselves engaged in debate about how to approach solving a problem. When the delays and costs due to these debates exceed any possible benefit, consideration of the causes of these debates can dramatically improve group performance.
January 17, 2024
- On Miscommunication
- Some sources of confusion in communications are difficult to detect. Because they escape our notice, they are also difficult to avoid. One example: words that mean different things in different contexts. Another: multiple negations involving prefixes.
January 10, 2024
- Six Traps in Email or Text: II
- Collaboration requires communication. For many, communicating often takes place in email and text message systems. But much of the effort expended in communication is dedicated to resolving confusions that we created for ourselves. Here are four examples.
January 3, 2024
- Six Traps in Email or Text: I
- Most of us invest significant effort in communicating by email or any of the various forms of text messaging. Much of the effort is spent correcting confusions caused, in part, by a few traps. Knowing what those traps are can save much trouble.
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