Categories
Self-development

Small (micro) wins

Well, that is a satisfying conclusion! I managed to fit the study for this into some of the busiest months of my career earlier this year. The result is a nice payoff of course, but the syllabus alone was worth it.

This will not be my last experience with the Open University. I commend it to anyone considering distance learning.

Completion certificate from the Open University

Categories
Process Self-development

Living & learning

I am currently studying for a micro-credential in Organisation Design and Development with Open University. There is a fantastic mix of what I already know, what I thought I knew, and completely new information.

In the latter category is the fact that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has established principles that characterise a human-centred organisation. ISO 27501:2019 “provides requirements and recommendations for managers and the actions to be taken in order for an organization to achieve human centredness.”

It’s worth considering how your organisation – or team – stacks up against these.

Categories
Management Self-development

Managing Oneself

Self-awareness is increasingly identified as a critical leadership quality and a worthwhile pursuit for any professional. This little book is a great place to start.

Peter Drucker’s classic ‘Managing Oneself’ has been an indispensable reference over the years. The book (more of an essay really) promotes self-awareness and offers a simple framework for self-reflection:

• What are your strengths? Your weaknesses?
• How do you communicate?
• How do you learn?
• How do you work with others?
• What are your values?
• Where can you make the greatest contribution?

It may not hit the heights of Covey’s ‘7 Habits…’, but I see it as a perfect, compact companion.

Categories
Communication

Lifelong (re)learning

I’ve been blown away by the reaction to this annotated Dunning-Kruger graph. Simple thoughts that resonate with a lot of people. I’ve learned a lot just through posting this.

Categories
Books

Top 5 books 2019

A tough year to pick a top five from, but here goes.


Tragic Design

Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier

Shariat and Saucier explain how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. Through a series of historical case studies, the errors of design become woefully apparent. The designers responsible certainly didn’t intend harm, so what can we do to avoid making similar mistakes? For a taste of where the book goes, and how high the stakes for bad design can be, try Googling “ford pinto design flaw”. One of two books on the list where I was fortunate enough to interview the authors for the UX Belfast meetup during 2019.

https://www.tragicdesign.com

Tech Humanist

Kate O’Neill

Ethics and human-centredness in design have been a noticeable emerging theme in the last two years. Here, Kate O’Neill highlights the importance of meaning and purpose in tech. “The Tech Humanist proposal is to ensure that business objectives and human objectives are as aligned as possible so that as automated experiences scale, they scale human values with them, and a sense of what is meaningful to humans surrounds us.” Highly recommended for anyone seeking greater meaning in their work.

Factfulness

Hans Rosling

What a refreshing read. We can become despairing sometimes at the state of the world. And yes, a lot of what we understand in the world is wrong. However, this book by (now deceased) author Hans Rosling illustrates how much the world is improving over time. How quality of life is improving for those in the bottom tiers of society. Yes, there’s a lot wrong with the world, but this book teaches us to appreciate where and how things are getting better. And how we must bring critical thinking to our view of the world. Rosling’s children are continuing his work – see https://www.gapminder.org for more information.

Meeting Design

Kevin Hoffman

This book needed to be written, given the amount of collective time we invest in sitting in rooms together, physically or virtually. This book treats meetings as a design problem, and offers highly practical advice on agendas, facilitation and actions. Favourite quote: “Meetings are usability tests for organizations themselves”. ‘Nuff said.

Ego is the Enemy

Ryan Holiday

A great treatise on objectivity and not becoming attached to anything you feel defines you, either as an individual, or as an organization. “…at some point in time, every industry will be disrupted by some trend or innovation [which] the incumbent interest will be incapable of responding to. Why can’t businesses change or adapt? A large part of it is because they have lost the ability to learn, they stopped being students. The second this happens, your knowledge becomes fragile.” Sobering stuff, and a useful prompt to re-assess some core beliefs about oneself.


Work-related books only this time round. So much great fiction featured during the year also, but these are the books that really stuck with me.