The Hagakure #70: Teams as Complex Systems

A conversation with Kevin Ball on a bunch of juicy, complex stuff to make work work better.

I got into tech for the tech and stayed for the people.

In the meantime, I fell in love with complexity and systems as helpful lenses through which to observe what the heck is going on in organizations.

How can we make work suck less? How can true collaboration become more natural? How can we feel less anxiety and more joy while building massively valuable products?

There are no simple, easy answers and the rabbit holes run deep. Which is why I believe that it’s precisely through the sharing and exchanging of ideas that we best learn and seek truth.

So, I loved recently going on Kevin Ball’s podcast—aptly titled

Human Skills

—to have a chat about all this stuff.

Some of the themes we discussed:

• How to setup useful feedback loops for your team.

• Making surveys and pulse checks actually work by actively connecting the dots for people.

• What’s a complex system and why it matters for helping teams and organizations improve and succeed.

• Using “semantic versioning” for teams as a framework for collaborative continuous improvement.

• The unavoidable tension between individual success and organizational success.

And here’s also a link to the post on Kevin’s Substack, which includes a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Thanks

KBall

for having me!