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Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

tomcritchlow.com

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#101
post #100

> they’re asking for people to take positions and have opinions. Yes only positions and opinions that make them look good. For example, in a tech all hands. "Ask" questions like these 1. How did the upper management react to cost savings from initiative X. 2. How did vendor feel about us canceling their contract by building a cheaper home grown system that is saving us X million $ every year. 3. What is the strategy…

And what exactly did you / would you think to accomplish with these questions? Besides attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you and stroking your own ego? "Questions" like these put other people on defensive (which means they won't listen to you anymore) and mark you out as an a*hole (which means they won't listen to you at all). It's counterproductive. I'm always baffled how engineers don't get that…

> attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you

No it's the opposite.

How does highlighting millions of cost savings from CTO's initiative humiliate him?

I am confused how you got that impression from my comment. what did i miss.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#102
post #8

Very interesting to see this at the top of HN literally just after reading "Human Capital: a Horror Story" https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/27/human-capital-a-horror-st...

Stopped reading after Monday when it took a strong turn into weird racist shit, but Monday is accurate and it would be great if someone could tell me how to get out of office hell rather than encouraging me to become a “Gee Bob, great idea!” office improv guy

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That piece is really bizarre and poorly written. It feels like they're trying to shoehorn a bunch of right-wing talking points into a piece about corporate boringness. This quote is laughably bad: > The male toilet has disappeared overnight. Now there is an “All-Gender Toilet” and the door is decorated in rainbow hearts. > You go through three stalls before you find one that hasn’t got a used tampon floating in the b…

With you on the first sentence, it is written poorly. It came off as smug and trying to be a scientific explanation for an opinion. On your second sentence, I have no idea what you are talking about. Right wing talking points? Leave your politics at the door sometimes.

It's not like the author is shy of his views and agenda. If you truly don't see the right wing talking points, well maybe you just perceive as normal the views of a far-right political writer, no need to be shy about it.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#104
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what exactly did you / would you think to accomplish with these questions? Besides attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you and stroking your own ego? "Questions" like these put other people on defensive (which means they won't listen to you anymore) and mark you out as an a*hole (which means they won't listen to you at all). It's counterproductive. I'm always baffled how engineers don't get that…

> attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you No it's the opposite. How does highlighting millions of cost savings from CTO's initiative humiliate him? I am confused how you got that impression from my comment. what did i miss.

Not the commenter, and I understood what you were getting at, however, your original post doesn’t specify who is being asked the questions. It’s implied you’re asking the CTO, but it’s never clearly stated.

That said, this is a good reminder for everyone to “read generously”: If you read something that seems absurd, take a minute to make sure you’re not just misunderstanding the post. Posts often gloss over context, and so you should try to rebuild that context.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#105

The "Yes, And" technique is best when presenting as a team, e.g. for sales meeting or investment pitch. It supports what your colleague is saying even while you may need to make a correction. I've been automatically using this technique for years, since I have a performance and improv background. The rest of improv may not be as applicable, but performance sure does! The show must go on (despite unexpected setbacks o…

I see its value when mostly in agreement. Keeps the flow going. But how does one do "yes, and ...", when the previous statement is clearly wrong? You either sound sarcastic or like a patronising twat. "It is snowing." "Yes, and I'll leave my sweater at home since it's rather warm outside."

In improv, "Yes, and..." is kind of just the basics. It's to stop beginners from putting up a brick wall that kills the scene or forces someone to invent a whole new premise from whole cloth. That shit takes work on somebody's part and adds a ton of friction. You're supposed to add value, and not destroy value. ("Yes" stands for not-destroying; "and" stands for adding.) That doesn't necessarily mean agreeing all the time; in fact any half-decent dramatic scene had better involve conflict of some kind or it'll be boring. But you're supposed to find ways to do it within the reality of the scene, i.e. without negating the underlying premise.

If the analogy is applicable to business at all, it's about accepting the "reality" of the place you've parachuted into. Part of that might be to start with the assumption that people are grownups who have real honest-to-god reasons for saying things. That level of respect for strangers seems appropriate, and a lost art in these days of the online echo chamber. Then your job stops being about "being right" and more about listening. This whole viewpoint seems to say it's more important to keep the "scene" going than to be right.

Whereas in theatre you have the luxury of just declaring that yes indeed it IS snowing; in business it sounds like it would be more about figuring out why this person thinks it's snowing. After enough time immersed in their company culture you might see why, and you might even reluctantly agree with it. But you can "disagree without negating" by saying for example "Well I know it's probably not snowing in Cancún." In other words "When I worked at Blablacorp they had an excellent anti-snow system." Seems like maybe caution would be in order before saying anything like that though, as an outsider, because the obvious response is gonna be "Well this is YADDATRON, NOT BLABLACORP! At Yaddatron, it's goddamn snowing!!"

Anyway, point is, you don't necessarily have to accept that it is snowing; sometimes just accepting that the person thinks it's snowing is enough to keep things moving along. I dunno, don't mind me, this is new to me (improv isn't, but this way of using it is), so to some degree I'm thinking by writing.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#106
post #100

> they’re asking for people to take positions and have opinions. Yes only positions and opinions that make them look good. For example, in a tech all hands. "Ask" questions like these 1. How did the upper management react to cost savings from initiative X. 2. How did vendor feel about us canceling their contract by building a cheaper home grown system that is saving us X million $ every year. 3. What is the strategy…

And what exactly did you / would you think to accomplish with these questions? Besides attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you and stroking your own ego? "Questions" like these put other people on defensive (which means they won't listen to you anymore) and mark you out as an a*hole (which means they won't listen to you at all). It's counterproductive. I'm always baffled how engineers don't get that…

Total reading comprehension failure.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#107
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what exactly did you / would you think to accomplish with these questions? Besides attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you and stroking your own ego? "Questions" like these put other people on defensive (which means they won't listen to you anymore) and mark you out as an a*hole (which means they won't listen to you at all). It's counterproductive. I'm always baffled how engineers don't get that…

> attempting to publicly humiliate people who're paying you No it's the opposite. How does highlighting millions of cost savings from CTO's initiative humiliate him? I am confused how you got that impression from my comment. what did i miss.

Many of those questions could be percieved as hostile when asked on all-hands and non-hostile when asked in smaller setting. But perhaps your all-hands are smaller than mine.

But I concede that I have read the post in a non generous way and I apologise to the author.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#108
I’m disappointed with articles like this. If I wanted to be in sales, I wouldn’t be in engineering. Not everything is about marketing. Some people need to, and daresay, enjoy building things, otherwise nothing would ever get built. This salesification of all business strata is strictly an American phenomenon, and will eventually be the death of American industry. Already our major exports are media and pop culture that exemplify this phenomenon. Now engineers are supposed to market themselves? No wonder we don’t manufacture anything worth exporting anymore.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#109
post #28

I unfortunately recognize several of these as being true from my five years at BigCo. Is this advice true of a (tiny) startup as well? Work should speak for itself when the survival of a company depends on it, right? I'd like to know if it's the same on the other side.

I've only worked at tiny startups; I would say in the majority of cases, work speaks for itself. One thing to consider though, if you're producing good code... why would you be promoted to a position of mostly managing others? The company would no longer benefit from you as an IC. At tiny startups, even the CTO is spending a lot of time coding.

You can only code so much as you can - your output is limited to your skill, ability to learn, work ethic or determination, and time. There are all kinds of things that can waste your time - programming something that wasn’t required, programming something in a way that becomes a problem later on, oversights and other mistakes, but hopefully with experience you waste less of your own time by learning from all these previous less than optimal decisions. Now if there is more work to do than you personally want to do - it would just consume your life - maybe it is time to get some help, and then you are managing your helper in some way by guiding what they work on to help you out in the way that helps you get more work done than you could have by yourself. And then you get another helper, and another, and soon enough the team of programmers you are managing can produce more than you could have ever done by yourself. You don’t write much code anymore but You help your team solve problems with the building blocks you have, and keep them on the right path when customers and other forces will try to benefit themselves at your teams expense.

Re: Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work

#110
post #40

Lots of comments here come off as very resistant to accepting the ideas presented here: that success at work is as much about the quality of your work as the effort made to connect with the humans in an organization evaluating the work. Improv is a perfect frame for this: entertaining but doing deep preparation for that entertainment. What I'm really fascinated by is how this can be translated to remote working. I do…

> I would be really surprised to find anyone at the top of performance in any organization that isn't fully remote without resorting to Machiavellian tactics. Can confirm. Switching to a fully remote company was eye-opening. The politics are much worse than my office jobs. Everything is back-channeled. So many secret private Slack channels and exclusive in-person meetups where actual decisions are made. At least in t…

This says it. Yikes.
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