What Works

"Sensemaking starts with chaos," says organizational theorist Karl Weick. Chaos is the confusion and frustration we feel when things don't turn out the way we expect them to. To make sense of the chaos, we have to look past the results and examine how we came to expect what we did. This is the first part in a miniseries on sensemaking and media. Next week, I'll share some of the mental models I us...

If you're like me, you often think about what you would have done to prepare for... this job, this economy, this political climate, this financial situation, etc... if only you'd known. But you didn't know (I didn't know). And you (I) couldn't know. Some of the loudest shoulds and supposed-tos we face are those we couldn't have achieved due to the time we were born or the family we grew up in. In...

No job is safer than a government job, right? Well, not anymore. At least not in the US. I’m paying special attention to the fight over government jobs (or, as the administration might put it, “bloat and inefficiency”) because it’s part of a more comprehensive narrative project—one that shapes how we think and talk about work, and therefore think and talk about who we are and how we fit into socie...

I wanted to drop in with a quiet interlude about re-reading (or re-watching, or re-listening) and its value in a world obsessed with new and different. Footnotes: Read the essay version of this episode. " Murderbot Gets Us In Ways Humans Don't " by Tara McMullin on Motley Bloom " Broken Links " by Tara McMullin Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? by Mackenz...

Why is it that it seems like no amount of work, accolades, or achievement is enough? Why do we keep signing up for more, even as our capacity becomes ever more depleted? Why do we settle for mediocrity when we yearn for excellence? In today's episode, I revisit an idea from my book—the validation spiral—and provide a framework for understanding why we become stuck in it and how we can break free....

If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a like or a share, of course. But generally, the support they’re looking for is financial. And for good reason, life is expensive. Jobs with good pay and decent benefit packages can be hard to find—especi...

No matter how fastidious you are about creating and executing a plan, working toward any big goal will require adjustments. No matter how diligent you are about documentation and maintenance, any process will break down over time. The work we do is always changing—whether because of the people we work with, the market we operate in, or the cultural context our work is received in. Even when it see...

Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries? These questions were at the heart of a small kerfuffle on Bluesky last week between decorated speculative fiction writer Ann Leckie and a few prominent tech thinkers. Honestly, it bummed me out. But I found that the next morning, I had a lot to say about it. S...

"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy paragraphs about whatever is on my mind. Of course, no one wants to read my scribbles or suffer through my unrefined musings. So once I've spent some time thinking thoughts, I have to figure out how to organize them. To structure the...

"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGee I have a theory that you can measure the decline of any social media platform by the time it takes for its feed to become a firehose of unsolicited advice. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all sludge piles of advice now, but it took them years to devolve. TikTok took maybe 18 month...

Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the problem in the first place. To dream up novel solutions that allow us to realize higher values, we need to build structures that enable and extend our imaginations. And sure, I'm talking about macroeconomic, climate, and political c...

Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves about being more productive, working more efficiently, or hustling for more money. Even if we value rest, care, and comfort, that voice can be hard to ignore. Well, meet your Tiny Capitalist. Or rather, Tiny Capitalist s: the Tiny Pu...

Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political, and personal challenges. Whether it's the clothes we wear, the language we use, the dates we go on, or the people we vote for, our choices are often unknowingly constrained by standardization. In this episode, an update of an essay...

This episode is about the long term —the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our ability to do what's meaningful to us in time does have to be constrained by the urgency of now . There are ways to feel more grounded and create more possibilities at the same time. Footnotes: Read the essay version of this episode. Th...

Most of the work I do that's not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world. In this work, the question I hear most often is about making sense of a complex idea—the kind of idea that contains many smaller, supporting ideas and stories and research. The sort of complex idea best expressed in a lengthy essay...

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding how the people leading the tech industry think—how they perceive their own stories and generate their own hype—is a solid step toward making sense of what can seem so nonsensical. And there is one book...

What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common? The power to decide what content counts and what doesn't—and use that power to shape the knowledge and experiences of others. In this episode, I continue to examine the state of The Website today. Amidst a backdrop of diffuse epistemic violence, the website is both an archive and a...

I'm back! Maybe you noticed or maybe you didn't—but the show (and my newsletter) has been on its longest hiatus since its inception. In the final quarter of 2024, I decided I wanted to (re)consolidate my web presence, abandon most "platforms," and breathe some new life into my work. This episode reflects on both my own challenges with wrangling my online presence and the ways the state of the web...

So, health insurance is in the news. And so is Americans' feelings about it. I got to wondering how we ended up with this terrible health insurance system in the United States. I uncovered a fascinating story about the marketing campaign that sunk Truman's national health insurance program in the 1940s. I also discovered some interesting parallels to popular marketing messages among today's influe...

A problem, question, or challenge is often more than meets the eye. But we're biased to accept how an issue is initially framed. We acquiesce to the original terms. That's called acquiescence bias. When we don't counteract our acquiescence bias, we miss opportunities to get to the root cause or think creatively about a challenge. Today, I share 3 ways to resist acquiescence bias as you consider yo...

Do you see your software? Do you see how it influences how you run meetings, brainstorm ideas, fulfill your responsibilities, and communicate with others? Do you see how its text boxes, radio buttons, tabs, search results, and menus train you to think? Do you see it, or do you just use it? Footnotes : " The impossible dream of good workplace software " on Decoder   " Practico-inertia " by Rob Horn...

Stop me if you've heard this before: we're overloaded and overwhelmed by information. There's more content than you could ever hope to consume. More scientific theories, philosophical concepts, and art forms than you could ever hope to engage with. Enter personal knowledge management (PKM). It's a modern term for an ancient practice—how one collects, preserves, and utilizes knowledge worth remembe...

In management cybernetics, there are 3 types of systems: simple, complex, and  exceedingly complex. The systems we pay the most attention tend to be, you guessed it, exceedingly complex. In this episode, I explore what that means for how we do our work and run our businesses—and what happens when we forget that people are exceedingly complex systems, too. Footnotes: Cyberboss by Craig Gent Thinkin...

You've probably heard of a scarcity mindset. Maybe you've even been accused of having one! In this short, I explore the false binary of scarcity and abundance mindsets to propose a third way: resourcefulness. Footnotes: " Thought-terminating cliché " on Wikipedia Adam Tooze on  The Ezra Klein Show Information on the US tax gap " Breaking boundaries to creatively generate value " in The Journal of...

We're constantly bombarded by data. And it's easy to think that with the right clues, we could answer the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything. But data aren't facts. They're not a secret code. Data are media—they  mediate our interactions with the world around us. To make them useful and meaningful, we need a critical framework for working with data as media. That's what I've...