olivierg

The more people are isolated from one another, the weaker they are, as social interactions are one among the universal human needs. The less they can find their needs fulfilled by their social network, the easier they can be controlled by external forces. The so-called tragedy of the commons happens when actors are acting based on self-interest AND not coordinating with one another when they realize that the common resource risks depleting. The tragedy is not that the resource is getting deple...

Nicklas Luhmann was a social scientist and prolific writer. He published over 60 books, with some of them revolutionizing his field. A few people have studied his technique of taking notes and associating them, which seemed to explain how he could come with novel ideas and write them down so fast. I can’t recommend enough the book “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens (2017). The book describes principles and generic steps to take notes for successful writing. What is interesting, though, a...

I once worked for a company that had no testers. Software developers but no testers. Zero. I was really surprised. Even more surprising was the absence of testing or staging environments! How was the quality? It was actually not bad at all. It was even better than in other organizations that had almost as many testers as there were developers. How could this be? It turned out that there was a culture of testing. Developers knew that nobody was coming after them to check their code, the produ...

Some claim you should manage products, not projects. Projects are a huge drain on resources, requiring to stop what people are doing, gather a diverse project team and that will focus only on the project until… the project is completed. What would be recommended instead, is have fixed teams to whom you give portions of the project work, and manage dependencies between teams if several teams are required. The stable element being the product, and the systems that constitute it, you should rely on...

Should you have project managers? How do you assign responsibilities inside a group or organization? Let's say you have a team and several tasks or projects. They are complex and involve the same people. These people have to collaborate. There will be opportunities when task A competes with task B. Is this good or bad? Well, it depends on whether the bigger picture is lost or not. Can we focus on task A and put task B on hold? Probably. How do we when task B becomes so late that it affects th...