Published 2026-08-20
tag(s): #link-post #random-thoughts
A couple days ago I was reading a post by
Javier, Transferring
Knowledge. I agree with most of points made.
The last paragraph stuck with me, because I think what it says can be generalized beyond only
teaching:
I generally feel there's a lot of "interaction" type of activities that people tend to underestimate, probably because we miss that teaching isn't just showing something or doing a demo. It's paying attention to how people actually learn, respecting their pace, and not assuming the way we learn is the universal way. If we did that more often, half our "communication problems" would probably be alleviated.
The same conclusion can be applied, in my opinion, to most activities in any organization. There's almost always a mandate to make things as homogeneous as possible, to standardize. And I get! It would be chaos if everyone did things how they want in any org that is more than a few tenths of people.
But at the same time, like Javier says, people are complicated. What works from some might not
work for others. And since teams are comprised of people, the same applies to them, too.
As much as organizations want to be shielded of "people differences", and put in place
mechanisms to make things work no matter who is doing the doing 🤡 at the end of the day, who
is carrying tasks does make a big difference.
Documenting is a good idea (as I have stated in this space before). But what looks like a great document to one person, can look too detailed or too sparse to others. What a team thinks is a good process, can prove to be inadequate once new people join and try to follow it. And so on.
And on the topic of teams, I am 100% convinced that any change in team composition will change their internal dynamics. Not only someone joining, even one person leaving will alter the team's "vibe". No matter the amount of process around it, these inevitable changes affect productivity, employee satisfaction, sense of belonging, etc, etc, etc.
Keep things small. Both teams and overall organization size.
Easy peasy!
I don't have one, to be honest.
Bigger organizations can achieve things that smaller ones can't. Despite my personal belief
that "medium sized is the upper limit", reality shows that bigger orgs are not only
viable, but also necessary to achieve certain types of goals.
(Whether all orgs need to grow, companies in particular, is a different
topic. I am firmly of the camp that most of them need the opposite, to stabilize at a
small-to-medium size. And they grow more than that because of market/financial reasons, rather
than organization health.)
The best I could think of in the last couple days, is that being more accepting of the fact
that people can be so messy, rather than fighting it, can help a lot.
Go with the flow. Don't spend so much effort trying to prevent the inevitable, if you
will.
For anyone that has ever worked in a Big Company kind of environment, it sounds impossible (that includes me). But that change in attitude, in particular at the mid-management level, could be quite helpful in the long term.