The Leaflet #134: pro bono advice 1 and 2, big team best practices in small settings
Pro bono advice, part 1
Build something for a team you believe in or care about. Build it to spec for them. Make it really good. Design with sensitivity. Ride along with the folks who will be using what you build. Perhaps the most radical part of this suggestion, at least to anyone not in the legal field: consider doing this for free.
A few lovely things can emerge from this kind of effort:
The organization you care about now has something well-designed and useful
You learn, potentially quite a lot, about how to build this kind of thing
You have a portfolio now. At the very least, the beginning of one.
In the US, we tend to think of this kind of model as only-for-interns. Something one does very early on with little expertise. It might be more useful to everyone involved mid- or late-career, when you have lots of schema and (hopefully) seasoned empathy for the clients you’re designing for, even if your expertise in the precise domain where you’re building is nascent. You know how teams and individuals work now in a way you didn’t then. That could make what you build that much better.
-eric
Pro bono advice, part 2
The morning pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way have become famous, beloved, dreaded. But for me, the most provocative and useful exercise in the book is one where Cameron asks you to write down a list of jobs/professions you have dreamed about but never attempted. Then she tell you to do some activity in the following week that gives you a taste of that profession.
Sometimes, this small step into that imagined world can sate you, all by itself. Sometimes, it reveals the line between fantasy and maintenance and further reveals that you may not have interest in crossing that line.
A third possibility: a pro bono design project like the one described above in part 1. It serves as a robust Cameron test. You live the fantasy, do the maintenance, and learn how the work looks and feels beyond self-helpful indulgence.
-eric
Bringing big team moves into small collaborations
We’ve found in context after context that planning backward from a bold definition of success, acknowledging incremental progress, tying productive choices to your team’s stated values, and hiring with thorough inoculation serve teams well and get significantly underestimated. These are cheap to practice and yield outsized results.
The moves work well when you’re running a big team. It can feel strange or awkward to pull them in much smaller collaborations. But they work there, too.
Don’t let go of your best practices because you’re in a more relaxed leadership team setting or a 1:1 partnership. Adapt them to that context.
-ben and eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
AI observer Zvi Mowshowitz on changing the world:
If you have a good plan to change the world, it is going to involve causing a bunch of otherwise low-probability events to happen, either intentionally or via good luck.
Veterinary behaviorist Ashley Elzerman on cats:
I am always excited to see empirical work that increases our understanding of the social dynamics of cats, especially in multicat households where subtle, chronic tension can be hard for owners to identify.
Man of many tools Kevin Kelly on how LLMs work:
Catness is a direction, and so is fluffiness.