July 2020 Learning List

Photo by Joshua Chun on Unsplash

Info from the past month I'd actually consume again.

The importance of understanding "What is going on here?"

While exploring practice of decision making I came across the following in Radical Uncertainty: 

Intelligent views about actions, and the range of possible actions, are expressed at the end, not the beginning, of the process of ascertaining "what is going on here."

This lead to the realization that most my own decision making process is focused just on that: understanding "What is going on here?" 

12 Tech Companies with Decision Cultures

While exploring the practice of decision making, I've come across a number of tech companies that express a decision-process as part of their culture.

Here are 12:

1. Square - SPADE (SPADE Toolkit)
2. Coinbase - How we make decisions at Coinbase, Brian Armstrong on Invest with the Best
3. Stripe - SCQA, via Zack Tratar and Jeff Weinstein (Writing == Decisions, redacted example)
4. Amazon - 6 Page Narrative  (again)
5. Fictiv - DACI
6. Coda - Framing
7. Matter - Decision Disagreement Framework
8. Intercom - RICE
9. Shopify - TOMASP
10. Netflix - Netflix Culture
11. Gitlab - Making Decisions
12. Buffer - Documenting Decisions in a Remote Team

One could suppose that it's a coincidence that these businesses emphasize (or at least signal...) a decision making practice. 

It seems more likely that they are examples of how at some echelon of knowledge work, the practice of decision making becomes core/critical part of how the business operates.

A Primer: Stripe, decision making, and SCQA

I've recently become interested in Stripe after noticing that a bunch of their people (Patrick Collison, Claire Hughes Johnson,  Zack Tratar, Jeff Weinstein, Patrick McKenzie @ ~46:55) talk about the practice of decision making and a specific framework: Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principal and SCQA framework for effective communication.

You can copy my template here: Greg's Simple SCQA

Here is a short primer 👇

June 2020 Learning List

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Info from the past month I'd actually consume again.