Organizing and simplifying, one illumination at a time
This week’s post is born from a conversation with a friend about how someone could believe what they did.
Morality is sticky business.
It’s actually a topic people have studied, which on one hand, no surprise, people have studied everything. On the other hand, I learned about the study of morality and systems of morality back in high school and it was such a bizarre experience that I thought it was worth writing about.
One thing that we in UX have in common with software developers is that we’re constantly learning. Another thing is that the process of learning is very frequently painful, because we recognize how stupid the decisions we made in the past were. We all have a Past Me, and Past Me is an idiot.
“The Guy” is a concept I heard about years ago. The Guy is that one person that the company absolutely cannot live without — The Guy cleans up the messes, works incredible hours, fixes things no one else can fix, and is indispensable. If The Guy is on vacation, work doesn’t get done. If The Guy gets sick, or has a family emergency, no one’s sure how to pick up The Guy’s work.
Thing is, no company over a certain size should have a The Guy. I’ve seen many situations over the years where The Guy was the result of a manager who didn’t want to staff up or provide adequate support, which forced The Guy develop. I’ve also seen many situations where people made themselves The Guy by putting so much personal pressure on themselves that they became The Guy just because.
Neither of those is healthy. My July 12 post on The Interconnected explains why, and what to do about it.
Read You are not “The Guy”.
On The Interconnected, I wrote about how we keep and create balance in our lives. It’s a little corny, but also an important message for a year that’s brought chaos to so many.
I am honored to be the author of the first post on a new website, The Interconnected. Styled a bit after The Pastry Box and a bit after goals of our own, Dylan Wilbanks, Elaine Nelson, and I built The Interconnected to be a place to discuss how we connect to each other and how, as connected people, we tie into the web. You can read more about our goals.
My first post, Cuckoos and Connections, discusses the expectations that we set for each other — and the way that every one of us, in some way, breaks someone else’s expectations.