SWLW #597: Seek first to understand, The "Iterative Adjacent Possible", and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

The Iterative Adjacent Possible: Embracing Our Limitations to Unlock Our Potential
17 minutes read.

There is no better description of why startups are so hard and why, as an industry, it's such a powerful way to leverage failures to "sponsor" a few lucky ones that make it. We can iterate towards our adjacent possible while always looking 5-10 years ahead (North Star) to drive the inspiration to fuel the much-needed endurance. Or - we can choose to build a different type of company. This is the beauty of optionality and luck we have today. Alex Komoroske writes it well: "Those very visible lottery winnings get people’s attention and encourage more people to play. The investor math works out so that even a single blockbuster can subsidize the funding for dozens and dozens of failures. And the self-perpetuating myth creates a never-ending supply of fresh talent. The only downside is that the system chews up and spits out the vast majority of participants. The whole system can hum along in overall equilibrium — especially in a zero interest rate environment where huge amounts of capital can be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. [...] It is an iterated game. You make your choice, you execute on it, then you make another choice. Importantly, the choices that you have after one round are different from the choices you had before. You’ve moved forward in the possibility space, bringing a whole new set of possibilities into your adjacent possible."

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Culture

VCs Tweeting vs VCs Investing
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Seek First to Understand
4 minutes read.

"By observing how something fails, you can learn a lot about where a team or organisation is. The specific case does not matter; you are interested in the patterns of failure. Now you know where to start work. I call this technique Fix the Next One." This advice is very useful for every new hire joining a relatively high-seniority role. It's hard to build empathy and context when you're not curious to understand the constraints you operate in and the tradeoffs the team is making.

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The Human Side of World-Class Engineering Leadership | Michael Lopp (Video)
64 minutes read.

Michael Lopp is one of my favorite writers and speakers on engineering leadership. He has a great way of telling stories, explaining why he optimizes toward specific paths, and providing helpful frameworks. This interview is packed with such gems. I highly recommend jumping between topics based on your immediate interest.

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Building Layoffs on a Healthy Foundation
6 minutes read.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea covers the importance of building healthy foundations to deal with companies' struggles that often lead to layoffs: "As a leader a key job is to ensure that your company is a well run system that is a healthy and productive place to work. Layoffs are a major stress to that system, violating many of our implicit social contracts, breaking relationships, highlighting historical mistakes and failures, and bringing us face to face with the underlying business imperatives of the company. For a company that isn’t ready for them they’re a major rupture in the functioning of the system. Getting ahead of that and laying a healthy foundation is how you improve outcomes for everyone."

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Peopleware

Early-Arriver Arbitrage
6 minutes read.

The idea of looking for a "new arena" (e.g. knowledge arbitrage, social network arbitrage, technological arbitrage, cultural or geographical arbitrage) to be part of and experiment with is a powerful framing I never thought of. There are many examples around us today (e.g. I'm exploring Agents AI) if we look for them. Anu puts it well: "People talk a lot about “surface area of luck” and how to go about increasing it. Not to take the romance out of the word, but “luck” is often just the likely outcome of some kind of arbitrage. One of the best kinds of luck comes from early-arriver arbitrage because you have agency in manifesting it. Make it a point to regularly visit new arenas and you’ll see. And if you can, get to the arena before the crowd shows up."

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Evergreen Notes
6 minutes read.

Andy Matuschak's "Evergreen notes" concept is brilliant. I'd start with "Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience" to set the proper framing when approaching learning and capturing learnings.

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18 of My Favorite Frameworks (Thread)
4 minutes read.

David Perell provides 18 frameworks you can explore further. It helps me think about the frameworks I created for myself (e.g. IQ over time for project management, escape velocity for personal growth) and those I've learned from others and practiced recently. What kind of emotion or action did reading this framework have for you?

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@sweatystartup: Grumpy people make bad employees.

@jasonjoyride: Pessimism is easy, optimism is hard. Be brave, do the latter.
 


p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.