launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Jono.  I hope the retrospective goes well.  We'd be very happy to
> hear your ideas on changes and improvements and experiments.  (I still
> need to write up today's retrospective but I'm out of time ATM.)
>
> I'll update the lists as you suggest.
>
> I'm not sure yet exactly how I'll integrate the Covey ideas, but I'm
> very interested in trying to do so. Depending on a cross-team developer
> (or developer) is definitely one of the more consistently difficult
> things we've encountered, both in the open source world and not.
> Occasionally it works fabulously, but more often it falls into a hole.
>
> Items 3-5 are particularly easy to miss, and yet they also are hard when
> the natural consequences are only on your side.  Interesting to think
> about incentives ("unnatural consequences"?) in that context, but it
> feels like that might backfire sometimes.
>

I think of incentives as "imposed consequences". I think natural ones
are more motivating[1], even if they don't directly apply to you. I
think this goes doubly so when all the people involved are in the same
organization and thus are (hopefully!) on the same side.

Compare the vague sense of unease and guilt I get when I know I'm
procrastinating on a review for someone vs knowing that while I'm not
reply this, Benji literally has nothing to do and everyone working on
Launchpad is waiting on slow build runs and I'll never get
auto-completing tags on the +filebug form at this rate. Also, if I
don't reply before Friday he's probably going to fork and then it'll
be heaps of hard work to ever get patches out of him again.

I don't really know how to integrate the Covey delegation thing
either. It's still pretty new to me and am looking forward for more
ways to experiment with it. Want to do some of my work? :P

There's also the David Allen trick of keeping a "Waiting For" list[2]
and reviewing it from time to time. That one is a life-changer.

cheers,
jml

[1] ISTR, "Drive" and other bits of research that show that incentives
often backfire, as people would often rather cop the punishment or do
without the reward than do the actual thing.
[2] Or a @WAITING email folder. Or both.