Thoughts

Getting to the Work Graph

influential in my thinking on how I work with others is the concept of "Work Graphs" by Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana.

The points in a Work Graph are not people, they're action items, dates, documents. When we rely on meetings and person-to-person interactions for everything, we prevent the "work graph" from existing and require a minimum of two people having a near blocking-process moment to make something happen or retrieve poorly stored data or redecide when something should happen or generally (re)aggregate, (re)determine, (re)coordinate, and (re)document. If those verbs begat nouns, we've made progress. If they merely stay in the two (or more heads), we loose data (almost immediately!) resulting in (wait for it...) more meetings!

The less vague things are (and conversely, more actionable), the more enabling it is for people to actually take action. Leaving things vague provides a buffer for failure, but it also puts that same buffer between us and success—so we can never be quite sure if we've achieved it or not.