People are hard to change. As an industry, we've invested enormous sums of money in trying to help people change. Performance management systems. 360's. Personality tests. The list is long and every single item on the list represents hundreds of millions of dollars over the last thirty years. None of them really work at changing people...

I've seen tears of many types in the workplace - anger, joy, sadness, pride, defiance, and misery. I've been the cause of tears at work and I've shed my own. Yesterday I shed tears of sadness. I was glad that I was remote, and even though the other person in the meeting knew exactly what was happening I was grateful that I could turn o...

In 2009 I launched a side hustle, TroopTrack.com, that helped Boy Scout troop leaders manage their organizations. It was a simple product and was built as a one-off solution specifically for Boy Scout troops. Within a year I was getting requests from customers to add support for Cub Scout packs. And Girl Scout troops. Other “youth char...

Years ago I lived in a small city called Nobeoka on the eastern side of the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. Nobeoka, as I remember it, is built on a coastal plain wedged between the Hyuga-Nada Sea on the east and steep mountains in every other direction. There was only one train track through the city, coming down from Saiki in the...

Years ago I got in a fight with a friend. I was certain I had the moral high ground, that I understood the problem correctly, and that she was to blame. I told her as much. When I was done, she told me her view, and as she talked I felt several sensations sweep over me, almost all at the same time, but they were distinct feelings. Firs...

In my last post I mentioned a game that systematized feedback in a real-time, civil, and limited way. It also reduced the number of times my team members would interrupt each other, a key factor in helping everyone feel as if they were listened to. I first got the idea for this game in 1995. I was sitting in an engineering class at BYU...

Years ago as an IT project manager I found myself in a difficult position on a new assignment. The team I’d been given was completely dysfunctional. In terms of the five phases of group development, they were in perpetual storming, unable to resolve conflicts about roles and responsibilities within the team. As a result, this team was ...

Do you see the curvy pieces of wood in the trash bin? That’s a sampling of the templates I threw away as I was getting ready to build the custom desk I posted about recently. As a reminder, here’s a picture of what it looks like: Getting the templates right was the hardest and most time consuming part of the project. I racked up at lea...