April 2024 – James Osborn

Surrounded By Idiots

There are fools everywhere, and sometimes you can feel like they are just there, getting in your way, not understanding you, and frankly being dense just for the sake of it.

Surrounded By Idiots is an immensely readable book that takes this opening premise, and gives you the “four colours” of people to help you understand they aren’t idiots, they are just different.

As with any profiling tool, you need to take what you find to be valuable from the book. Don’t just box yourself into one of the colours and use that as a new crutch to justify why things don’t go well for you!

The book has loads of examples to help you understand the Red, Yellow, Green and Blue profiles. From the dominant, pushy Now now now types familiar to every Sales org, to the precise and methodical Blues of your data analytics department, Thomas Erikson guides you through an explanation of the profiles, how they work and what matters to them.

He helps you understand how to connect better across the divide. How do you appeal to someone who shows mostly Green characteristics? How do you meet in the middle, or at least somewhere away from your centre?

He works through the hard stuff, giving feedback, feeling angry and what saps our energy. Knowing all this helps you pull a disparate group together, leaning on strengths and rounding out weaknesses.

The key takeaway is that we are not all the same, and so to get on we have to work together to build our community. By putting in the effort to understand people we can build better and stronger relationships, and have a more fulfilling life with less stress.

A very noble goal, and again, a very engagingly written book. I’m sure you will enjoy it, and you’ll definitely learn something from it!

Processes

Good process is a great way to scale your impact. Bad processes stifle creativity and stop progress dead.

So when you think it’s time to add a new process, be really honest with yourself why you want to add it, and ask yourself a few key questions.

Firstly, is it actually going to help? Does it solve the problem you are trying to stop, or does it makes things worse? Get some people to throw some rocks at the proposal. Imagine what happens if you follow the process to the letter, as people’s judgement will fade over time, you can’t rely on that.

Assuming it passes these tests, and is likely to lead to better outcomes and good behaviours, ask yourself if it’s worth the cost? If the impact is big, then it might be worth a new process. If it’s small, why are you bothering? Don’t add overhead you don’t need.

Then ask if it’s really worth the cost. If you add an approval step to every release, then you’ll release more slowly. If three people must sign off a slide, then triple whatever the original cost to create was. If it’s your process, then you’ll need to own these costs. Nothing comes for free, it’s never just pure upside.

Finally, ask yourself how you’ll get rid of the process, or update it when the time comes. It’s easier to add than subtract, especially when you create jobs to enforce a process. What’s your way out? How will you know when a process is embedded into culture? How do you know if you are going through the motions for no real benefit?

Good process accelerates change. Bad process stifles it. Do the work to make it good, don’t just launch and forget.