Links of the Week (Week 3/2016)

LinksoftheWeek

Here are our Links of the Week, curated from several of our partners’ reading lists.

Facilitation & complexity

Chris Corrigan writes about the danger of being attached to an outcome in facilitation or consulting situations. Referring to the story of a recent Netflix series that dealt with this topic, he asks the question:

how do we let go of a pre-conceived outcome so that we can truly learn what’s going on and make decisions based on good information?

Read all about it in The curse of predetermining outcomes.

The value of your degree

A remarkable piece of news from the accountancy world. Ernst & Young have decided to no longer require prospective new hires to have a university degree.

While this approach might have already appealed to you intuitively, the company backs it up with data:

“Our own internal research of over 400 graduates found (…) no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken.

The full article can be found in the Huffington Post.

Successful teams according to Google

Based on two years of action research, our colleagues at Google re:Work share the five key elements to a successful team.

image by Google re:Work
image by Google re:Work

Read the full article: The five keys to a successful Google team.

The Gap

This short video is aimed at creatives and makers but carries an equally important message for anyone who is doing work of any kind. It describes the Gap between being a beginner and being good, or even a master, at what you do.

Hitting snooze on Slack

Here at Structure & Process, we use Slack for a lot of our internal communications. The team chat tool is rising in popularity and Slack groups that accept people across organisation boundaries are popping up everywhere. That means that it is more and more likely that you’ll be in multiple Slack teams (yours truly is already in 5).

That could mean getting an overload of notifications throughout the day (and night), effectively killing your concentration. Luckily Slack has recently introduced the “Do not disturb” mode.

With some simple settings you’ll be able to control when you want to disturbed by Slack, and when not! Find out how at Knock, Knock: Introducing Do Not Disturb.

About Rob van den Brand

Rob van den Brand is a former partner in Structure & Process. Among others he held the roles of Personal Productivity Coach, Holacracy Facilitator and Product Development. He is focused on providing the necessary guidance to organisations that want to transition to different ways of working. He also likes to help people get more productive personally. Rob's Website is Productive Mind.