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Dima and Slava discuss the complexities of estimation in business contexts and the challenges of striking the balance between ambition and realism.

• Estimation, forecasting, and projecting
• Desired level of confidence for the estimate makes a difference
• Short-term vs long-term estimation
• 50/50 goals
• Benchmarking is helpful when you do something novel
• Working backwards can help in planning projects
• Is your thing really a special snowflake?
• Illusion of precision, or precision bias
• Realistic estimated vs ambitious goals

Estimation and benchmarking was also discussed in Biweeklycast #36 How Big Things Get Done.

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Dima is doing his best to explore a particular flavour of ambiguity and Slava keeps him in check by sticking to definitions and anchoring the discussion to reality.

• Ambiguity – the quality of being open to more than one interpretation
• Is ambiguity merely a lack of proper definitions?
• Approaches that help in dealing with ambiguity
• Explicit definition of how success looks like
• Clear definition of the problem to be solved
• Validate hypothesis with real-world inputs

• At times, dealing with ambiguity requires a leap of faith

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Dima and Slava explore Richard P. Rumelt’s book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters and share insights they took away from the book.

• https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239
• https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Safari-Through-Strategic-Management/dp/0743270576
• The Kernel of Strategy: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions
• What does coherence have to do with policy and strategy?
• Building on your strength is a great foundation of strategy
• Bad strategy is the result of a leader who’s unwilling or unable to say “No”
• Cut through that “strategic fluff” with focus on concrete and specific elements
• Don’t trust examples from business books. Do your own research
• 6 reflections after reading the book
• Rating the book: 3 and 5 out of 10

• The greatest closing quote ever by Dima Malenko: “Think for yourselves!”
• Check out other bookclub episodes of Biweekly

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Dima and Slave talk about what strategy is and what strategy isn’t.

• From Wikipedia: Strategy is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty.
• Dima’s characteristics of a strategy
1. Multi-step plan, a “pattern of decisions”
2. Built on a particular world view
3. Aims at global (long-term) maximum
4. Does not rely on competitors making favourable choices
5. Requires agency and ability to execute
• Different flavours of strategy: business strategy, product strategy, etc
• Not every entity needs a strategy

Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare.

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Dima and Slava count priorities and discuss how having to count priorities is a problem in and of itself.

• Dilution of terminology: priorities, KPIs…
• “Focus” is a good alternative that is expressly singular
• Priority: importance vs ordering
• Does priority get most time or the best time?
• One with 10 priority tasks gets to choose what the true top priority is
• Priority management cultures: collective and individual
• Does need for prioritisation arise having a lot more work that one can do?
• Have a stack of priorities and be very explicit about them
• Limit number of top priority items that you have at any given time

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Dima and Slava discuss the end of the second season of Biweeklycast and talk about what to expect in the upcoming third season.

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Dima and Slava discuss the practice of Open Feedback Circle and challenges of providing specific and actionable corrective feedback.

• Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast
• The Hedgehog and the Fox
• Open Feedback Circle
• Four A’s Feedback of Framework
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Erin Mayer. Discussion in Biweekly #28
• What is the value that people get from Open Feedback Circles?
• “Assume positive intent”
• Talking to people does help a lot

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Dima and Slava have read the book “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World” and discuss what it means to be a generalist and what it takes to triumph.

• Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World by David Epstein
• Biweekly 42: How Mind Change
• Wicked and kind learning environments
• Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
• "Story telling with some examples"

• General statements cannot be proven with just an example
• Who do we call “generalists”, anyway?
• T-shaped skills
• Lateral thinking
• The Market for Lemons – a theory behind bad products succeeding on a marketplace
• Best sellers vs best readers
• All bookclub episodes of Biweekly
• Next bookclub episode is going to be an experiment: a book vs podcasts
• Book: The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

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Dima and Slava start with discussing routines and dealing with them, and discover that there is a lot more than routines out there: habits, behavioural patterns, traditions, and rituals.

• Dima’s season of decoupling is… going
• So, basically your next step is “sit and wait” 🤔

• Routines are important for making changes in life. Or not?
• From Google AI Summary: “A routine is a set of actions regularly followed to create order and structure in daily life.”
• Routines vs habits vs behavioural patterns
• Is forming “an identity” around habit helpful?
• Episode #52 Needs analysis about chain of results
• Habit points and “well done” technique
• Doing things together also helps to build a habit
• Externally forced routines, which some call “rules”
• Desire for novelty does not necessarily go against building a routine
• One more flavour of “routine”: tradition
• Reactance theory
• One more flavour yet: ritual!

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Slava brings three stories from his recent professional practice and together with Dima they discuss using case studies in business training, designing a card game, and running strategic sessions for military units.

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Dima and Slava discuss a report from a foresight exercise by Aspen Digital about second and third order effect of AI, criticize the output, and agree with demise of practical skills driven by different kinds of automation.

• Second and Third Order Effects of A.I.
• AI or A.I.?
• What are foresight exercises?
• Wisdom of the crowd
• Biweekly 52: Needs Analysis – episode about chain of results
• Loss of practical skills is a real, but that is not necessarily related to AI
• Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson
• Remember "World Wide Web"?

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Dima and Slava discuss the spreadsheet mentality and the general difficulties of making data-driven decisions while not loosing the forest for the trees.

• Theme corner: Dima's season of decoupling

Spreadsheet mentality (sometimes called "spreadsheet thinking") refers to an overly mechanistic or reductionist approach to decision-making and management that relies too heavily on quantitative metrics while ignoring qualitative factors and nuance.

• Improving a number while loosing track of why we started this in the first place.

• Measure = quantify, at least for the purposes of this discussion
• Cult of data-driven decisions
• Biweekly 52: Needs Analysis
• The “Traffic Light” Approach to Problem Solving

Quotes on the topic

"What gets measured, gets managed.” – attributed to Peter Drucker or W. Edwards Deming

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." – W. Edwards Deming

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Goodheart’s Law

“Tell me how you will measure me, and then I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, don’t complain about illogical behaviour.” – Eliyahu Goldratt

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Dima and Slava discuss all the so familiar ways in which business meetings can fail and share their thoughts on how to prevent meetings from failing.

• Theme corner: Slava's winter of nucleus and spring of connection
• Magic of longer vacations

Meeting is when people get together to achieve a specific purpose

• Meetings have a goal. Effective meetings achieve their goals.
• How meetings fail
• Goal or purpose is not defined
• Meeting setup is not fit for the goal it tries to achieve
• People, who are needed, are not in the meeting
• The purpose of a meeting is misplaced
• Lack of focus in a meeting
• Wrong pacing of meeting: too fast or too slow
• Lack of follow-up
• Are there kinds of meetings that absolutely must happen face to face? Is it possible to hold any kind of meeting remotely?
• Is there a best duration for a meeting?
• The Surprising Secret of Synchronisation
• Episode about results chain 52: Needs Analysis

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Dima and Slava discuss the ineffable concept of thought leadership and politely disagree with the author of publication that sparked the discussion.

• Dima's contribution to the pile of undead documentation
• The Ineffable Concept of Thought Leadership
• "Thought leadership is content" – how can that be?
• Martin Fowler
• Serhiy Haydaychuk
• Cortext podcast
• Meta-discussion: last-minute praparation and different ways approaching multi-step tasks

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Dima and Slava discuss documentation for systems, processes, and so on, and debate how to prevent it from crossing the line from being helpful to being actively misleading.

• Dima's January of putting one foot in front of the other
• Hacker News
• Fighting undead documentation
• Documentation evolves independently of the systems/processes it describes
• Put date of last update in the document to signal that it may be outdated
• Doing something vs documenting something
• Finding a updated document can also be a challenge
• How often and how much to document?
• Ideally, documentation is integrated into the system is documents
• 1-2-3 rule for automation writing documentation
  

Just feel it!

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Dima and Slava kind of follow up on the discussion of Customer Development in the previous episode and talk about chains of results in assessment of customer needs.

• Other ideas that are connected to what The Four Steps to Epiphany discusses
• Jobs To Be Done
• Disruptive innovation
• Theme corner: Slava's winter of nucleus
• Results chains in needs assessment: inputs - outcomes - outputs activities inputs
• "The more "whys" the better."

• In education, output of a learning activity (e.g. training on giving feedback) is clearly disconnected from desired impact (supportive culture of effective continuous improvement)
• How does one know if a learning activity is going to lead to the desired impact?
• How does one know how to do something if they are not an expert in the particular field?
• Reshaping expectations of a customer

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Dima and Slava read and discuss "The Four Steps to Epiphany" – a classical book for entrepreneurs and startup founders.

• The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win
• Steve Blank
• Opt for paper or e-book. This book isn't really meant to be an audiobook.
• Key idea: for success enterpreneur needs to hit product-market fit. The book explains how to approach that systematically.
• Spreadsheet mentality: not everything that is important can be expressed numerically
• OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act
• Thought experiments for CustDev for the theme journal and a coffee shop
• Jobs To Be Done (JTDB)
• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• What if CustDev tells something different from what one wants to hear?

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Dima and Slava follow up on the conversation they started in episode 47 and Dima tries to articulate more precisely what he means by people not being specific enough and gives example of common pitfalls of obscure communication.

• Theme corner: Dima's year of next
• Example 1: "System X is broken"
• Clear call to action is very helpful
• High context and low context situations and personalities
• Example 2: "Uber for X"
• Metaphors can be useful, but must not be the only means of describing an idea
• Effectiveness of metaphors depends a lot on pre-existing context
• Example 3: "System will to be reliable"
• Context is important for everything!

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Dima and Slava dive into wonderful season of strategic sessions and try to deduce why everyone does them in December and how to make working on strategy a time well spent.

• Theme corner: Slava's fall of nucleus

• Slava's another podcast: Starsphere Talks (in Ukrainian)
• What is a "strategic session"? And why everyone tries to have them in November and December?
• Difference between strategizing and yearly planning
• What to consultants or external facilitators bring to strategic sessions?
• Leadership and collaboration for strategy development
• Work on strategy: a point in time or a process
• What's "strategic" in your work?

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Dima and Slava discuss "Founder Mode", an essay by Paul Graham about differences between more founders and hired managers in tech companies.

• Founder Mode
• Format of an essay
• What is special about founders?
• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky: ‘I Never Called it Founder Mode’
  

"An argument can be perfectly biased in two different ways."

• Perils of delegation: where to dive deep and where to step away
• Is "manager mode" about driving towards short-term objectives and "founder mode" about executing on a long-term vision?

"Care about what you do."