midset

How many books on your bookshelves have a number in the title? Specifically a list of X things. Such books sell, blog posts of a similar ilk get read.

Small, specific nuggets of information, best presented as a list and advertised as such. No grand unifying thesis, just “75 things”. The closest I have ever come to this was “Little Book of Requirements and User Stories” which was my best seller and would have sold more if I had called it “16 tips to improve your User Stories.”

However, most of my books aren’t like that. Most of my books contain a big idea – at least one big idea. The whole book sets out to explain that. Business Patterns does say “38 Business strategy patterns” but really the books big idea was “Apply pattern thinking to business strategy”. In retrospect it would have sold better if I had called the book “38 Business strategy patterns” and put the pattern thinking stuff as an appendix.

Regular readers might notice that my blogs follow a similar pattern: mostly long thoughtful pieces which try to build an argument, few practical posts thrown in once in a while. Despite knowing I should write more short practical pieces (to boost readership) I keep failing.

Why?

Two reasons.

Sometimes those “short practical tips” seem so trivial, or so obvious, that I just assume everyone does it that way and everyone sees what I see. They are so small and so “obvious” I don’t see them.

But more because I see value in those long pieces. I see them as “philosophy” pieces, they are about how to see the world, how to comprehend what is going on, sense-making. Quite often I will wrestle with balancing forces, how one force pushed you one way while another pushes you another. The right course of action is about balancing those forces and what is “right” may be different at different times. (Thats a pattern thing.)

It might be better if I called those “Mindset” pieces. They are about preparing the mind to see the world in a particular way. Conditioning you for agile, perhaps.

To me those Mindset pieces are more important because they shape the way you respond. In the complex world in which we live few decisions and few courses of action can actually be boiled down to a simple “If this Then do That”. Instead, the thousands of small decisions you make each day are informed by your mindset (philosophy) of how the world works and what will happen if you make decision X instead of decision Y.

Especially for those working in management, it is your mental view of the world that shapes your decisions and relationships. I’m sure somewhere out there is a “50 practical tips for better management decisions” book but in truth there are so many variables, unknowns and ambiguities that you can’t boil the world down like that.

Thats why, while everyone is short of time and wants “10 practical tips” to fix a problem right now it is more important to spend time really challenging your own thinking. Change can only really become permanent when people change their actions and decisions without thinking each time, when people can make decision #563 today congruently to everything else not because they read it in book but because that is the way their mind works.

Our constant search for “quick answers” can mislead us, we might get a quick answer but we aren’t necessarily building our long term capability.

In Succeeding with OKRs in Agile, I tried hard to write a hands-on-practical tips book. I failed but in failing I did better than I would have done without trying. I very deliberately kept the opening chapters short and quickly moved into “practical tips” (mainly about writing OKRs). Almost all the mindset philosophy was pushed later in the book. So far sales suggest I got it right.

So, even as I strive this year to write more “10 practical tips” blog posts I expect I’ll have more philosophy as I put the world to rights!

---

Subscribe and download Continuous Digital for free