Obliquity: the art of the indirect
This is going to be short and sweet since I am currently enjoying a week off (autumn holidays) with the family. I thought of honoring my cadence here regardless.
This isn't the first time I've written about it, but this is intended to be slightly more direct (no pun intended) in touching the matter. And with that better exemplify the power of the oblique.
If you really think about it, you may have an intuitive sense of how much of life happens in indirect ways. A very simple example that will resonate with parents out there (I'm on a week off with family, so this is in my mind): in dealing with small children, you quite often won't tackle something head-on. You will use some sort of indirect mechanism, you will redirect incentives and things like that. All of those are facets of what I am describing here as obliquity.
But there is much more to that, and back to business, here's a list that I can think of (for the time being, with no intention to be a comprehensive list):
You don't (or at least shouldn't) do (weekly) updates for the sake of it, but because of the reflection, feedback, materialization of learning, and possibly some other indirect reasons.
You don't improve the conversion rate of a product by directly telling users what is missing, but by 'nudging' their (change in) behavior likely in some unorthodox indirect way.
The point of limiting WIP is quite often not to find what you have the capacity to do at a moment but precisely to indirectly trigger the conversation of what matters most (now, next, and what can be parked for later or even never at all).
In 1:1's, quite often what you will keep as something remarkable wasn't something dealing with something head-on but some indirect implication (watch out for confirmation bias, though).
You shouldn't value quality over speed, or alternatively, dynamically steer between the two as two levers of some sort of trade-off, but rather because in the long run, quality enables speed (of change).
I could go on for a little while, but I think you get the spirit of what I am trying to articulate here. There's one more I would like to state as one of my personal favorites, and in fact, one that some people may find counterintuitive in how I approach things at work:
It's not about valuing output (efficiency) over outcomes (efficacy), but ensuring the flow of work at the output level is one of the best shots you have to increase the likelihood of achieving (more) outcomes and to do it sustainably.
Or, better stated, like in a previous post here:
Flow enables efficacy