My greatest professional accomplishment of the year: I got my exec & manager teammates saying "point positive," a term from whitewater rafting and kayaking.
Meaning: when facing hazards, point people toward where to go/what to do, rather than drawing attention to everything to avoid.
@eanakashima The benefits of this are obvious to me when facing immediate threats where there's no time to orient and plan a path to safety. Sharing common language so that you can get to safety with a single glance is huge.
Bringing this to the office, where emergencies are rarely this immediate, seems to be little more than applying the name to preferred behaviour where we want people to do more than just point out problems.
Is that assessment correct, or is there more to this?
@timsev @eanakashima
> [in the office] emergencies are rarely this immediate
Was about to comment the same.
It sounds like this advice would be great if you had to make a decision in seconds.
But in the office, where you usually can slow down to gain more time to evaluate your options, but management is overeager and wants you to go fast, I think that making them aware of the severity of a problem and reasons why the current approach won't work is half of the work...
@wolf480pl @timsev Hmm, I think you are reading a lot more into this than is written there. I don't encourage navigating all of our professional lives as though we are navigating a whitewater river and shouting to each other about rapids.
The point is just, when you are navigating a big change, it can often be more helpful to paint the picture of what success looks like or where we should go next than to focus overly much on all the ways we can fail or go wrong.
But this is a very high level observation (and partly a joke, written for an audience of friends) rather than a thorough guide to workplace leadership.
Emily Nakashima
Tim Severien
Wolf480pl