Staying Organized When Stakes are High
We’re under no illusions that we save everyone’s holidays, but we have a tool we hope might help some of you.
We’re coming into the holiday season. While we’re supposed to be relaxing and enjoying time with our families, it can also be stressful to plunge back into fraught relationships, and some of us run ourselves ragged trying to make other people happy.
Our Next Episode: Incident Management at Thanksgiving
Did you know that fire departments, emergency medical responders, and the teams that manage complex internet services like Gmail and Robinhood all use the same basic process for incident management when something goes wrong, to ensure that they’re responding efficiently while sharing information with everyone who needs to know it? It’s called the Incident Command System.
Brent Chapman is an expert in incident management; every year, he hones that expertise as part of the team which provides emergency services at Burning Man, and he has introduced or formalized incident management at Google, Slack, and other tech companies. In next week’s episode, he’ll explain why incident management practices are so flexible and useful, and how they can be applied to situations in our personal lives, such as the high stakes problem of preparing a holiday meal for your family.
Another tool for the holidays: Leslie Jones Stops Your Annoying Relatives from Ruining Thanksgiving | The Daily Show
Tools
Incident Management
The Incident Command System is a way of organizing a response to a high-stakes, complex situation. While often used for emergencies (burning buildings, broken online services, etc.), our upcoming episode will talk about its use in non-emergency but high-stakes situations like preparing a holiday meal, or keeping a polling place running correctly.
Crucial Conversations
One of Hindsight Retros’ favorite tools comes up again in the next episode. Crucial Conversations is a book (and a series of classes) describing a method for having a constructive conversation even when stakes are high and people are emotional. It’s a powerful and nuanced approach, but at root it boils down to establishing common ground before branching out to talk about the points under contention.
Checklist Manifesto
Another Hindsight Retros all-star, The Checklist Manifesto extolls the benefits of using checklists for high-stakes processes: even if we think we know how to do something, under pressure it’s easy to forget little details, and having a checklist means we have a place to write down anything we want to make sure we do differently next time – one of the core ideas of the Hindsight Retros philosophy being that we should learn from our mistakes, and find ways to make sure we don’t forget those lessons.
The Pregame
Every high stakes experience deserves a pregame (no, we don’t mean having drinks at home before a night out on the town). A pregame is an opportunity to bring your friends, family, or team together, outline your strategy and tactics, and what you’ll do if the going gets rough. Just ask the group 3 simple questions:
What are your goals?
What are you worried about?
What good fortune are you hoping for?
This helps you understand the group’s styles and goals, which can help you avoid conflict, and relax and enjoy the experience.
Contact and Feedback
If you’re enjoying the podcast, tell a friend! Forward a newsletter, reshare our Facebook or LinkedIn posts, send them to http://hindsightretros.substack.com, or have them search for “Hindsight Retros” in their podcast app.
We’re very interested in broadening the topics of our episodes, which means getting more people in the studio [that’s an expression, we generally record remotely]. If you’re interested, or you know anybody who’d be interested, in spending an hour or two doing a retro on air with us, please let us know!
We also love any feedback from listeners. Have you put any of this into practice in your own life? Any ideas that stick with you?
Tell us about people we should talk to, or give us feedback, by emailing us at feedback@hindsightretros.com.
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