Accountability sinks via A Working Library [Shared]

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

I have seen this lack of accountability in real life many times. It allows any one employee to disavow responsibility for any action. “It is corporate policy. I can’t connect you with anyone else who can help you.” Even worse is the individual who performs heinous acts that they would decry being done to them because “It’s not me who is causing the issues. It is the amorphous ‘company’ that is doing it.” Corporations weaponize this inability to empathize in their workforce and “plausible deniability” to treat their customers with contempt. – Douglas

Accountability sinks via A Working Library

The image is a book cover with a predominantly white background. At the top, there is a quote in red text that reads, Funny, fascinating and compelling by Tim Harford. Below the quote, the title of the book is prominently displayed in large black text: The Unaccountability Machine. The subtitle, Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How the World Lost Its Mind, is written in smaller red text. The authors name, Dan Davies, is positioned at the bottom left in white text. The cover features a black and white image of a suit jacket, shirt, and tie, with the head area intentionally left blank, symbolizing the theme of accountability.</p> <p>Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B

Buy The Unaccountability Machine via Bookshop.org

In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

Davies proposes that:

For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.

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Repair and Remain: How to do the slow, hard, good work of staying put by Kurt Armstrong [Shared]

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Repair and Remain: How to do the slow, hard, good work of staying put by Kurt Armstrong

The image shows two individuals standing barefoot on a floor covered with newspapers. They are holding paintbrushes, suggesting they are engaged in a painting activity. The person on the left is wearing denim shorts and has paint splatters on their legs, while the person on the right is wearing ripped jeans, also with paint on them. Both individuals are holding paintbrushes, with the person on the left holding a brush with a white handle and the person on the right holding a brush with an orange handle. The floor is scattered with newspapers, and a paint roller is visible on the left side of the image. The background is a plain wall, and the overall scene suggests a casual, hands-on approach to home improvement.</p></p> <p><p>Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B

Let’s say time comes to gut and renovate your bathroom: I can help you with that—demolition, framing, reworking the plumbing, moving some electrical, installing some mould-resistant drywall, maybe some nice tile for the floor and some classic glazed ceramic three-by-six subway tile for the tub surround. Should take a month or two, depending on what all’s involved. And as for you, hey, for the sake of your wife and kids, I think you better quit the flurry of furtive late-night texts to the sexy young co-worker and cut back a bit on your recreational drinking because wine is a mocker, so goes the proverb, as if those Facebook posts of you at the bar last week weren’t proof enough.

Repair and remain. Work with what you’ve got. Sit still for a moment, take stock, make some changes. Big changes, if necessary.

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The 4 Types of Luck by Sahil Bloom [Shared]

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

The 4 Types of Luck by Sahil Bloom

The image features three white dice in mid-air against a dark background. The dice are captured in a dynamic state, with one die in the foreground showing a five, another in the middle showing a six, and the third in the background showing a five. The dice are illuminated by a light source from the upper left, casting shadows on the surface below. The focus is sharp on the dice, highlighting the black dots representing the numbers, while the background remains blurred, emphasizing the motion of the dice. The overall composition is minimalist, with the contrast between the white dice and the dark background creating a striking visual effect.</p></p> <p><p>Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B

The 4 Types of Luck

In 1978, a neurologist named Dr. James Austin published a book entitled Chase, Chance, & Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty.

In it, Dr. Austin proposed that there are four types of luck:

Blind Luck

Luck from Motion

Luck from Awareness

Luck from Uniqueness

Here’s how to think about each type:

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Start with the Jar: How to understand your capacity via Turtle’s Pace [Shared]

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Start with the Jar: How to understand your capacity via Turtle’s Pace

The image features a clear glass jar with a wooden lid, filled with colorful, spherical objects resembling planets. The jar is set against a plain, light-colored background, which enhances the vivid colors of the contents. The spheres vary in size and color, with prominent hues of orange, blue, green, and red. Some spheres have detailed textures and patterns, mimicking the appearance of planets like Jupiter and Saturn, with visible bands and spots. The arrangement of the spheres is random, creating a visually appealing and cosmic scene. The jar is filled to the brim, with the spheres densely packed, showcasing a miniature representation of the solar system.</p></p> <p><p>Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B

Optimism is dangerous, especially when it comes to planning our goals. If we underestimate the effort of an endeavor, we set ourselves up for failure. When we fail to meet our expectations, we can succumb to cynicism.

We must learn how much we can process to avoid the hope trap.

Domain, Duration, and Dimension

Imagine you have thousands of marbles to carry on a plane, and airport security released a new regulation that limits an individual to one jarful. If you don’t know the jar’s capacity, you won’t know how many marbles you can bring and could risk losing your precious orbs!

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How To Be More Intelligent 101 via Nicholas Bate [Shared]

Posted on April 7, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

How To Be More Intelligent 101 via Nicholas Bate

How To Be More Intelligent 101 via Nicholas Bate

1. Read staggering amounts, regularly returning to the classics both fiction and non-fiction. 

2. Write your own notes of your daily learnings aiming for super concise summaries. In that way you must squeeze and reveal the essence of a subject. 

3. Stay active during the day. That’s not just ‘go to the gym’. Stay active; you’ll notice the ideas flowing so much more quickly and easily.

Plus 100 more!


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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber [Shared]

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

Full text of book is available in several formats on the web page.

In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation.

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.

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The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum [Shared]

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

A concept for life in genreal, not just coding. – Douglas

The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum

The Art of Finishing via Bytedrum [Shared]

“It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon. I’ve carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project. As I settle into my chair and open my terminal, I’m confronted with a challenge that’s become all too familiar: deciding which of my many unfinished projects to tackle.

I navigate to my project directory, greeted by a graveyard of half-implemented ideas and stalled works-in-progress. Each one represents a different problem I’ve tried to solve, a different technology I’ve attempted to master. They’re all interesting, each with its own purpose and potential. But as I scan through them, I can already feel my enthusiasm waning. I know that whichever one I choose, I’ll be facing not just the original problem, but a hydra of new challenges that have sprouted since I last looked at the code.”

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Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan [Shared]

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan [Shared]

Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer via Lara Hogan [Shared]

As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it.

If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the energy of the room was off—and that feeling affected you, even if it was super subtle.

We’re wired to spidey sense this stuff; this gut instinct is part of what’s helped us stay safe for millenia. Our amygdalas are constantly on the lookout for threats in our environment that could be bad news. Plus, we tend to infer meaning from those weird vibes. Our brain is trying to make sense of the shift in behavior, so we’ll make some (often subconscious) guesses about what’s truly going on. We often even jump to the assumption that those vibes are about us.

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Building a Creativity Kanban via Will Patrick [Shared]

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Building a Creativity Kanban via Will Patrick [Shared]

Building a Creativity Kanban via Will Patrick [Shared]

To get more creative work done, think like a car manufacturer. A system for optimising the creative process and breaking through your barriers.

Always Be Shipping

Have you made anything lately?

Have you published anything? Shipped anything? Finished something and put it into the world? Your answer will lie somewhere on the spectrum between ‘Yes – today!’ and, ‘No. Never.’

Your answer is important.

Tell me how often you ship, publish, or show the world what you’re doing and I’ll tell you where you’ll be in five years. In short: you’ll be doing incredibly well and far, far better than the person who said, ‘No. Never.’

If you are someone who is in the business of creating anything – whether it’s code, books, photographs, videos, lessons, physical products – the importance of regularly shipping what you make cannot be emphasised enough.

It is vital.

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Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises via Harvard Business Review [Shared]

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Douglas E. Welch

Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises via Harvard Business Review 

Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises via Harvard Business Review

Summary.   

Moral injury is experienced as a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations and that have the potential of harming others physically, psychologically, socially, or economically, and it could prompt people to leave a company. It was first studied in veterans who’d witnessed atrocities of war. More recently, this research has been extended to health care, education, social work, and other high-pressure and often under-resourced occupations. The past two years have made it increasingly clear that moral injury can occur in many contexts and populations, including the workplace. As a new world of work unfolds before us and the pact between employee and employer gets rewritten, leaders have to learn and evolve to keep pace. The authors present six things leaders can do to ensure their actions aren’t unintentionally injuring the moral center of those they lead.

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