Seen.
X Factor
This week a founder shared a story about a deal.
It involved multiple businesses and multiple people within each one.
Whilst what he was trying to achieve seemed logical, he noticed that few of the conversations he was having involved logic. Instead, people's reactions were emotional.
We were reminded of an old adage: People buy with emotion and justify with logic.
Even in something complex, where you'd expect logic to be the driving force, understanding how people feel about it is still the "X" factor.
Read.
Factor X
This article discusses the use of jargon in startups.
For the author, jargon excludes. It makes things harder to understand. Acronyms, opaque abbreviations and buzzwords keep outsiders out, close down thinking and make your business harder to be a part of, reducing scope for diversity.
Others have claimed jargon just helps make communication efficient by providing a shorthand. Equally, using language that is uniquely your own helps people feel part of a team and a business, actually promoting an inclusive culture.
There is clearly a contradiction.
A point we felt built on the author's thoughts was intention: Where jargon makes simple things complex, it could be a problem. Where it makes complex things simple, it could be useful or even essential.
How does your business balance these different perspectives?
Learned.
XX≠2X
In computing there is no such thing as multitasking.
It's an illusion. Processors don't do multitasking, they do time-slicing. Quickly switching from one task to another .
This comes at a price. Every switch between tasks means a change of context. So a time-slicing processor gets less done than a processor dedicated to one task.
To get more done you can use more processors. This is called parallel processing.
This works, but only if you are organised. You have to design how the processors will communicate carefully, otherwise they just end up waiting around for each other.
Our learn this week is much of this is true of humans too.
We also can't multitask. We can time-slice but it means getting less done, and every switch between contexts builds stress.
We can do parallel processing by getting more humans involved. But it only works if we make sure they are organised and communicate. Otherwise all the humans end up wandering around confused and blaming each other.
If you are human or work with some, does any of this sound familiar?
And finally.
People are finally starting to take a break for the summer. Some very lucky ones have managed to get away.
We like to try an exercise at this time of year. We count how many channels of communication we have turn off to make sure our holidays are genuinely free of work communication.
The record so far was 16. 4 email accounts, 2 Slacks and 1 MS Teams setup, WhatsApp, Messenger, texts/calls from two phones, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The second part of our exercise is deciding which channels you really need to turn back on when you get back.
Why not try it?
Don’t forget to check out the accompanying podcast version of #founderhacks for a tantalising live experience of team atomex!
