So cool when two of my worlds collide! Nat (they/them), the author of that article, worked at Pivotal, where I also worked and saw their influence via the company slack. A lot of ex-pivots follow their newsletter, partly for the occasional nostalgic hit of reading "what it was like working at Pivotal". Example article of that writing here: https://www.simplermachines.com/do-what-works-was-the-hard-part/

I could imagine wanting to be seen as helpful as a step toward being more helpful. But it’s weird that thIs isn’t actually stated as his goal.

Also, I get that it’s an article for a particular audience, but I wish the examples were more general. I don’t know what most of then problems described are, or what things like “retro” mean in this context. Makes it hard to tell what kinda of problems he’s identifying or describing, which makes it hard to figure out how to implement this idea (which does seem like a genuinely good one! maybe?).

I felt like this was a good quote about *why* this process:

"I'll ask why things on the list are that way, and how they got to be that way. I'm trying to establish credibility as someone who's genuinely curious and empathetic, who's patient, and who respects the expertise of my coworkers. That's the reputation that's going to let me make changes later." [emphasis added]

As a long-time developer and manager of developers, this all rings very true to me as a great way to onboard to a new team and influence change without causing undue friction.

I read this earlier in the week and thought it was great. I didn’t interpret it as a Machiavellian end at all, but even if it was… is it really a bad thing? If your behaviors are using your past experience to help the team fix things, why does it matter what the intention behind it is?

The line that grabbed me was It's one of my most powerful techniques for making changes on a team, and managing myself while I do it.

Not sure how they meant "manage myself" --literal managing my work or managing my self and my reactivity to other people. I've been slowly studying Bowen Family Systems Theory over the last several years and one of my biggest take aways is that my job (parent, partner, colleague, human) is to manage (observe, strategize) my own reactivity to people and experiences (ha! so easy to type that, so hard to do.) This book seems like a useful idea in numerous situations -- a way to capture the reactive WTF and allow time to observe, learn and experiment.