How I operate
A short manual for working with me. It exists because the thing that makes me effective is also the thing most easily lost in a bad handoff.
The best training method I know, I learned at Pizza Hut.
In 1998 I was taught a three-step model for training people, and I have never found better. Show and tell: demonstrate it and explain it at the same time, once, clearly. Guided practice: watch them do it and check for understanding while a correction is still cheap. Follow-up: come back later and confirm it held. Almost nobody trains this way anymore. I still do, because it works on everyone.
Step two is the one people skip.
Checking for understanding is the step that tells you whether the first one worked. Skip it and you find out weeks later, expensively. I learn contemplatively, so a new process does not land the moment I hear it; it lands once I have turned it over. A pause to confirm is what turns that from a week into ten minutes.
It runs in both directions.
This is how I teach, and it is also how I take things in: a process, a procedure, or a story told over a beer. If the opening is ambiguous I am still working on it while the rest of it arrives. So I hold myself to the standard I am asking for. The first telling I give you is the one I would want back.
Ambiguity costs me more than it costs you.
When something is vague I cannot file it away and keep listening. I have to hold it open as a question, and while I am holding it I am not taking in what comes next. Three vague sentences and I have stopped absorbing the fourth. I followed you fine. I am just still working on the first one.
What I do with a clear process.
Then I go further with it. I write it down, find its edges, automate the repetitive parts, and hand back something better than I was given. Most of the systems on this site began as somebody else's process that I understood properly and then extended.
What helps
- Say the goal before the steps.
- One thing at a time, with room to confirm before the next.
- Check for understanding rather than asking whether I have questions.
- Name the done-state.
- Put it in writing, or let me.
- If I stop you to ask what something means, that is the process working, not stalling.
If we cannot get there
I will still work with you well inside a clear arrangement: defined scope, defined outcome, no drama. What suffers is open-ended collaboration, which needs shared precision to be worth anything.
If you already write things down and say what you mean, none of this costs you a thing. You just get the version of me that builds the process out, and then improves it.
I did not write the prose on this page. I inspired it. An AI crafted and finished the writing.
Start a conversation
Say what you need. I will tell you if I can help.