#but i cannot prioritise. i have other things to illustrate too!!!

[drgnbnd]

x

it's not enough that the Light destroyed us all

[dingkaigrad604]

20 objects ideas

I plan to do the poster using photographs of the real objects but mixing it with digital illustrations based of my own style as well as researched and inspiring illustrators/designers.

My huge 100 Bill belt buckle - I've worn it almost everyday and to me it represents being able to be obnoxious with expression and art yet conscious and self aware about it.

Headphones - Has helped uplift many aspects of my life and amplifies emotions.

Sketchbook and pen - My main form of expressing my thoughts and feelings through illustrations and journaling

Bamboo house plant - A gift from my dad to give me good luck with my studies.

My metal KFC bucket - A sentimental item from my first job as well as a practical item where I put my accessories

My pen tablet which I use alot to create my digital illustrations.

My smiling sleep mask - I used to wear it alot outside as an accessory. It reminds me now of a period where I first started finding myself and style with my creative thoughts and paths. It also helped me realise I don't always have to make sense of my artwork and just do it for my own enjoyment just as it doesn't make sense to wear a sleeping mask on my forehead all day instead of my eyes.

My other belts and hats - Important forms of expression

Chinese red packets - Has been one of the few traditions keeping me in touch with my relatives that I'm away from.

A half empty wallet - My struggle between prioritising the financial stability of my future or my satisfaction and enjoyment with my life and creative aspects

Super Diaper Baby Book - Helped me learn to embrace stupidity and pure fun when being creative. And to run wild with any idea you have

Acrylic paints and paint brushes - I found out during high school arts that traditional arts is not my strength and that my strong points are in digital image making and illustration. The paint reminds me that as people there will always be things you're not good at and things that you are and that you have to accept yourself for the things you cannot do and appreciate your strengths. Especially as artists, too many people are too in their own heads doubting their own abilities because they can't seperate their good and bad points.

My framed images - I have a framed image of my dad in China on my wall. Underneath is a framed poster of two American rappers and another of a photograph of a fight between Ali and Fraiser. This is a reminder to me about how my cultural knowledge and involvement is diluted as a kiwi Chinese and how it will continue to dilute if I don't do anything about it.

My mini statues of Chinese kids doing kung fu - It's hard to tell when you're actually in touch with your culture or whether you're just using it as decoration trying to seem like you're cultured. Often I feel like I'm just an imposter. These little figurines have no meaning or symbolism behind it, I simply thought it looked cool when I bought it.

The guitar in my room - Reminds me of the importance of commitment and consistency. Because It was something I bought, picked up and learnt the easy parts of guitar and then stopped playing. No skill can be developed easily you must put effort in. Though at the same time I'm happy, the skills I learnt are the parts of guitar I enjoyed playing the most so it's now also a reminder that it's okay to just have fun sometimes and not put so much pressure onto yourself and others.

The plant pot on the balcony - My dad made me draw this plant everyday to try improve sketching skills. During this process I realised this is not something I'm passionate about. It helped me realise I enjoy expression ideas from my head in an illustrative cartoon-like fashion. I really appreciate realism and the art of it but this helped me realise this isn't a path and art form I wanted to pursue.

My high school math books - Where I best expressed my love for doodling and drawing whatever comes to mind. Math classes were definitely the most boring which lead to the most drawings out of my school books.

Video Game Controller - Video games are their own form of art. Every game was created by and individual or a team of creatives who collaborated many creative ideas and refined it and continue to refine the final product. Video games were a huge source of creativity during my childhood. Interesting game concepts, characters, storylines, soundtracks, environments/settings all fuelled my creative drive growing up.

DVD's - A selection of dvd's which content set the tone for my creative ideas of lighthearted, fun and exciting (at least to myself!)

Pack of pens - A specific pack of pens My dad got me when I was younger. I'm grateful my dad has accepted me always and is comfortable with the direction I'm going in life. I've always been stressed and worried that wanting to be an artist would be gut wrenching for my parents but that wasn't the case. This acceptance has freed up so much space in my mind to focus on doing the things I want to do

Chinese Cigarettes - The smell of it reminds me of the smell of being in China. Which reminds me of one of my roles of telling my story as one of the many Kiwi Chinese artists in New Zealand.

Box of chocolates gifted to me that I will never eat - I keep it around as a reminder to how important my friends are to me and how important I am to them. I find that I have a problem where I easily forget they exist sometimes or forget how important it is to maintain connection with them and this gift is a constant reminder to myself that it is important. This in a way also shows the importance of human connection within a creative setting/world.

[yjwhatif]

Ok let’s do a quick post on Kaldur and Objectivity before the new episodes drop…

While there’s M’gann and Zatanna who show a certain lack of objectivity, Kaldur is arguably too objective for his own good. He’s made a habit of often making/agreeing to decisions based on logic and ultimately disregarding the emotional impact said decisions have on others and himself. Especially himself.

Kaldur has been involved in two major secret operations which manipulated his fellow heroes and friends into situations designed to hurt the Light. Great for The Mission. Not so great for the friends hurt in the process. He’s very much a product of Batman’s guidance - putting all personal desires aside to ensure full focus is where it needs to be - to ensure maximum success. Even if it means playing by the other side's rule book.

Kaldur is a soldier and his duty is to protect those in need - even if that means sacrificing part of himself to ensure others don’t have to suffer the burden themselves. After the traumatic experience that was Failsafe, Kaldur’s first instinct when talking with Canary was to step down from his role as leader - all because he let himself get ‘killed’ saving the life of another and ultimately abandoning his team. The only reason he revokes his resignation is to protect 13yo Robin from having to carry the “burden” of leader whilst being still so young — despite Kaldur himself only being 16/17yo at the time. Logically Kaldur is the best leader - but given the fact he describes the role as a “burden” illustrates pretty clearly his emotional opinion of the role.

Kaldur’s choice to prioritise logic over emotion can be just as harmful as the reverse — especially when it’s his own emotions he’s disregarding. After Tula died and he discovered Black Manta was his father, Kaldur never grieved or took a timeout to come to terms with these major life changes, instead he saw a logical opportunity to further their mission by going undercover to tear the Light down from within. A plan which would also isolate him from those he cares about - at a time he should really have support around him - and paint him as a dirty traitor to all who knows him. That is not a good way to process your grief - in fact, he essentially commodifies it - making it into a believable reason why he’d switch sides instead of an emotion that comes after suffering a loss. Then there’s what happens after Wally's death… Kaldur loses one of his closest friends and what does he decide to do? He carries on leading. After everything he’d been through undercover, the experiences he had to face, the deception he had to embody, and it all ended with the death of someone else he cared about. He cannot go through all that and just be ok - all things have a breaking point whether you want to believe it or not.

S3 may have shown some of those cracks starting to reveal themselves when Kaldur struggles to accept the praises of his king and mentor regarding the Outsiders mission the Anti-Light manipulated. The logic of lying for the sake of the mission finally shows its weight as it tugs on his conscience and causes his emotions to slip into view. This is the first instance of his losing a bit of composure - the emotional side he’s been neglecting for 3 seasons is finally catching up to him and is ready to tip the scales. As I said in my Random thoughts post, all things have a breaking point and I strongly feel like Kaldur’s is coming very soon. In what we’ve seen of him in 4a, he couldn’t even speak when Artemis asked what had happened and he’s been spending time at Conner and Wally’s memorials - those emotions are getting stronger. Something major has got to happen in Kaldur’s arc that causes that change in design seen in the trailer, and whatever it is I think that will be the thing that finally breaks him… (sorry but he is overdue some form of emotional breakdown after all the stuff he’s been through)

Anyway, I don’t know how his actually reads. I just wanted to get the basic thoughts down before I see what actually happens in 4b. I love Kaldur and I’m so excited to see what the show brings us with his arc and the rest of the show… Guess I’ll find out tomorrow!

Happy YJ watching everybody!

LB

[skylinesnsunshines]

skz reading: bang chan ideal type + as a boyfriend

hi friends! today i’m doing a reading for chan’s ideal type and what he’d be like as a boyfriend. you all know the drill, askbox is open so submit requests if you’d like (but please read my rules first) with that being said let’s get into it!

DISCLAIMER: this is all speculative and for entertainment purposes only, so take it with a grain of salt :)

decks used: ethereal visions tarot, archetype cards by caroline myss, heavenly bodies astrology, the wild unknown animal by kim krans

(italicised is the card on the bottom of the tarot deck which is meant to represent the subconscious/blind spot of the situation + rx means reversed)

IDEAL TYPE

temperance, 7 of cups, 3 of swords rx, the chariot | liberator, child:wounded, hyena, house four: cultural and family roots, home, peace and comfort

chris wants someone who’s emotionally balanced and patient as the temperance card talks about doing everything in moderation, due to his libra stellium it’s unsurprising he wants a partner who is his “equal” and able to be calm in whatever situation and i feel he wants his partner to be the type to do actions “for the greater good”. with the 7 of cups, i feel chris doesn’t have a “specific type” he goes for but he does admire certain traits/characteristics of people which tells me he really does fall for someone’s personality and finds beauty in everything/everyone, this card can also describe someone who’s a dreamer and idealistic which tells me that chris likes the “creative types” as these people tend to have lots of ideas. the 3 of swords rx can indicate someone who has gone through difficult situations but has healed/is healing themselves due to their level of forgiveness, since his venus is in scorpio it’s unsurprising to me that he wants to have a really deep bond with someone and this card indicates that he wants someone who he’ll be able to be fully vulnerable with, this card can also indicate someone who’s a peacemaker so with the temperance card i definitely see someone who’s very fair and patient like chan himself. the chariot card is associated with cancer so this tells me the that i feel chan wants someone who resembles him but amplifies his positive traits, this card describes someone who has a very high level of determination and willpower though so underneath all that “fair” and patient energy this is definitely someone who’s a force to be reckoned with, cancer rules the moon and therefore deals with the divine feminine which means that there’s a possibility in his relationship he could want to be “nurtured” since he’s used to being the nurturer, he definitely wants someone who is very emotionally intelligent and is protective of those they care about. 

with the liberator card, this tells me chan definitely wants a leader type and someone who people look up to as it talks about someone who frees themselves and others from outmoded beliefs, on the card it illustrates a woman holding a torch so it gives me the vibe that this person is very selfless and is willing to help others before themselves (just like chan himself). child:wounded talks about someone who has a lot of compassion and desire to help those who are wounded especially children, it also talks about someone who is able to forgive themselves and others which reiterates my points made earlier with the 3 of swords rx card. hyena talks about someone who’s very humorous and sarcastic so sense of humour is definitely important for chan’s ideal type, i definitely feel his type of person has a natural knack for communication and their words can uplift people. house four is ruled by cancer so it reiterates the points i made about the cancerian qualities i pointed out earlier, i feel his ideal person is someone who is very attached to their family wether they’d be biological or not, definitely is a lot of people’s “home” and often is described as the “mum/responsible friend”.

AS A BOYFRIEND

6 of swords, death rx, queen of cups, the hanged one | mediator, gossip, turtle, libra: consideration, fairness and harmony

with the 6 of swords i do feel chris goes through a lot of personal transformations especially during relationships (cause of his scorpio venus), he’d definitely be the type to sacrifice himself for “the greater good” and falls extremely hard when he’s found his match, this can also mean that there’s two sides to him and he often keeps the part of himself he’s not proud of “hidden” because he doesn’t want to burden anyone else, i also get the feeling that he sees love as something that’s very transformative and cannot do surface level relationships as his soul craves something that is very intense. the death rx card basically reiterates the points i made earlier as this and the 6 of swords both represent scorpio and scorpio energy is very intense, chris definitely keeps his walls up and often bears his burden alone which is why he wants someone who’s very nurturing as cancerian energy matches very well with scorpio since they are both water signs, chris is only ever vulnerable to a handful of people and this card tells me when he finds someone he feels safe with he’ll let them in his life and be extremely loyal to them, but if they ever had a falling out he will take that very personally and struggle to move on as his scorpio venus can make him extremely attached to people. queen of cups tells he wants a nurturing soul cause he himself is one, since the cups describes emotions and is more of a feminine energy it tells me chris is extremely in tune with his emotions and has very pure intentions, i can definitely see people coming to him and venting as he often listens without judgement and has a high level of empathy. with the hanged one on the bottom, i feel chris could take his time when pursuing someone as this card talks about someone willingly pausing, he’ll take his time cause again he wants to make sure he TRULY likes the person as once he’s involved with someone it’s very hard for him to seperate, i feel he could be a bit quirky when he expresses his love too which is quite cute.

it’s unsurprising we got the mediator card as he is a libra after all, he’s definitely the type to solve problems from an objective point of view and people often go to him for advice as they know he’ll be able to come to an agreement that is fair for everyone, definitely the type of boyfriend to discuss problems rationally and logically. with the gossip card i do feel chan could be pretty talkative with his partner, once he’s comfortable with someone i totally feel he’ll tell them a lot of things and his person would be his human diary so to speak as communication is very important for him since it is an air sign trait. turtle card talks about someone who’s peaceful, grounded, adventurous and an old soul which describes chan to a t, he’s definitely very wise and loves peace which is why everyone listens to what he says as others know whatever he says will be beneficial for everyone. libra card for the libra stellium, chan definitely prioritises consideration, fairness and harmony in relationships and it tells me that he’s incredibly loyal especially to those he loves, i definitely think he’s gonna be quite romantic in relationships and will express his love in various ways but will get shy at times cause he’s easily flustered. overall, he’s definitely a dream boyfriend <3  

that is all! if you have any feedback, comments, queries or requests please don’t hesitate to reach out to me my ask box is always open. sending you all love, light, positivity and abundance <3 much love

[adrianodiprato]

+ “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.” Dame Jane Goodall DBE | English Primatologist and Anthropologist

Educational Spring | Wellness by Design®

Yesterday a friend sent me a message about an encounter they had with one of my ex-students at a recent dinner party. This ex-student mentioned the impact that I had on a number of his friends, his words were “you have no idea how many he stopped from suiciding just for being there and being him”. I’m not sharing this message to brag, I am sharing this insight into the true value of teachers and learning communities that operate from a human-centred learning ecosystem design. People need people. Every individual matters.

This got me thinking about what really matters. It amplified for me that the real pandemic of our industrial model of schooling is the growth in mental illness amongst young people. Additionally, COVID-19 sharply illustrated the truth of inequity in our system, especially with reference to the digital divide. According to Pasi Sahlberg from the Gonski Institute for Education, the pandemic has unearthed this unpleasant truth, "The education system has unequal structures that have become visible now through this remote online learning period."

So, what if we placed wellness at the centre of our society? What if we made it central to the objectives of learning? What is the interconnected relationship between character, competency and wellness within a whole education? What might be the global context for this?

The World Economic Forum has explored whether gross domestic product is still a relevant measure of a population’s wellbeing for many years. Looking at what alternatives could offer as mega trends such as climate change, demographic shifts, rapid urbanisation, moves in economic power, resource scarcity and swift advancements in technology innovations reshape our world.

In an interview with the BBC Radio 4 in May 2019, Lord Richard Layard, a Program Director at the London School of Economics and the Vice Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics, advocated that wellbeing should replace growth as main aim of UK spending. His group drafted a wellbeing report for the UK government, setting out proposals including a bigger budget for mental health, a strategy to improve the wellbeing of children in schools, and more spending on further education for people who don’t go to university.

Australia also performs very well in many measures of wellbeing relative to most other countries in the OECD Better Life Index. Australia ranks at the top in civic engagement and above the average in income and wealth, environmental quality, health status, housing, jobs and earnings, education and skills, subjective well-being, social connections and personal security. Having said that, mental illness remains a serious issue. One in five (20%) Australians aged 16-85 experience a mental illness in any year. Data from the 2014 Mission Australia’s Youth Survey showed that around one in five (21.2%) of young people (15-19 years old) met the criteria for a probable serious mental illness.

Learning Creates Australia recently highlighted the current measures of success and achievement in schooling are causing barriers to excellence rather than leading to excellence in learning outcomes as highlighted below:

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants to transform its politics to focus on empathy, kindness and wellbeing. After talking about “doing things differently” with a “well-being budget” at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2019, Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand government in May of the same year unveiled its plans to make that strategy a reality.

This move toward a greater commitment toward the health and wellness of communities is not limited to New Zealand. The United Arab Emirates has a Minister of State for Happiness and a National Programme for Happiness and Positivity. It has an agenda that is based on three pillars: inclusion of happiness in the policies, programmes and services of all government bodies and at work, promotion of positivity and happiness as a lifestyle, and development of benchmarks and tools to measure happiness.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is a philosophy that guides the government of Bhutan. It includes an index which is used to measure the collective happiness and wellbeing of a population. Bhutan measures this collective happiness and wellbeing via a Gross National Happiness index over nine domains as illustrated in Figure 1. 

Figure 1: Bhutan Gross National Happiness Index

Dream a Dream is a not-for-profit organisation in Delhi, India positively impacting on the lives of young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and flourish in a fast-changing world. One key aspect of their work is the development and implementation of a Happiness Curriculum. The curriculum aims to equip students with skills so that they can better deal with anxiety and stress while thinking critically.

The 45-minute class starts with a meditation session, after which students read and listen to one another’s stories. In addition to textbooks, street plays and yoga serve as teaching tools. The curriculum has been implemented in at least 1,024 Delhi government-run schools, affecting more than 1 million students to date. “In a year and a half, we have already started observing minor but beautiful, positive changes in the relationship of the child and the teacher,” Vishal Talreja Co-founder says. “We have children coming forward and saying, ‘I look forward to coming to school.’”

The Dream a Dream Happiness Curriculum is becoming a model that other governments are promising to replicate in their countries’ classrooms. Countries such as Colombia, UAE, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

It is increasingly becoming clear that the main goal of governments is the overall wellbeing of its citizens. Their resources need to be more wisely spent based on what really matters most for the entire human experience. This also presents a real challenge for the entire education sector and makes a strong case for the moral imperative to curate a human-centred Wellness by Design® learning ecosystem.

Will Richardson, Co-Founder of The Big Questions Institute believes “in school, we seem to think learning happens only when it’s age-grouped and graded, or when it’s chunked into time blocks and subjects and meets some predetermined outcomes. Students have “learned” it seems only when they have consumed a mandated bucket of information or content and been tested to make sure they consumed it adequately.”

We have got to stop the testing hamster wheel that burns out children. We cannot and will not continue to be terrorised by the dreaded ATAR, an overbearing student ranking system that ends the careers of school leaders and teachers and drives up anxiety levels in young people. Figure 2 highlights that 64% of those living in inner regional areas and only 40% for those living in very remote regions complete Year 12. Of course, there are other factors impacting on these statics of those in disadvantaged areas, nonetheless the numbers are damming of our current infatuation with an out-dated, one-size fits all industrial model of schooling.

Figure 2: Geographical impact on education attainment rates1

Daniel Koretz, one of the America’s foremost experts on educational testing, argues in The Testing Charade that the whole idea of test-based accountability has failed—it has increasingly become an end in itself, harming students and corrupting the very ideals of teaching. Pressure to raise NAPLAN and ATAR scores dominates much of Australia’s education today. More often than not standardised tests shape what is taught and influence what we value as assessment. In many schools, we seem to think learning happens when it doesn’t look like real life. During the pandemic with the transition online, we’ve been reminded of those things that we value most: relationships, community, the curiosity of young people, and the power of real, authentic self-determined learning.

Please do not interpret my shift in emphasis as denouncing the value of literacy or numeracy data. Not at all. Of course, they have a place in supporting student growth, not just definitions of achievement. Nonetheless quantification measures like NAPLAN and the ATAR have assumed an importance beyond their ability to truly judge and paint the whole picture of each individual.

By its very nature, a crisis turns everything on its head. So now that everything has changed, why not take the opportunity to guide the development of a new culture? Director and Founder of Leading Thinking International, Kathleen Donohoe in a recent post titled Is educational policy constraining a renaissance in education? stated, “Age old traditions such as school times, compulsory hours, the definition of attendance, recognition, reporting and feedback on learning and the definition of student engagement are following the fate of blackboards and chalk, requiring the reimagination of policy, process and procurement.”

We’ve been paralysed in schooling for far too long, educating by living in the world without truly feeling. Now, acutely, we feel that need for an evolution and move toward the next normal. As we grow out of the pandemic, we need to recognise that this is our Educational Spring. It could happen, but it might not. There will be enormous pressure to forget this educational spring moment and go back to the old ways of experiencing schooling life. History is happening right now.

A clear feature of all the models we shared in our Continuous Learning Toolkit | Volume II – Leading Through Crisis has been an explicit focus on wellness. While some have viewed the use of technology as a distraction, the application of technology during COVID-19 has been an opportunity to prioritise wellness into all aspects of planning and scheduling. This new normal of schooling is based on a shared understanding of the significance of the interdependence of learning and wellness as we support each young person to flourish in this new world environment. It requires us to map the connectedness of a whole education for character, competency and wellness. It brings into sharp focus self-direction, self-determination and self-regulation as critical dimensions in fostering the development of resilient, resourceful and independent learners equipped with the adaptive expertise and self-efficacy to thrive in their world. Let us all build back better, with Wellness by Design®.

To prepare today’s learners to thrive in this new world environment, a whole new Wellness by Design® framework is needed. At the centre of this framework must be an explicit purpose-driven social contract based on the reality that all young people are home to a life, and that individual and collective wellness encompass all dimensions of life within any community.

For learning communities, a positive sense of individual wellness supports a base for rich learning growth and achievement, that enables all learners to thrive throughout their time at school and beyond. Wellness and the full flourishing of the individual cannot be separated from learning. Post COVID-19 we have the powerful potential to positively disrupt education forever, and the key is a genuinely human-centred reimagining. Therefore, it is imperative that any continuous learning competency framework for all school communities, needs to develop a learning ecosystem model that Equips the Learner, Empowers the Learner and Enables the Learner, positioning wellness at the heart of school life.

A focus on wellness is imperative now more than ever before - and I’m not talking about a visit to a day spa or a regular massage (although self-pampering is always welcomed). Wellness by Design® refers to a sense of wholeness and connection that entails personal growth, character and competency, healing from the residual of one’s past, and integration of self-worth and agency.

Maintaining personal wellness often requires commitment and significant effort. Through acknowledging our whole selves, not just the parts we think are amazing, but our blind spots, we become better equipped to connect with the other, which further opens up ways of our social, cultural and spiritual awareness.

So, in the context of schooling, how do we truly meet this moment? It is time to shift the emphasis, the investment from the seduction of just academic prowess and league tables achievement. It is time for learning communities to amplify the central position of Wellness by Design® as we support each young person to move from resilience to the power of resourcefulness of self-efficacy, personal aspiration, adaptive expertise, agency and advocacy.

We need to consider the role of personal goals, challenging assumptions, cognitive flexibility, courage over fear, emotional regulation and self-determination in supporting young people to flourish for their future. All fostered in a school ecosystem that values high (wellness) support as much as high (academic) expectations. A school that explicitly cultivates relationships that give each young person a profound sense of psychological safety, where they are known, valued and loved, through an authentic feeling that someone has their back and always in their corner. After all, we all need a champion.

It may seem counter-intuitive to put wellness at the centre and allow it to permeate throughout the whole of learning instead of confining it to a box of its own, and attending to it as an afterthought, but if we are not well, then how are we to thrive? How are we to make progress? How are we to succeed?

It’s time for us to create Wellness by Design®

References

Koretz, D. (2017). The Testing Charade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free Press.

Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S. (2018). Resilience: The science of mastering life’s greatest challenges. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

1   Commonwealth of Australia. Commonwealth Government (2019). National regional rural and remote tertiary education strategy: final report. Page 13. Year 12 rates are for people aged 19. Tertiary qualifications are for people aged 25-34 years. Remote includes Remote and Very Remote Categories. Any tertiary education qualification includes VET in Schools. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2016) Census of Population and Housing.

15   Financial Review, May 29, 2018.

16   Mission Australia (2017). Youth Mental Health Report: Youth Survey 2012-2016. Page 12.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

In line with my recent announcement about High School Musical fanfiction, here comes another analysis from High School Musical II. Apologies for the fuzzy video quality: I found this on Youtube. 

The above scene shows Gabriella Montez accusing Troy of becoming “a new Troy”, and the rest of the Wildcats sharing her anger after Troy is called away to practice with the Redhawks. 

One thing that strikes me throughout this scene is the sincerity of Troy’s apologies. During my series, Questions for High School Musical II (Part I & Part II), my commentary contained less nuance. Having discovered things about the series which I had not learned beforehand, I just wanted to spill my thoughts onto Tumblr. 

Returning to High School Musical meta and fanfiction therefore challenges me to use more nuance and reasoning in my work, and I am fascinated to know whether my views have changed. So the scenes that caused me such frustration beforehand still render the same reaction? Have I noticed things which were concealed beforehand? All of these things are worth considering. 

Troy apologises for forgetting the staff baseball game, for missing lunch, and for missing the two-on-two play after work. We don’t see any impatience, something along the lines of, “Can’t you see that I have to--?” Sure, he shows frustration, but only because he is caught between commitments and has chosen to prioritise his scholarship opportunities. Instead, he say, “I know... I’m sorry.” when Zeke reminds him about the after-work game. 

It astonishes me that Troy Bolton is portrayed as the culprit here. Anyone could criticise him for trying to please all the people all the time, one of his lasting flaws throughout the series. He can be inconsiderate and forgetful. He can ignore good advice, and stubbornly pursue the wrong path. But has he really changed into a snob who has no time for his friends? 

If that were the case, then why offer to go on a date with Gabriella once he returned from basketball with the Redhawks? Why apologise for forgetting about the staff baseball game and commit to being there? Why, when Chad insinuates that Troy thought the Redhawks were too good for the Wildcats, would he quickly clarify his comments: “It’s a closed practice.”? At every turn, Troy clarifies his position and is mortified by even the suggestion that he is abandoning his friends or insulting them. “No, no, no that’s not what I meant.” 

This scene is built on insinuations from Gabriella and the Wildcats, which we the viewers are told to take as fact. Gabriella goads Troy by mentioning his “Italian golf shoes, new clothes, golf carts...” as proof that he changed. She doesn’t mention that Troy never sought these advantages (something that Troy commendably points out to Chad later on). Neither does she mention that Chad also rode in a new golf cart when caddying for the Evans’ (something he considered hugely beneficial), nor that Taylor got her own golf cart as part of her job. 

Should Gabriella be upset that Troy has missed dates? Well, he turned up for the picnic (she was ambivalent about this one), he was late for the after-work swim (she commendably waited for him without complaint). He missed the free cheeseburgers at lunch, in what can be described as the only show of inconsiderate behaviour throughout this entire movie. Sure, if Gabriella wants to be upset, have at it. But 2/3 ain’t bad. She rarely gives him credit where credit is due in this movie. 

The fact that she cannot highlights the unrealistic expectations she has of Troy and their relationship. Her cutting sarcastic comments highlight this: “Crazy stuff. Hard to keep track of, I bet.” Remember that Troy had been promoted to a job paying $500 a week plus tips, teaching golf to children. He also had to practice with the Redhawks, and rehearse for the Talent Show. That’s a considerable amount of responsibility, and so it’s inevitable he would forget other tasks and commitments. But once again, Troy responds by apologising and promising to do better in future. 

It’s worth pointing out that Troy was practicing college-standard basketball with the Redhawks. This meant developing and refining his technique, listening to tough feedback, all under the watchful eye of his father and his employer. Unlike what Taylor McKessie claims, sportsmen work hard to earn their fame.  

But Gabriella doesn’t even acknowledge the work Troy is putting in to secure his future goals, instead casting him as the recipient of new privileges and thus a new person. Why? Because he forgot a few commitments. Well, I don’t wish to justify forgetting your commitments, but as I said, Gabriella doesn’t even humour his explanations, though they are entirely reasonable. Just a few errors and she has already emotionally detached herself enough to make sarcastic remarks after he had promised to take her on a date. 

I think it’s worth examining Troy’s remark here: “So what’s your point?” I have often said before that Troy is impervious to Gabriella’s faults. Actually, I think that is untrue. I think this section of dialogue disproves my previous claims. Just see how Troy’s smile disappears, replaced by a frown. 

He catches the insinuations. Instead of trying to explain himself, he asks Gabriella to come straight to the point. So he dislikes her statement, and is hurt by her insinuating, rather than directly stating her problem. Of course, Gabriella’s response leaves him without an answer, but it encourages me to see a glimpse of Troy answering back in his defence, if only for a moment. 

Later on, it is Chad who insinuates that Troy has forgotten the team (the same accusations he made in the previous movie), and that Troy doesn’t want the Wildcats to come and play the Redhawks because he thinks the former are beneath the latter. We know that Chad made the accusations without evidence, because Troy quickly clarified that it was “a closed practice, sorry.” That’s not snobbery. It’s just a fact-- after all, the Redhawks players call Troy alone, not anyone else. 

(Watch how the player/driver’s smile disappears when Chad says, “Hey Bolton! That’s my ball!”. I think he is very perceptive. His reaction to Sharpay’s cloying behaviour is also illustrative). 

In HSM I, Chad, Zeke, and Jason all told Troy that they had had “another team meeting” about “how we haven’t been acting as a team”. They rightly confessed to downing Troy’s ambitions because it didn’t align with their own perceptions, and promised to be “cheering for you”. Yet fast-forward to the summer and the same three are again guilt-tripping Troy because his ambitions don’t align with their own perceptions. As Troy’s father rightly says, Troy has as much a duty to himself (even more so) as to the Wildcats. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping your eye on the prize.” 

Let’s not forget that the purpose of attending Lava Springs was to work for money. Each Wildcat had their own goals. Chad wanted to save up for a car, “so I can take that little hottie out on a proper date”. Zeke had to find a job so that his parents would match what he made (he has good parents, evidently). Troy was concerned about college funding, and made that concern clear: “No but seriously, guys: this summer I’ve got to make bank. My parents keep talking about how much college is gonna cost.”

Yet when Troy, in imperfect circumstances, does his best to achieve that goal, he is shunned and maligned. Sure, Sharpay pulled strings to give him privileges, but some of those came as a result of Mr. Evans’ more objective appraisal. Certainly, the Redhawks weren’t lying when they took a liking to Troy and invited him to scrimmage. And Troy did demonstrate an ability not only to play but teach golf, which also impressed the Redhawks. 

So it would appear that the Wildcats are not as contrite about their deception from HSM I, since they still question his motives any time he makes his own way-- even if making his own way in basketball, supposedly their common language. Worse, not one of Troy’s friends apologises for the above exchange. If Troy has to apologise for putting his scholarship and financial future first, why can’t his friends also apologise for the above scene?

[news-square]

Parts of Victoria and NSW are sweating through an extreme heatwave that started sweeping across Australia's southeast on Saturday.

This may seem like just a good excuse to go to the beach, but as the planet warms and summers become longer and less bearable, heatwaves are coming to represent an existential threat to Australian suburbs.

Already, heat kills more people in Australia than any other natural disaster, including floods, cyclones and bushfires.

Now, faced with the prospect of 50-degree-plus summers, experts say highly urbanised parts of Australia may become unliveable within decades.

The race is on to re-imagine, redesign and rebuild the Australian suburb.

Car parks may be ripped up and planted with trees and greenery, houses retro-fitted with insulation, roads painted to reflect rather than absorb heat, and supermarkets and even whole suburbs built underground to reduce cooling costs.

One centre of these efforts is Western Sydney, home to more than 2.5 million people.

In this floodplain of closely packed houses, heat pools on islands of black bitumen and collects on sun-baked concrete.

The mercury gets close to 50 degrees Celsius here in summer — and that's just the ambient air temperature. The radiant heat from bitumen carparks can push 80C. The surface temperature of playground equipment has been measured at 100C. Since 2019, all 33 Sydney councils have been funding a climate adaptation program that has identified heat as the number-one climate threat to Sydneysiders."We are not yet building a city that's really equipping our people to survive and adapt extreme heat," says Beck Dawson, who heads the Resilience Sydney program."If the community doesn't have access to things to make themselves cool we effectively have a very large oven occurring across the Western Sydney plains."The scale of the emerging threat is different to anything we've faced before."When Penrith hit 48.9CA taste of that future came on January 4, 2020, when Sydney — surrounded by bushfires — was struck by a heatwave that broke temperature records.In the suburb of Penrith at the foot of the Blue Mountains, the mercury hit 48.9C, making it one of the hottest places in the world on that day.At her nearby practice in Blacktown, GP Kim Loo prepared for the worst."It's a sense of dread," Dr Loo says about the days of forecast high temperatures."I have isolated patients who are near poverty or the working poor who are frightened about power prices.""I've got quite a lot of patients with heart failure, respiratory failure and little kids with asthma." In Sydney, the most expensive suburbs are also the coolest — the harbour and coastal areas are often 10C cooler than inland.The highest temperatures are usually recorded in low socio-economic areas with a high proportion of people who are vulnerable to heat, including the elderly, those who are socially isolated, and those on pensions who cannot afford to run the A/C."Air con is so important because [when temperatures rise] over 35C fans just don't cut it, but running the air con is so expensive," Dr Loo says."Many of my patients cannot afford it. I advise them to go to shopping centres."Parts of Western Sydney may be 'abandoned'On a hot night in Blacktown, the 24-hour Kmart is a hub of social activity: people linger until it's cool enough outside to go home to sleep.The ad hoc reliance on shopping centres to keep cool illustrates the scale of Western Sydney's emerging heat problem, says Ms Dawson."We're putting one million more people into Western Sydney and they're not all going to fit into Kmart on the fourth day of a heatwave," she says.But most of the really vulnerable people, she says, suffer through the really hot days in silence — they stay inside and keep the curtains drawn.A project called Sweltering Cities is surveying residents to hear what it's like to live, work and travel around Western Sydney on days of extreme heat.The responses so far paint a scary picture, says Emma Bacon, who's running the survey."The amount of people who use the word 'dread' with me about summer is shocking," she says."Overwhelmingly, they're saying political parties should have policies to address the heat in the city."The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology estimate the average number of days over 35C in Western Sydney could increase by up to five times by 2090.Put another way, Western Sydney will have an extra month of days over 35C by 2090.Mattheos Santamouris, a professor at UNSW and a globally recognised expert on building cooler cities, believes that without action to help residents adapt to hotter summers, "many places" in Western Sydney will be abandoned over the next 20 to 30 years. To understand why this may be the case, Professor Santamouris says it is first necessary to consider Western Sydney's geography.The desert to the west acts like an open oven door, blasting hot air at the suburban sprawl. Sea breezes help cool the city, but only reach as far as the edge of Parramatta.Combined with climate change, high-density development and clearing of the tree canopy, the westernmost suburbs are getting alarmingly hot."If we don't apply a very radical agenda for the next years, most people will move towards the coast where the sea breeze may help a lot," Professor Santamouris says.Public life, he predicts, will shift to air-conditioned malls. He's noticed this happening already in Darwin "where the main commercial street is not visited at all."Resilience Sydney's Beck Dawson believes Western Sydney will remain habitable, but people will have to live there in very different ways to what they do now.She suggests daily heat-risk rating system, similar to the one used for bushfires, could be introduced."When we get to extreme heat we have to respond as if it's an emergency," she says.Dr Loo is less confident. From her medical practice at the frontline of climate change effects, she foresees a future of rapidly escalating health costs due to summer heat."With the number of hot days we have within Western Sydney — if we don't have adequate adaptation — Western Sydney is not going to be liveable," she says. Taking action on heatAction on heat takes two forms: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is reducing the ambient air temperature itself (through planting trees or using heat-reflective materials), while adaptation aims to soften the impact of high temperatures (such as building houses with insulated roofs and double-glazed windows).So far, NSW Government efforts to mitigate the extreme heat of future summers has focused on increasing the tree canopy across Greater Sydney by planting one million trees by 2022.Explore Mt ResilienceRead moreDiscover a town built to survive and adapt to extreme weather on your mobile in AR.But though these programs are worthwhile, they are not enough on their own to counter the rising heat, says Professor Santamouris.He's calculated that planting five million trees would only decrease the maximum temperature in Western Sydney by 1 to 1.2 degrees.In some scenarios, he said, trees can even make the city hotter.Once trees get too dry, they draw water from their leaves into their trunks, so that they no longer have a cooling effect on air temperature. This can be countered with irrigation, but millions of trees would require a lot of water."Just planting a number of trees will not solve the problem," Professor Santamouris says. "We need to have much more radical solutions."Radiating heat into outer spaceOne simple solution is to use more light-coloured building materials that reflect rather than absorb heat.Trials have shown that painting road surfaces with heat-reflective paint can keep them at least 10C cooler than untreated sections.Widespread use of these cool materials could reduce the ambient air temperature in Western Sydney by 1.5C, Professor Santamouris calculates.Next-generation "super-cool" materials could double that figure.These materials, called photonics, radiate heat at a frequency of infrared that, rather than being absorbed by the atmosphere and bouncing back, sends the heat into space. They can be applied as paint or a spray-film for plastics and even wood to stay up to 10C cooler than the ambient temperature."We expect them to be ready in the next few years," Professor Santamouris says. But even these high-tech materials are no match for the impact of climate change, he says.The reduction in temperature through mitigation will be mostly cancelled out by the projected increase in ambient temperature."Given that, mitigation is not enough," Professor Santamouris says.A city of parks and underground bunkersThat leaves adaptation: reducing the impact of the heat.Sebastian Pfautsch, an urban heat expert at Western Sydney University, proposes replacing the model of runaway suburban sprawl with one that prioritises green space.He's calculated that in some Western Sydney's suburbs, 80 per cent of the surface area is sealed with roads, pavements, car parks buildings and other kinds of construction that trap heat.That figure, he says, needs to get down to 25 per cent."If you don't want to have urban development where you increase the temperature then you can only achieve that where you're the covering area with two portions open space and one portion of closed space," he says. To do this, he says, houses and shops need to be built largely underground, which has the added advantage of making them easier to cool.Another option is to house people in high apartment blocks surrounded by vast areas of parkland."We need to build up or build down," he says."This may sound utopian but it is a necessary type of progressive thinking in hot areas."A large shopping centre built underground can bring its cooling cost down by 95 per cent."Other ideas include retro-fitting homes with insulation and air-conditioners as well as providing cheap renewable energy.Renters or people without access to suitable roof space could purchase or lease solar panels in a centralised array, with the electricity generated credited to the customer's electricity bill.Such "solar gardens" are already operating in regional NSW, with customers in Western Sydney. Then there are plans to better forecast and track heat.Several Western Sydney councils have commissioned Dr Pfautsch to install thousands of temperature readers to map the eddies and flows of heat in their area.The Bureau of Meteorology has introduced a national three-day heatwave forecast and is also working on a "heatwave predictability map" that it hopes will better inform Australians about the severity and duration of each heatwave as it rolls in. A separate project led by Emergency Management Australia aims to draw on survey data to identify the locations of people who are most vulnerable to heatwaves.These national initiatives and high-tech solutions are welcome, Ms Bacon says, but there also many simple things that can be done right away."We still have bus stops that are uncovered," she says."Bus stops aren't an expensive piece of infrastructure."Progress is being made, but slowlyDr Pfautsch points out that poorly insulated houses with heat-absorbing black roofs are still being constructed in great numbers out west. Unsuspecting buyers chasing the Australian Dream are being locked into decades of sweltering heat."When it comes to development itself, I cannot say that I see any change," Dr Pfautsch says."How long can we afford to build these hotboxes that will at least be there for 30 to 60 years?" Progress is being made, but slowly, says Ms Dawson of Resilience Sydney.She points to the publicly funded Cool Suburbs program to develop a tool to help developers and planners better consider urban heat mitigation measures.None of these building design programs are mandatory for developers to use."As our building communities are getting used to what matters and what the community priorities are — they will respond," Ms Dawson says."I'm confident that a lot of the building industry will come up with fantastic ideas."The solutions to heat require co-operation between many stakeholders, including developers, planners and different levels of government, she says."It really reminds of the 1980s, when there was a really big change in the building code for cyclones."That change was precipitated by Cyclone Tracy, which levelled Darwin.Ms Dawson says Sydney's heatwave equivalent of this natural disaster will be a string of days of record-breaking heat combined with high levels of humidity."When we have one of those events, it'll be a very dangerous disaster across the city," she says."I really hope we don't have to wait for that event to galvanise the scale of action that we need."

[isabellinden]

Forgetting

I have started thinking that forgetting is an interesting thing to look at in this project. I have said that I would like nothing to be forgotten in this project. I have also looked at the intention in practice to exhaust possibilities, and I think this is connected with trying to remember as much as possible, and to record all those remembered thoughts. The residue of our experiences that remain in our memory must be determined by their significance within our system of perceiving the world. It seems to me that memories can be used like iron filings on magnets to illustrate their magnetic field. I used the metaphor of magnets, because they are just as affected by what is attracted as what is repelled.

Remembering is obviously significant to artistic practice in influencing the subjects of work, but also in the way that memories or knowledge are processed and given significance and manipulated within that structure. We cannot see the machine or library in a person’s head, but we can get an idea of what it looks like from what is let in and what it looks like when it comes out. Forgetting is all about our relationship with all the things that we do and also can know. It shows how much we have to ignore in order to free ourselves to interpret and create from those experiences. The process of forgetting exposes the capacity of the systems of thought that we employ. This is all fairly obvious but the paradox that we then arrive at is this: we become paralysed by remembering too much, but in remembering too little we are paralysed with a blindness to those systems of thoughts that dictate all parts of our lives. We are unable to see these systems’ purposes or chosen destinations as arbitrary, chosen from many different destinations, which are then left in the shadows, insignificant and unmagnetic and organic.

I read Borges’ story Funes the Memorious. by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a very difficult writer to analyse: he’s purposefully slippery and plays with the trust you give him as a storyteller to say what happened. This is always a silly idea that someone will say what really happened, but we always want so badly to give away that trust and allow ourselves to be manipulated and passively shown things. I wonder whether this way of tricking and confusing and slipping up the reader might be a way of designing that I could try.

Funes is paralysed by the fact that he can remember everything. He has separate memories for the angles at which he has seen objects. He has a counting system where each number has a very different name. It can only be remembered and therefore repeated by him. This was the example in the book that made me realise that systems become ingrained and seem to work by their lack of variation according to individual repetition. Borges quotes Pliny’s Naturalis historia ‘ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum’ (in the Latin, without translation)– Nothing that has been heard can be repeated with the same words. If you combine these two ideas (validating systems through repetition and the impossibility of repetition) you see that there is a failing in these systems for the fact that they prioritise repetition and create the myth that it is possible. This myth of repetition and sameness, if we buy into it, makes us unable to see the spaces between, the meanings, knowledge and memories that are lost.  

Rowan Williams talks about this human desire for repeatable experience in Silence and Honey Cakes:

‘[The desert] looks like nowhere in particular, yet you go into it so as to become more particular than ever. In the modern context, you could compare it with the other sort of non-place we are familiar with – […] the airport lounge, the fast-food outlet, places designed entirely for individuals looking for repeatable experience.’

Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well. – Nietzsche

I would really like to resist the argument that Funes has become a machine without power of interpretation or originality. When the narrator meets Funes the second time, he is quoting Pliny’s words about repeating words in a ‘high-pitched, mocking voice’. He criticises Pliny’s opinions and judges his previous self. His system of numbers is an incredibly creative response to a subject as lacking in stimuli and feeling as numbers. The fact that he can name each one, give each number meaning, is very creative. His paralysis, instead, comes from his incapacity to have repeatable experience. Borges adds an interesting idea at the end, as has Nietzsche, that the human should never think of itself as fitting smoothly into any system.

‘I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.’ By creating systems of hierarchies, historians can indicate a most significant cause for an event. But the truth is, in history, everything happens as a result of thousands of smaller events. Maybe, as I think Borges is suggesting, we are so scared of how much we experience and how much we affect the experiences of others that we forget it all by making ourselves think it is the same:

‘The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.’

[exploringthestreet]

Harmful Art and the Use of AI  April 8th, 2020

When discussing what concepts might appear on the street in our design, we can only really speculate upon what might arise. Thus far, our group has discussed in length about what kind of environments might generate meaningful content, along with the kinds of topics and situations they might create narratives out of. However we have not tackled instances where things could go wrong in terms of how people could generate content.

Specifically, my group thought of a poignant question of whether people could be trusted with drawing non-harmful content on the street. Extra consideration was taken in this case as while we wanted to make our design to be as  accessible as possible, we do not want to introduce another outlet for bad actors to post harmful content.

The hypothetical solution we came up was an AI responsible for oversight, it would immediately erase harmful content if detected. Looking into this, we found interesting pieces of inspiration as to how this AI could potentially function.

(Image source: http://deepangel.media.mit.edu/)

The following GIF is from Deepangel, an MIT project that aims to explore the aesthetics of absences within pictures by using AI to erase specific content. Their outputs allowed us to envision how the the AI could interact with the street art by showing the process of how erasure by AI could be undertaken. What really stuck out to me is how vivid the imagery is in the erasure process. The picture shows a much slower process of deletion, it shows the content being slowly taken apart as if its being absorbed into the surface rather than instantaneously wiped away. 

In a previous post, I discussed how naturalistic properties of the street can be used to enhance our design’s aesthetic. I think this GIF demonstrates some of the ideas mentioned by using properties like colour and motion to make something entirely digital look more naturalistically grounded and giving a “feel and texture” often seen in photo diaries and provides an illusion of being apart of the physical world. 

I thought based on this, there was an argument that this method of erasure could weave itself into the design seamlessly. However I decided to further consider the proposal’s implications by using the principles of a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment to speculate on them. Specifically this involved taking a claim and envisioning outcomes by taking it to an extreme. 

The claim being another proposal from our group involving AI analysing cultural data to gather guidelines on harmful content. This was considered useful it could let the AI self-update ensuring the standards for what is or isn't harmful art is current with the times. Where this becomes dystopian is the notion that AI are capable of learning what is given to them, but usually without a moral compass. 

(Image source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ai-artificial-intelligence-dangerous-text-gpt2-elon-musk-a9192121.html 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kb7zdw/microsoft-suspends-ai-chatbot-after-it-veers-into-white-supremacy-tay-and-you)

here have been numerous accounts of AI’s capability to spread harm based on how it processes data. The articles mentioned above talk about how AI with good intentions could be distorted based on internet content. The first of which discusses how an AI model could string text together to spread harmful messages from hate groups. The other discusses how an AI used machine learn to enhance its conversational understanding by analysing text from users inadvertently turning it into something hateful. 

The latter article is particularly relevant as this process only took a couple of hours. Based on this there did seem to be a dangerous extreme to which this potential function could go. Specifically, if our AI was to analyse cultural data from the internet it is possible that could learn standards of what is harmful and non-harmful are based on online discourse and content. This could then potentially introduce a counterproductive outcome where non-harmful art promoting egalitarian values are subsequently deleted from our design while harmful art preaching hate is not only accepted in the design passing the AI learned standards. 

Naturally, such speculations are absurd as additional safeguards can always be put in place to ensure such a scenario never happens. One example could be a definitive set of standards that the majority of communities agree with that the AI could prioritise such as no art depicting white supremacy.

However, the author of Speculative everything tries to encourage this thinking, in that we should not only address the consumer in our designs but the citizen too. More specifically, we should use speculative thinking to envision how we can meet needs of users and industry, and how we can redirect that thinking into social goals. Thus, while the situation is unlikely, fictions like these are important to consider the social and ethical implications of what we design. 

With this a mind, a particular shortcoming with this exploration is the lack of clear artefacts to ground these speculations. A video  could be useful for presenting such information as the ideas could invoke genres of social and technological dystopia invoking a greater sensory experience than simply reading about it. Furthermore the process of filmmaking sometimes takes the form of “films as dialectic”, meaning its creators cannot shy away from deciding what is important, but being constrained on what to film. This could narrow down what are the important aspects of the world that created from these speculations, and better illustrate it to stakeholders unfamiliar with the process. 

However, with this small fiction conjured up I can no longer accept the notion that AI can be the simple solution we initially thought it would be and need to question how much oversight is needed, and furthermore would any oversight really be able to know what is or is not considered harmful.

[endorsereviews]

How to Overcome 6 Key Product Leadership Challenges

No Transactional Power

Unlike a line manager, you usually don’t manage the development team and stakeholders as the person in charge of the product, and the individuals don’t report to you. You consequently don’t have any transactional power: You cannot tell people what to do; you cannot assign tasks to them; and you are typically not in a position to offer a bonus, pay raise, or other incentives. In other words, you are not their boss.

At the same time, you depend on the individuals. You rely on them to design, implement, market, sell, and support the product. Additionally, some of the people you lead might be more senior than you. They might have worked longer for the company, and they might be very influential and well connected.

In order to overcome this challenge, build trust with the stakeholders and development team members. The following tips will help you with this:

Empathise with the individuals and make an effort to understand their perspectives, needs, and interest, for example, by practicing active listening.

Speak and act with integrity: Say what is true and make your actions match your words.

Show people that you value their ideas and concerns and involve them in product decisions.

Get to know people and allow them to get to know you.

Strengthen your expertise. The more knowledgeable you are, the more likely it is that people will trust and follow you.

Leading a Large and Heterogeneous Group

The second challenge you face is leading can be comparatively large and heterogeneous group: Together, the development team and stakeholders are often more than nine people—the maximum number of individuals line managers are commonly recommended to lead.

What’s more, the dev team is cross-functional and may include UX and UI designers, developers, and testers, alongside other roles. The stakeholders come from different business units, for example, marketing, sales, support, and service for a commercial product. As people have different backgrounds, they are likely to have different perspectives and needs. While this can be a source of creativity and innovation, it can also give rise to arguments and conflicts.

In order to succeed in leading such a group, I recommend that you keep the stakeholders and development team stable. Why? It takes a while for a group of people to get to know each other, build trust, and be able to effectively collaborate. Additionally, every time a team changes, the team performance tends to dip: The new members have to get up to speed, new connections have to be made, and new friendships have to be built.

Additionally, increase your ability to constructively deal with disagreements and learn to resolve conflicts so that nobody is left feeling frustrated or hurt.

Finally, agree on shared goals or outcomes. Use them to establish a shared purpose, to direct and align people, and to give the individuals the autonomy they need to do their piece of work—be it creating a marketing strategy or designing and building a product increment.

Limited Influence on Group Selection

While you might know who would be best suited to work as a stakeholder or team member, you are typically not in a position to hand-pick people. Instead, line management staffs the development team and selects representatives from the business units as stakeholders—no matter how likeable you find the individuals and how well you get on with them.

To maximise the chances of finding the right people, team up with the Scrum Master and engage with line management and your sponsor. A great technique to acquire the right people is self-selection: Clearly communicate the roles you need to fill and the skills people will require. Then let the individuals decide if they want to be on the team or not.

To effectively lead people who you may find difficult or unlikeable, strengthen your capacity to empathise. Come from a place of curiosity and care, as Oren Jay Sofer recommends, and cultivate an open mind. At the same time, do not accept inappropriate behaviour—clearly tell people in a kind, empathic way when their speech or actions are harmful.

Dual Role

While guiding people can be challenging on its own, you also have to actively contribute to getting the product out of the door. The latter includes carrying out product discovery and strategy work, updating the product roadmap, and prioritising the product backlog.

You therefore play a dual role: You are leader and contributor. This sets you apart from a line manager and project manager who usually enjoys the luxury to focus on managing and leading people.

To be a successful leader and contributor, carefully manage your time and adopt a sustainable pace. Look after yourself and do not overcommit. Do not take on tasks that are not part of your role. Do one thing at a time and avoid multitasking.

What’s more, do not de-prioritise your leadership work even when push comes to shove and you are pressed for time. Look at leadership as an integral part of your job that is at least as important as updating the product roadmap and refining the product backlog.

Leadership at Multiple Levels

Guiding the development team and stakeholders towards product success requires leadership at three levels: vision, strategy, and tactics, as illustrated in following picture.

As the person in charge of the product, you should shape its vision; you should lead the effort to create, validate, and evolve an effective strategy; you should guide the development of an actionable product roadmap; and you should work with the development team on the product backlog to determine, capture, refine, and prioritise its items (assuming that you don’t work in a scaled environment).

While this approach ensures that leadership and decision-making are consistent, it makes the leadership work demanding—it requires a broad skillset and the ability to successfully navigate between the big picture and the product details.

To overcome this challenge, recognise that a shared product vision and validated product strategy are more important to guide and align people than beautifully crafted user stories. Consequently, do not neglect the product discovery and strategy work.

Additionally, share the workload. Involve the stakeholders and dev team members in the discovery and strategy work, empower the development team to make detailed product decisions on their own, and share product ownership with other product people when your product has grown too big for you to manage it on your own.

Finally, improve your skill set. Acquire the skills that you might lack and deepen the existing ones. This will make it easier for you to lead at the three levels.

Agile Process Constraints

Last but not least, most digital products are developed using an agile development framework like Scrum or Kanban. While an agile process offers great benefits for product people—for example, the ability to validate UX design and features at a very early stage—it constraints how you can lead the development team.

As you probably know, an agile dev team is self-organising; the team members decide how to do the work and how to collaborate. As the person in charge of the product, you should therefore not interfere with their work but respect the team’s autonomy and empowerment.

What’s more, the members have the right to determine the appropriate workload, reject work items if they exceed the team’s capacity, and only work on what has been agreed for a sprint or what is within the agreed work in progress (WIP) limits. This means that you can, or at least, should not try to pressurise people to take on more work, even if the progress is slower than expected.

In order to leverage agile practices and effectively guide the development team, I recommend that you partner with the Scrum Master. Let the individual help the team to learn to how to effectively work together and make realistic commitments. (This, of course, assumes that you have a qualified Scrum Master who is sufficiently available. If that’s not the case, then explore what you can do to help find the right individual.)

Furthermore, empower the development team. View the team as an equal partner, involve the members in product decisions, and encourage them to take ownership of the product details. At the same time, hold people accountable for the commitments they make. A team that is empowered to decide how much can be done is also accountable for getting it done.

Finally, participate in sprint retrospectives to help improve the collaboration and the process and receive feedback from the team members on your work.

The post How to Overcome 6 Key Product Leadership Challenges appeared first on Roman Pichler.

How to Overcome 6 Key Product Leadership Challenges posted first on premiumwarezstore.blogspot.com

[samanthasweeney-blog]

where to from here?

They don’t teach you that the period immediately after you graduate university and leave, for the first time in your life, the education system, contains a lot of manic, circular thinking: what do I do now? That’s probably the point, though. They can teach you the intricacies of the Australian political system, what counts as negligence and what doesn’t, and how to analyse quantitative data, but they absolutely cannot teach you what to do with yourself after your degree ends. Nobody can. So, I am writing this blog partially out of the need to put some part of me into the universe and cry I am here! I haven’t disappeared! And also, to give myself a project, some kind of mental nourishment, while I figure out what to do now. As humans tend to do, I looked at graduating through an idealistic lens, impervious to the truistic notion of the grass is greener on the other side. Fed up with a tiresome routine of uni, work, repeat, I was eager to slow down. There is irony in the nostalgia I now feel thinking about my final semester, the sentimental longing I have for all of the plates I was juggling carefully, if a little frenziedly, in my mind. The proverbial rose-coloured glasses fell off after about a month, and the grass is not, in fact, any greener. My discomfort is rooted in having too much time, rather than too little. I learned recently about the ‘adaptation principle,’ which describes the mind’s ability to adapt to new stimuli over time, creating a new psychological baseline. As Jonathan Haidt writes: “nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they ‘habituate,’ firing less to stimuli that they have become used to.” What is initially novel and exciting can quickly become the revised norm, and our enchantment fades. While this explains why things are not as exciting as I’d (misguidedly) predicted, it does little to console a racing mind. Much of my discomfort stems from a lack of direction, like finding an open field at the end of a narrow path. I am an achievement-oriented person, and also a human being who is fundamentally programmed to seek purpose (hello, Jonathan Haidt) and to suddenly find myself void of a significant and meaningful pursuit does not a smooth transition make. What’s more, I’ve realised that this change of dynamic necessitates redefining how I measure my own success and achievement. How do measure your progress or your success without a framework, such as what academia provides? Is eating a good breakfast a success? Though a semi-rhetorical question, there is room to argue yes, eating a good breakfast is success. I discussed this with a close friend over coffee last week. Do we absolutely need a tangible and predominant pursuit or project in order to attribute purpose and meaning to our lives? Or do we need to reframe the way we assign meaning to our lives? My answer: a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. With this in mind, I am trying to engage with the things that bring me joy, like writing and cooking, spending time with my friends, running. Some of these hobbies, like writing, nurture the part of me seeking a purposeful existence; the need to create. Others, done purely for the sake of enjoyment, help me reframe my perception of productivity and achievement, outside of the prescribed career-pursuit model. It’s a tough process, and I’m not immune to feeling like I’m stagnating or falling behind, like I should be working harder to pursue my career goals. But unlearning takes time. A helpful reassurance is reminding myself that I am exactly where my past-self wanted to be, an important achievement we all too often forget. Now reading: Breaking out of the repressive belief that you should only read one book at a time has been one of my greatest successes of 2019. I now love to read multiple books at a time, usually one fiction and at least one non-fiction, sometimes more non-fiction depending on the subject matter and the mood I’m in. Fiction is great to read before bed (but sometimes, you just get stuck into a really good psychology book and that before bed is great, too). Fiction-wise, I’m reading Choose Someone Else by Yvonne Fein, a collection of short stories centring on the moments when people feel ‘chosen,’ whether by a divine being or as the object of someone’s attraction. Written by a Jewish author, the contemporary Jewish experience and what it is to be the children of Holocaust survivors underscore her stories. When it comes to short stories, I am unashamedly voyeuristic: I enjoy most the (quasi) realistic stories that insert your directly into a character’s life for a period of time, a temporary window into another person’s existence. Fein is a master of this. Non-fiction, I’ve just started Big Coal by Guy Pearse, David McKnight and Bob Burton, which illustrates Australia’s infatuation with the coal industry and exposes the industry’s influence in the development (or lack thereof) of our economic and environmental policy. It is both eye-opening and infuriating to read about the extent to which mining companies can undermine laws designed to protect farmers, Indigenous communities, the environment. Perhaps most disappointing, yet unsurprising, is how the Federal and State governments enable this. An honourable mention goes to The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, which may just be one of my all-time favourite reads. I love a good psychology book, and this one combines psychology, philosophy and neuroscience to examine ancient edicts of wisdom regarding happiness. The analysis is saturated with insight, and nurtures essential self-awareness. Self-awareness is something we all need more of, and learning about the ways our brain is programmed to function and subsequently learning to identify these processes in action is valuable for all of us when it comes to being better versions of ourselves. Now listening: My October Spotify playlist is currently this:

On top of that, I’ve been enjoying 80s disco-electronic (is there a better name for this? I would love to know). Think, M People, Chaka Khan, Soulsearcher. The kind of music you can groove to, that is super catchy, and has a funky bass line. I’m also revisiting my love for Foals and Duke Ellington (partially inspired by the latest season of Big Mouth). Podcasts are among my favourite things on this Earth. On trend with this period of existential pondering I’m floating around in right now, two podcasts have provided me with endless ideas for contemplation. I Said What I Said – Growing Pains speaks on the difficulty of transition, discussing whether difficulty is inherent or arises from our resistance (subconscious or otherwise) to whatever transition/growth/evolution we’re experiencing. I’ve found the sentiment that our suffering is in our resistance to be weirdly soothing, and trusting in myself to figure things out with time, and to be open to new opportunities, has been a huge help. Ten Percent Happier – A Radical Approach to Productivity, Self Compassion Series, Jocelyn K. Glei, is so full of bites of wisdom I don’t even know where to start. I find that the concept of productivity can be really burdensome sometimes, another form of internal pressure we place on ourselves, sometimes without a clear intent or purpose in mind. This podcast challenges and redefines our understanding of productivity, placing emphasis on the need for us to accept our human limitations and value our successes as much as we value aspiring towards our next goal. The overarching message is one of self-acceptance and engaging with meaningful work. It’s imperative that we accept our achievements, our failures, our progress or lack thereof as vital parts of our experience overall, and prioritise what’s meaningful to us (in any form – not just work) rather than ‘performing’ productivity which is, really, not that fulfilling at all.

[whatsonforperth]

The Asian nation Australia needs to embrace

Australia was part of the diplomatic push senior ministers visiting India told me it was now at the front rank of our international partnerships. There were high hopes for stronger ties. But there have been many false starts in the Australia-India relationship. So has reality lived up to the hype? Illustration: Andrew Dyson In some areas the answer is yes. There has been marked progress in the political relationship between the governments of the two nations, accompanied by greater recognition of common strategic interests, especially in the Indian Ocean region. People-to-people links are also much deeper - Australias Indian diaspora has trebled in size during the the past 10 years and continues to grow. But those advances have not been matched on the business front. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Delhi Metro last year. Photo: Andrew Meares Too many Australian firms are indifferent to India or have simply put it in the too hard basket. Anexpert reportreport on India's potential for Australia, released by the federal government last month, says that while India is already in the first tier of Australias diplomatic relationships the economic relationship is stuck in the second tier. And yet, India's fast-growing economy will need all sorts of things that Australia is good at producing. Stronger business ties with India would also reduce economic risk. At the moment about 40 per cent of our exports go to just two markets with rapidly ageing populations China and Japan. Peter Varghese, the former high commissioner to India. Photo: AAP A deeper economic relationship with India which has a large and youthful population would reduce Australias economic exposure and bolster resilience. The report's author, Peter Varghese, the former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, says one key problem is old-fashioned attitudes. The Australian business community needs to get a much more up-to-date view of whats happening in India, he told me. Loading Varghese suspects many Australians consider India to be a much more closed economy than is actually the case a legacy of the stiflingLicence Raj that once dominated India. The transformation of the Indian economy is underway, the report says. Its progress will be uneven but the direction is clear and irreversible. Varghese has another pointed message: India is not the next China. Those two Asian giants are often linked simply because of their vast populations and rapid economic growth. Loading While the pair have the same vast scale, comparisons with China only get in the way of understanding India. Because of its democraticpolitical system no Indian government will be able to direct the economy in the way China does. Nor will it ever have the control over the allocation of resources which has been intrinsic to Chinas economic success. There isnt a template you can take from elsewhere and just apply to India, says Varghese, who was Australias high commissioner to India while I was posted in Delhi. He recommends that Australia set itself the goal by 2035 to lift India into its top three export markets and to make it the third largest destination in Asia for Australian outward investment. Varghese has also singled out 10 Indian industry sectors where Australia has competitive advantages along with 10 Indian states that could be a focus for future trade. The good news is that Australia has a valuable asset to help our growing Indian diaspora. The report estimates about one in 50 people now living in Australia is Indian-born. They can go into the nooks and crannies of a relationship where governments cannot, it says. They can shape perceptions in a way governments cannot. And they create personal links, in business, the arts, education, and civil society which can help anchor the relationship. Varghese predicts that Indian-Australians may prove over the next two decades to be the most politically active of any migrant group in Australian history "since the Irish." This, in turn, will influnce how our political leaders prioritise, and manage, the broader relationship with India. I think we will see the Indian community in Australia becoming more engaged in politics, says Varghese. Because they come from a political tradition of liberal democracy they are probably more comfortable in the Australian political environment than some other diaspora communities." It is all part of the way Australia will shape, and be shaped by, the Asian century. https://www.watoday.com.au/business/the-economy/the-asian-nation-australia-needs-to-embrace-20180814-p4zxf2.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

[misstincu]

Breaking Up With My Girlfriends

There are many people that come and go in our lives. Some leave because they want to, others leave because you make them, and a few might mutually agree there is nothing beneficial in staying in each other’s lives.

A friendship is by definition a relationship between friends, a state of mutual trust, support and attachment. Throughout my life, the predominant gender among my diverse groups of friends was female. I will talk about my male friends as well, but that’s for another time.

Today I want to focus on what female friendship means to me, the effect it has on my existence and on my lifestyle and how much friendship resembles a relationship with a partner, with a few exceptions of course.

                                   © Illustration by Mariah Llanes ©

Friendship vs relationship - the inception, development, torment (in some cases) and the heartbreak that comes whenever one of the two ends is pretty similar. One important thing I learnt from my friendships is that, unfortunately, they don’t always last forever. I have lost many girlfriends over the years, and others lost me, and I’m sure all of us will continue to lose and discover friendships until the day we die.

Close friends, acquaintances, friends of friends - I used to know so many, to hang out with them at numerous parties and social events. Friendships that lasted a night, friendships that lasted a summer, friendships that lasted years - I’m sure we all experienced these types of connections.

Looking back, it is clear as day why I lost certain female friends, or why they lost me - of course, there are also the situations where I don’t know what the fuck happened. In terms of the ghosts of my girlfriends past, I can only speak for myself and say that in highschool I was too clingy and territorial with them. I was loyal to them to the point of my destruction and their suffocation. Basically, just like a super annoying golden retriever.

I know I was looking at my girlfriends as someone to hold the place of many things missing from my childhood: a loving family, affection, understanding, to be accepted and liked by my peers, someone to keep me company. I had no idea what boundaries were back then, and why I should back off a little and not compete and compare how much time they had for me and how much time they had for their boyfriends.  

As I transitioned into womanhood, some of my longest friendships started to disintegrate  because we had grown apart, each of us flourishing in different directions. But growing apart takes a very long time, and sometimes the damage is so big that it cannot be undone - sometimes it’s just too little, too late.  

Losing girlfriends is painful, it’s sad, it’s heartbreaking. But there are many things to learn from losing these people that were once so important to you. If I were to name a few things that we can find in the ideal friend, such as: trust, empathy, support, attachment, respect, loyalty - I think we can agree that this list overlaps a bit with the list of qualities we look for in a life partner.

Today, I strongly believe that “less (friends) is more”. I no longer look for absurd or unrealistic things in my girlfriends, and the list of my expectations is short and sweet. The expectations are to receive back the same amount of respect, consideration, honesty, empathy and moral support that I offer. To me, the beauty in all of this lies in the fact that when a friendship is mutual and real, everything comes naturally. I don’t have to force anything, I don’t have to chase anyone, I don’t have to beg or demand anything - it’s already there.  This is why I don’t invest in toxic, manipulative, unreliable, time and energy draining friendships anymore - to be fond of a person and nostalgic of who you both were at some point in life is not enough to sustain the longevity of a friendship.

As you go further in life and gain more and more knowledge, you realise that actually you don’t have so much free time anymore - you barely have any time left after work, responsibilities and domestic chores. And all you are left you are with is a few hours once in a few weeks to have a coffee with your girlfriend.

Adulthood comes with a strong need of prioritisation: who and what you are spending your free time on. Don’t get me wrong, I still reminisce at times about my long lost girlfriends. I still smile when I find something that reminds me of them. I am still happy for them if I hear they are now happy, and went further in life than the point where I left them when we stopped being friends. I am still happy to hear they changed for the better and I am still saddened if I hear they are not doing well and a lot of bad shit is going on in their lives.

Life does, however, go on. Whilst it’s not always in our power to make a friendship work and resist the test of time, we can still do what we possibly can to make our friendships worth our time and energy, to support our friends and let them know we appreciate their time and appreciate them as a person. We can respect the boundaries of our friendships, be honest, understand and accept what the other person is going through. Accept the fact that sometimes we won’t be able to see each other or talk to each other often. At the same time, it’s important to let them know that we’ll still be here at the end of the day.

A real, powerful, meaningful friendship will resist the test of time as long as the desire and work that goes into sustaining the friendship and supporting each other through change, no matter what life throws your way, is mutual.

[itsnelkabelka]

Speech: "Human rights are intertwined with so much of what the Security Council does."

Thank you Madam President for calling this important debate. I welcome the clear Security Council support for discussing this issue. I also thank the Secretary-General for his briefing, and strongly agree with all of it.

The United Kingdom is committed to the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. Not just because this is the right thing to do but also because it is a cornerstone of peace, stability and security and a tool for conflict prevention.

The Security Council has a clear role to play. It is necessary in order for us to do the job the United Nations Charter gave us. It is absolutely not encroachment, for the reasons the Secretary-General so eloquently set out.

Too often after a conflict the international community looks back and concludes that more should have been done at the outset, and that warning signs had not been acted upon. All too often those warning signs involve human rights violations and abuses.

Twenty-five years ago, the Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial executions reported on allegations of killings in Rwanda. A year later, his successor visited Rwanda, and later warned the Commission for Human Rights of his fears of potential genocide. We all know now the consequences of the international community not responding decisively to those concerns. Today the international community is being asked the same questions and given similar warnings in South Sudan, and we need to come up with better answers.

The situation in Syria also shows the clear connection between human rights violations and conflict. A regime faced in 2011 by peaceful protests from its people responded not with reform, but with repression and violence. We have seen where this has led: a civil war; a huge rise in violent extremism; death and forced disappearances; a refugee crisis; regional instability and even the use of chemical weapons against civilians.

The story of Masri, a Syrian man, is sadly just one example. He was arrested after participating in a peaceful protest at the start of the conflict. He was tortured, starved and interrogated over two years in four detention facilities, and then taken to a regime hospital that has been described as a ‘slaughterhouse.’ A rare survivor, he was taken back to the notorious Sednaya Prison for another year of torture. He was eventually released; but by the time he returned home, he screamed at his own reflection in the mirror. He did not recognise himself; a ghostly skeleton of a human standing where he once stood.

And that’s an illustration of why repeated abuses of the veto in this Council to block accountability for violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses in Syria are so damaging. They reinforce the Syrian regime’s certainty that they can get away carrying out gross violations of human rights with impunity. The United Kingdom will continue to do our utmost to hold accountable the perpetrators of all such violations and abuses.

And that is why the United Kingdom also welcomes, Secretary-General, your continued focus on prevention, and this includes your support for your predecessor’s Human Rights Upfront initiative, which seeks to bring the UN system together to prioritise human rights, and work together on cross cutting issues. It also seeks to ensure that the UN does all it can not just to respond to, but to prevent, serious violations or abuses of human rights – and we have seen time and again how detrimental those are to peace and security.

Two institutions of the United Nations are particularly vital to delivering this joined up approach to human rights. First, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and his Office provide invaluable support to UN peace operations. They advise on mandates, they carry out strategic assessment missions to South Sudan, Liberia and Mali, they send technical and operational support missions to Iraq, & Kosovo to name just a few from the last year. We welcome the interactions between this Council and the UN High Commissioner and his Office.

Second, is the Human Rights Council. Like many others, we are concerned when countries with poor human rights records get on to the Human Rights Council. But the Human Rights Council nevertheless plays a central role in responding to human rights violations that pose imminent threats to peace and security. Every country, including the worst offenders, have a Universal Periodic Review, they have to explain policies and actions. The United Kingdom particularly values the role the Human Rights Council plays in overseeing the special rapporteurs and other investigative mechanisms such as Commissions of Inquiry. Crucially for this Security Council’s work, these vital tools help provide objective and professionally-gathered information on how potential or active conflicts are evolving.

Madam President, human rights are intertwined with so much of what the Security Council does. The United Kingdom welcomes this debate. This Council cannot fully discharge our responsibility enshrined in the UN Charter to maintain international peace and security, without addressing human rights every single day.

from Announcements on GOV.UK http://ift.tt/2pD3GN0 via IFTTT

[rueur]

Morning Pages #14 (18.01.2017)

Wednesday 18th Jan - 9:12 a.m.

I feel like these entries are getting later and later, but today I also feel like I have a perfectly good excuse: I am definitely sick. I don’t think it’s Hepatitis anymore, I think I was just panicking about that, but it’s definitely a cold or something. My sore throat and fever are mostly gone but I am still spitting out phlegm and I am coughing on occasion. I certainly do not feel well enough to go to rehearsals but I know I will have to, because the show is in just over a week and the first tech rehearsal is in exactly a week, and nobody is as ready as they should be and people keep dropping out or not turning up and it’s infuriating. This show was put on far too soon, but council wanted us to produce something, because really it had been two years since the last instalment for ‘Thanks For Asking’ and I feel like maybe Paul had been placed under a fair bit of stress to churn out something near-immediately once he had gotten the job.

I was just on Lisa’s Facebook page. She was in my third year creative writing class last year, and she went to Japan right after her graduation, to visit her family. She’s half-Japanese, I think her father’s Anglo-Australian. I think I miss her a little. I really enjoyed talking to her and working with her, and am now thinking that maybe I should hit her up, go out for some coffee some time. I don’t know if she’s open to dating women. She once told Steph, another gorgeous girl in our class, that she’s always loved her smile and her eyes. I was there for that, I thought that was incredibly adorable and just a lovely thing to say. Lisa always seemed quite socially awkward too, which is why I think she waited until the last day of her last semester to say anything. It’s a shame. Even if I were never to see either of them again, I’d like to think that they’ve kept in touch themselves. Having said that though, I do hope I get to see them both again. We’re all creative writing majors so hell, I might even be able to work with them some time in the future. Anything could happen.

I went to Sandringham Beach yesterday, all by my lonesome! No, it was honestly a great day for it. I was supposed to go to St. Kilda Beach because that was where Jacob was going to be, with a bunch of friends, but I left the apartment way too late and by the time I got to Flinders, I wasn’t feeling it anyway. So I caught the train to Sandringham and walked up and down the beach on my own, taking photos and feeling the gravelly sand beneath my feet. I was there from around 4:30 p.m. till about 8:30 p.m., and I didn’t go swimming because I was expecting to get my period today, but I didn’t get my period today. I think it might be because I’m sick and I’ve been a little emotionally distressed lately, but then again I’ve been emotionally distressed since October, I’d say. I found a whole half of a clam shell, which felt like a gift from the earth. I saw it in the still water a little way out, and I rolled up my pants legs and sleeves even further, reached in and grabbed it. I also found a boulder covered in seaweed that was being slapped viciously by the tide and thought it was superbly fascinating. My notes on it are as follows: ‘rock pool coming in the breaking waves, micro waterfalls for pindrop rainforests’. I took a number of photos of that, before I walked up the beach a little further, found a wide stretch where there were no people on either side of me and decided to sit down here and do a bit of reading. I read a little of Helen Garner’s ‘True Stories’, which I feel have a very similar voice to the one I’ve been using to write my morning pages lately, just less casual and more with purpose. My morning pages have never held a voice of purpose. I have some notes that I took at the beach though, that I would like to have a go at turning into something here. In a bit, not right now. I keep stopping and starting, because I think I am really quite sick.

I meditated at the beach as well, just for about fifteen minutes. It was peaceful for the most part, but I could hear a lot of people even though I was so far away from the actual crowds. I opened my eyes and the whole world was bright blue, like I was looking through one lens of a pair of 3D glasses. It was refreshing.

After a little bit of that, I walked up the length of the beach again, determined to get to these bright red and orange cliffs that lay far on the other side of the stretch. It took about twenty minutes of trudging my way through the heavy sands of Sandringham, my feet rising and falling on the uneven earth. The ground was only stable where plant life grew at the base of the cliffs, the root masses keeping the sand and dirt at some trekkable level. On my way to the red cliffs, I managed to notice a number of peculiar things that only made me love the beach environment a lot more, made me realise once more how free people felt here, and how the value of these experiences within the landscape cannot be understated. Most notable was a Hispanic family with a naked baby. The mother and the father were dancing together, tangoing in their swimwear as their family looked on. It was a very pure sight; their bodies were newly browned and their cerise bathing suits looked less like clothing and more like markings on their skin. I smiled at them because they were happy and they were sharing their happiness with me. A little way past them were a group of four or so tourists who were sitting in a circle-like position, all facing each other. Between them, I could see that the sand had been divided up into four different frames. Each frame was being turned into a piece of art by all of them. One woman was drawing a delicate mandala, the others were drawing cavelike illustrations of ancient animals, towering trees, and gorgeous landscapes. They were all in deep concentration, and had a stereo beside them playing soft, cosmic music. Next along this lively stretch of beach came a posse of running children, chasing each other for what looked like a tiny, black ping-pong ball. They seemed quite young, too young to be left to their own devices, but old enough to be caught up in their independent play. One of the girls tripped over a mound of sand and fell flat on her face and I was ready for her to start wailing. Surprisingly enough, she simply jumped back onto her feet, shrieked with excitement and continued in her pursuit for the elusive black ping-pong ball. In amongst all this activity, I felt too transient on my hike to feel like a participant in this bustling beach scene. I was just a drop of ocean water on the sand, trickling into this gravelly terrain until there was none of me left on the surface, and I became only a whisper of the earth. I liked being an onlooker, though. My joy was to see what this space meant to other people.

Last year, I was privileged enough to attend a lecture being given by writer Arnold Zable. His gift to us was the sound advice that living must always come before writing, and that you need to be present in the scene that you wish to capture. It does no good to you in the long run if you’re focused more on your work than on your subject, otherwise your work becomes a self-conscious and more abstract product, with only one foot in the real world and the other in abstract space. I’ve been keeping this in mind ever since he said it, and feel that it’s been inarticulately helpful for me. When my parents and I went to see the psychic on December 10th, right before they left for Sri Lanka, the woman gave me this card that said ‘Wonder’ on it that basically told me to keep doing what Arnold Zable told us to do: be in awe of the world, and don’t focus too much on explaining what’s happening. Just wonder and enjoy the innocence of the wonder, and capture that instead because it’s what you can do best. I’ve been reading Helen Garner as I said, and after working my way through her first few short stories, I’ve decided that that’s exactly what Helen Garner had accomplished with her pieces. She captured the wonders of Melbourne during the ‘70s. She was able to preserve the atmosphere of Fitzroy High School and its colourful staff and students. She painted a picture of Johnston Street in Collingwood, stuck in time, a stunning portrayal of Merri Creek that will never die, and that I still see today. Her attention to detail for the wider world around her has perfectly captured this city and her experiences in it. It’s shown me that I can do just that, and people will recognise the value in my work. Her stories aren’t chapters in a memoir, they’re more immersions into a long-gone Melbourne, and they are precious to me in this way.

In the Introduction of ‘True Stories’, Helen Garner wrote that writers need to adopt this peculiar position where they must both live within the world they hope to capture, but they must also be an observer. They must be left of centre in regards to the heart of their piece, but they should still make an effort to involve themselves, to participate in the image. Visual artists have a more distinct position: off the canvas, they turn the world in front of them into art. Writers must instead grab the bubble around them and somehow express the entirety of that bubble. It’s like taking a panorama but somehow more complex. I tried to take a panorama of the stretch of beach I had walked along yesterday, and found that the water was always distorted because of the coming and going of the tide. The world would not sit still enough for me. I think that my portrait of any space will be incomplete, just as Helen Garner’s are most definitely incomplete, limited to whatever observations she prioritised. This fact makes me a little scornful, a little frustrated that this city won’t just sit still! I want to take you all in and you just keep running around me in circles. I want to keep you alive, I want to share you, I want to live and wonder in you forever.

[endorsereviews]

Sustainable Pace in Product Management

What is Sustainable Pace?

Sustainable pace is an important agile principle. The Agile Manifesto defines it in the following way: “The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” The goal is to create a healthy work environment and avoid that people are routinely overworked, lose their creativity, make mistakes, and eventually sacrifice their health. A framework like Scrum offers specific techniques that ensure sustainable pace—unfortunately, only for development team members and not for product people.

But sustainable pace is equally important for you, the person in charge of the product. You have a demanding job with a range of diverse responsibilities. These include interviewing users, working on the product roadmap, updating the product backlog, engaging with the stakeholders, and working with the development team, to name just a few. As all these duties compete for your time and attention, it is all too easy to do too much, work too hard, and exhaust yourself—which is neither good for you, nor for your product.

Say No

If you find that you are overworked and struggle to cope with your workload, then start by reflecting on the tasks you carry out. Are all of these part of your actual job? I find that product people often take on responsibilities that belong to other roles thereby making a demanding job even harder. A common example is looking after the development team. While it’s great to care about the team, facilitating effective collaboration within this group is not your responsibility. That’s the job of the Scrum Master.

I know that some product people don’t have a Scrum Master working with them or that the Scrum Master’s work is not effective—the individual might be too stretched or not adequately qualified. But if that’s the case for you, then I recommend addressing the issue rather than covering another person’s job. The latter will stabilise an ineffective setup and cause you to be overworked or neglect some of your core duties, neither of which is desirable.

Therefore, focus on your actual job—making or keeping the product successful. Do not take on additional responsibilities like improving the development process, leading the dev team, making UX design decisions, or creating a marketing strategy. That’s the responsibility of the Scrum Master, development team, and marketing stakeholder respectively, not yours. Have the courage to say no even if it’s difficult: There is no lasting benefit in you becoming the general dogsbody for the product.

Be Proactive

Next, minimise the amount of unplanned work and firefighting you encounter. I find that many product people are so busy with urgent tactical work, such as refining user stories, working with the development team, or answering a support request, that they neglect important strategic tasks like regularly assessing if the product strategy is still working. This can cause nasty surprises like a competitor leapfrogging you, which then leads to more, unplanned work, as you desperately try to catch up with the competition.

Consequently, make enough time for strategic work. Regularly assess how your product is doing and how effective your current product strategy is, for example, by holding collaborative strategy reviews, as I describe in more details in the article “Establishing an Effective Product Strategy Process”. This will allow you to play a proactive game and be responsive rather than having to react to surprises.

Share the Work

If you find that you are simply too busy to regularly strategize and cannot let go of any responsibilities, then consider sharing your workload with development team, stakeholders, and other product people.

With the Development Team

If you spend a lot of time working on the product backlog trying to create perfectly crafted user stories or if you have to answer plenty of questions during the sprints, then you are probably not effectively sharing the product backlog work. Managing the product backlog should be a collaborative effort. The development team members should actively participate in the backlog work, discover, capture and update stories together with you, and help you prioritise the product backlog. This leads to better product backlog items, reduces the amount of questions you have to answer in the sprint, and frees up your time.

Additionally, you are often able to delegate (some of) the refinement work to the development team—assuming that the team has acquired enough knowledge about the users and product and that you trust the individuals to make the right decisions. This will further reduce your workload and enable you to spend more time on important strategic tasks.

With the Stakeholders

Some product people I have met spend a significant amount of their time on “politics”: negotiating deals, convincing people, selling ideas to important stakeholders. Consequently, stakeholder management can feel like herding cats. While you will always encounter stakeholder challenges, I find that a lot of time spent with negotiation, persuasion, and re-alignment activities can be saved when you embrace a participatory decision-making process.

The idea is simple: Involve the key stakeholders—together with development team members—in important product decisions, for instance, by using consensus or product person decides after discussion as the decision rule. This will increase people’s buy-in and reduce the need for continued re-alignment meetings or possibly some crisis management if you find out that people did not implement an important decision. (You can find out more about participatory decision-making in my article “Use Decision Rules to Make Better Decisions”.)

With Other Product People

If the previous two measures are not appropriate, then consider how big your product is and how many development teams you work with. As a rule of thumb, if there are more than three teams, then you may have to involve additional product people to help you manage the product. You could have, for example, one person in charge of the overall product and additional people who look after product features, as the picture below illustrates.

Alternatively, you may want to consider breaking up your product, for example, by unbundling one or more features and launching them as a separate product like Facebook did with the Messenger app in 2014. Both options will reduce your workload and make it easier to achieve sustainable pace. (Please refer to my article “Scaling the Product Owner Role” for more information on how to jointly manage a product.)

Prioritise

Many years ago, I was discussing a lengthy requirements document with the product manager in charge of a healthcare product. As there was too much work to do, I suggested prioritising the requirements. I’ll never forget the look I received and the answer the individual gave me. She said: “That’s impossible. They are all important!” The issue is, of course, that without the ability to prioritise, we don’t know when to say yes and when to say no. Consequently, we are likely to take on too much work and trying to accomplish too many things at once.

If you find it hard to prioritise—be it the order in which items should be delivered or if you should accept a feature request—then you will benefit from establishing clear and shared goals. As described in my article “Leading through Shared Goals”, I like to work cascading goals that form the chain shown in the picture below.

The goals in the picture above are systematically linked and constitute a hierarchy with the vision at the top and the sprint goal at the bottom. With the right goals in place, you are able to assess if you should add a new feature, for example. Here is how it works: If the feature is helps you reach your current release goal, you should probably take it on. If it doesn’t, then include it in the product roadmap—assuming it serves a user or business goal stated in the product strategy. If that’s not the case, then kindly but firmly say not to it. In the story above , the product manager would have benefited from having a clear and agreed release goal. This would have allowed her to order the requirements by considering how important each one was for meeting this goal.

Therefore, ensure you have meaningful and agreed goals available that help you prioritise the work. This will not only help you make the right decisions, it will also reduce the risk of being overworked and help create a sustainable pace.

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