email anti-patterns
Email is the tool we use every day. It's the basic communication medium for preparing for the con I'm running. Nothing would run without it, even face to face meetings…
Toolbox: Seven Questions of Change Management
I'm always working with my teams to accommodate change. Whether those are small changes or large, considering Peter de Jager's Seven Questions of Change Management has made me better at…
Toolbox: The Satir Interaction Model
Why is communication sometime so hard? Virginia Satir broke apart the processes that take place within our brains as we get a message and respond to it into the four…
High touch vs the System
Maybe all systems with human beings are like this to some degree, but there are tangles that can be unraveled with either a billion emails OR five minutes on the…
Thinking about the Debrief
Every year the convention has a debrief for staff after the convention in which we attempt to talk about what has happened in the organizational year and find out the…
Silent resignations
Somewhere out there is Schroedinger's Volunteer. Maybe she's doing the job and maybe she isn't, who knows because there's been total silence. No bad news but no good news either.…
Communicating about Communicating
I am wishing we could add to our "HI My Name is:" labels, some critical additional information. "Hi, my name is Rachel, I read my email about a dozen times…
Language alert
I use the word "Let's" too much. "Let's arrange things such a way." "Let's work on this project." And so on. Mostly "Let's" comes up in situations when I should…
Whose Job Is This?
There are lots of details about ThatCon I'd enjoy getting deeply involved with, but it turns out that, as con chair, most of those details are not my job. It's…
Totally Like Whatever, You Know?
Just a pointer to Taylor Mali's poetry today: A good reminder to me not to be too tentative when I speak. It's a beautiful Saturday and I'm going to get…