Leadership Toolkit
How to Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace

1. Setting the stage so that employees know how their open expression of feedback and ideas can advance team goals.
2. Inviting participation by having leaders present a learning mindset that communicates to employees that bosses know they don't have all the answers. The voices of others in the organization need to be heard to help achieve their goals. 
3. Responding proactively to feedback lets employees know that their input is appreciated and respected and informs the path forward.

Reimagined High-Tech Anthropology® Tours: 
Covering Discovery and Design in Two Parts

There is so much to cover when it comes to our High-Tech Anthropology® process, so we decided to give this topic the time it deserves! Our 90 minute Taste of High-Tech Anthropology® virtual tour has now been split into two tours: Discovery and Design. Part 1:Discovery covers how we collect data from observations and interviews and how we debrief and synthesize what we have learned. Then Part 2:Design picks up where Discovery left off covering workflows, brainstorming designs, and running design assessments. By popular demand, we have added more examples of how we are doing this work in a remote environment.

Each tour is 60 minutes long +30 minutes of Q&A time at the end. We've added more case studies, drawn in more artifacts from our past projects, and left ourselves more time to answer all your questions.

Outcomes Achieved, Not Credits Earned
Learning and Development Done Right

It's easy to mandate employees participate in professional learning or incent them by linking their participation to promotions, but is that actually effective? Is the $359 billion spent globally by organizations on training money well spent? Probably not. Steve Glaveski breaks down not only how learning and development can fail, but how it can be done right instead. Read more about lean learning here!

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
By: David Epstein

Specialization is big across industries. From athletics, to medicine, to technology, people are told to narrow their expertise and build their careers accordingly. Those who follow the "cult of the head start" like to point to success stories like the Polgar sisters, raised to be chess prodigies, or Tiger Woods, who started golfing before he was two. Their claim is that mastery requires 10,000+ hours of practice, so dedication early without divergence is needed to stand out in one's field.

Epstein's book turns this on its head and instead unpacks how generalists can often outperform their specialist counterparts. Chess and golf might favor the specialist, but they are not representative of all fields. In "kind" environments where similar challenges occur repeatedly—such as chess and golf—experience can be key to success. However, most environments are "wicked", and instead offer novel situations, where the rules of the game are unclear or incomplete. For example, to cure cancer requires novel thinking, and that's where generalists thrive.

I really enjoyed the variety of examples Epstein offers across industries of how knowledge from one field enriched another. The book also includes advice for how to improve one's generalist skills and watch out for the pitfalls of specialization. A great read and highly recommended!

Get your own copy here!