• It’s been a while since the last post as I was busy with the simple joys of the first good weather this year as well as doing some not-so-usual work at work. Firstly, we were busy enrolling our testing academy for the first time in Poland (and if you can help by sharing the message with interested parties, please do and/or let me know). Later, as we had an idea (firstly, as a joke, but later it got serious) to organize a free-of-charge full-day testing conference, we decided to explore the demand with a simple survey (that led to some interesting conversations and possible collaborations – exciting!) I find myself enjoying such tasks even though they are not really a part of my job description.

  • Talking about things that are not part of job descriptions - as I found just recently, there is a term for that - “glue work” (read more in these amazing article + slides + talk recording by Tanya Reilly). Actually, a recent episode of the “Quality Bits” podcast covers this as well as quiet quitting, technical vs non-technical debate, brag documents, and more. Recalling my previous post (The one with Charisma and “the Gap”), the “glue work” concept reminds me of “the gap” concept in a way. And when operating in a space of high uncertainty a lot of things fall down to one’s discipline, core values, culture - how much they care and how they translate their efforts into impact. After all, how do they see impact? Do we share similar vision? If so, can we help each other?

  • By the way, have you recognized the World Creativity and Innovation Day on April 21st? As a knowledge worker, I see it worth celebrating. But what is creativity actually? Google’s research about creativity mentions that “creativity is not about originality, it’s about reusability” (knowing Google, it’s no wonder they emphasize reusability) and that “creative thinking happens when collaborating, brainstorming, and learning”. I am a bit worried I am saying this, but on this topic I like Microsoft research paper by Advait Sarkar more. Not only the paper itself is really insightful and clarifies its perspective on AI, creativity, plagiarism, and so on, it also classifies more concepts of creativity (and I feel like I was applying at least 4 of them while writing this blog already without knowing):
    • Process as creativity
    • Authorial intent and discourse as creativity
    • Interpretation as creativity
    • Reuse as creativity
    • Randomness as creativity
  • Let’s switch to the topic of innovation. For example, in a world of all the AI buzz, innovation is not likely to happen where leadership comes to engineering and says “We need AI, go add AI into our products, so we can sell more products” (somehow I am reading this in the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger in my mind). I don’t know much about sales, maybe adding the term AI blindly to product ads works just fine, it seems so from the outside, otherwise, why would everyone be looking so stupid? Never mind, let’s get back to innovation - as real innovation is when leadership leads with context and empowers engineering with problems to solve as no one knows better than engineering what’s currently possible (in the voice of Marty Cagan). If AI is not really needed to solve the problem, and further, if AI adds complex risks to the product - is that marketing slogan really worth it? Talking about innovation, I love how Marty Cagan talks/writes about innovation and probably, I am repeating a lot of what he already have said. To be more specific - these are gold:
  • Finally, something to try-out. When discussing empowering team’s creativity and innovative thinking, we tend to consider brainstorming meetings as an established industry standard. However, Adam Grant suggest Brainwriting as a better alternative to brainstorming.