{"id":1265,"date":"2018-04-28T10:01:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T17:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=1265"},"modified":"2018-04-28T10:08:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-28T17:08:27","slug":"output-results-and-things-that-are-difficult-to-measure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/output-results-and-things-that-are-difficult-to-measure\/","title":{"rendered":"Output, Results, and Things That Are Difficult to Measure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a brainstorm rather than a well thought out (or thought out at-all) blog post. I briefly considered a tweet stream, but wanted to give my few followers a break.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a bit recently about what it means to be productive on a software team &#8211; or how that productivity is viewed, tracked, or measured. I&#8217;m not going to dive into performance\u00a0<em>reviews,\u00a0<\/em>as those have a lot more moving parts and dynamics &#8211; but just the general view of how we view result &#8211; or output from any individual, and any organization.<\/p>\n<p>Traditionally, &#8220;output&#8221; is a bullet point list of things-you-did. This is output &#8211; or production. It&#8217;s certainly measurable, and if someone has no output or results, there&#8217;s likely an issue. But there&#8217;s another kind of output that doesn&#8217;t get talked about enough. What about the person who makes other people better? The person who coaches, mentors, and finds ways to make people around them productive?<\/p>\n<p>Jessica Kerr, calls this attribute &#8216;generativity&#8217;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">generativity: the difference between team output and growth with me vs without me<br \/>\n&gt; productivity: personal output\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/organizationalPsychology?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#organizationalPsychology<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jessitron\/status\/811328886441201664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">December 20, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I like the term, and have begun using it recently&#8230;which is probably why I&#8217;ve been thinking more about this over the past few days.<\/p>\n<p>Some points to consider (and potentially discuss):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Output is linear. I can produce 0 things, and I can produce n things. More things == more production. (Note that all produced things are not equal).<\/li>\n<li>Generativity can be positive or negative. I can help the team achieve more than the sum of their parts, or I can be an asshole and hold everyone back.<\/li>\n<li>You can be both Generative and Productive. While you can be Productive without being generative, I don&#8217;t know that it&#8217;s a good thing to be Generative and\u00a0<em>not P<\/em>roductive. More on this below the bullets.<\/li>\n<li>Generativity requires leadership &#8211; this means that generative people tend to be more experienced (and that less experienced people may focus entirely on output).<\/li>\n<li>For those who care about measuring, Productivity is much easier to measure than Generativity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know of a system that&#8217;s done a decent job figuring out how to measure the non-tangible output (Generativity) of team members. I&#8217;ve seen highly generative (IMO) people viewed poorly because their\u00a0<em>output<\/em> was difficult to measure (which is why I included the third bullet above), but I think generative people are critical for success in most teams. Of course, the best generative people I know also produce some measurable results as well, so perhaps that combination is necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a brainstorm rather than a well thought out (or thought out at-all) blog post. I briefly considered a tweet stream, but wanted to give my few followers a break. I&#8217;ve been thinking a bit recently about what it means to be productive on a software team &#8211; or how that productivity is viewed,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}