My instantaneous gut reaction is discomfort. These are all good things, but the tone puts me off.
As someone who appreciates autonomy, I would rather be given an objective with advice on how to attain it than rules to follow. Even if the content is the same, it shows more respect.
Exhibit situational awareness : declarative and flexible.
Ask, debrief, warn : imperative and brittle.
More importantly, the espoused framework only works for a development task oriented situation. What happens when the either bee behind to do some project or product management work and has a less task oriented role?
Quick edit: managers (e.g. below director level) are typically high-performing individual contributors who're given employees in order to amplify the manager's performance. The 'ask, debrief, warn' framework is essentially a manager's framework and views subordinates as if they were extra hands (grab that thing, provide tactile feedback to say it was grabbed, then (oh shit) warn me it was really hot). Seems an effective way for a manager to think/operate, but, as this thread shows, isn't appreciated by all subordinates since it points out that they're 'hands' rather than situationally aware rock stars...
As a person that likes functional examples, "Exhibit situational awareness" is useless to me. "Great. How?" would be my first response. Ask, debrief, warn is a substantially better method for relaying this message to me.
Fun thing: it was actually pretty hard for me to put it into this tone, since it's not really mine. :) But I wanted it to be short and rememberable. I even wanted to do an acronym like they do it in the military. Just saying :)
Comments
My instantaneous gut reaction is discomfort. These are all good things, but the tone puts me off.
As someone who appreciates autonomy, I would rather be given an objective with advice on how to attain it than rules to follow. Even if the content is the same, it shows more respect.
In this case, the objective is simply situation awareness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness) for both parties. The advice is to ask, debrief, and warn.
Dan Pink gave a good 10-minute talk about this sort of thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Agreed.
Exhibit situational awareness : declarative and flexible.
Ask, debrief, warn : imperative and brittle.
More importantly, the espoused framework only works for a development task oriented situation. What happens when the either bee behind to do some project or product management work and has a less task oriented role?
Quick edit: managers (e.g. below director level) are typically high-performing individual contributors who're given employees in order to amplify the manager's performance. The 'ask, debrief, warn' framework is essentially a manager's framework and views subordinates as if they were extra hands (grab that thing, provide tactile feedback to say it was grabbed, then (oh shit) warn me it was really hot). Seems an effective way for a manager to think/operate, but, as this thread shows, isn't appreciated by all subordinates since it points out that they're 'hands' rather than situationally aware rock stars...
As a person that likes functional examples, "Exhibit situational awareness" is useless to me. "Great. How?" would be my first response. Ask, debrief, warn is a substantially better method for relaying this message to me.
As always, know your audience, I suppose :)
As a Haskell user I have to say I love the "declarative leadership" idea...
Cool. That's where I was coming from. ;) Painting with too broad and general a brush:
Google, Haskell : Declarative
Burger King, PHP : Imperative
Fun thing: it was actually pretty hard for me to put it into this tone, since it's not really mine. :) But I wanted it to be short and rememberable. I even wanted to do an acronym like they do it in the military. Just saying :)