To me a vision is not a list of items to do. It is not bullet points on a slide. Nor is it a graph which points upwards. It is not numbers added together to make an even larger number. A series of the above things is definitely not a vision. A vision is something that appeals to emotions and which triggers images to appear in the minds of the listeners.

Countless times throughout my career I have heard (and I think I’ve said it too): “you must pick you battles”. I have always struggled to believe this. Why should you not make the case for what you believe? It shouldn’t be a limit for anyone for how many times they can voice their concerns. If you have a climate where people are taught by example that you must pick your battles, what does that mean?

Having read recent articles about members of our community and how they have burned out [Burnout, Reset], I decided it was time I told mine. I learned my most valuable work related lesson the hard way. It was my second job and I was taking on what seemed like an awesome project. Creating an application for the Palm Pilot IV. With the courage of any you programmer I embarked on it without only some C++ skills to help me out.

In my previous post I wrote about Culture for Collaboration. One thing I didn’t go into was that in order to create a culture of collaboration, you must first establish basic trust. Trust is something that is extremely hard to just “establish”, it is something you earn. In short, establishing trust is not done over night. So were to start? Empower individuals and teams If you by your actions and words show that you trust a team or individual you will in time earn their trust.

“It is so cumbersome to have go round talking to people and submitting pull requests. Can’t we just go ahead and just duplicate or do whatever we want?” Yes, working together and collaborating is hard. It requires a willingness to listen to others and learning about different points of view. This is of course something which takes time to get right. Because it is about people and dealing with people is different each time and for each interaction.