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Andy

The Power of Fluff: Enhancing Team Collaboration

I’m sure somebody who is an expert in human psychology could shed more light than I, but there’s something about fluffy objects that brings us joy and comfort. Cute dogs and cats, baby ducks, snugly blankets. We just can’t resist the fluff, its part of who we are. Except for the fluff on peaches… that’s gross. Nectarines are just better.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Yet fluff is also a visible sign of superfluity – fluff is a disorganised, chaotic, mass of extra material that seemly isn’t essential to the function of the object to which it attaches. So its easy to think of fluff as something we need to cut through for efficiency’s sake. Indeed, it was with this lens a couple of years ago, that I found myself booking a long overdue planning meeting for my new team. Knowing that as a remote team there would be some delay in getting everyone into the Teams call and settled down, I flippantly added this time to the agenda for the first five minutes as “obligatory fluff”.

To my surprise, not only was this block of time where the team were given permission to chat crap about any topic they wanted very successful, but the phrase stuck. It quickly became a trademark of my team and entered into our way of working.

We even had memes we’d share in meetings when we had run too far off topic and the meeting had become “too fluffy”. We loved the idea of fluff so much that it became a part of everything we did – fluff at the beginning of calls to get settled. Fluff at the end as a reward for finishing early. Fluff in the middle of the meetings when we got distracted and started talking about random things.

A cartoon image of a sad cat with text reading "404. Fluff Not Found"
Not enough fluff makes for a very sad team.
A cartoon image of a sad cat with a lof of fur with text reading "413. Fluff Too Large"
Too much fluff in a meeting? Pull it back on topic.

Maybe it seems here that we were losing sight of what we should have been doing, but it was the opposite. By having permission and time to be fluffy, it was easier to call the event to order and focus on the important core of the meeting. Its about balance.

Fluff – far from being an extraneous thing to be cut back, simplified, made more efficient – became the warm, cosy embrace that tied us all together as humans, collaborating on a shared project, rather than drones clicking though one Jira ticket after the next.

The team bonded really quickly after that. They saw each other as humans with more depth than just being a “backend engineer” or “that guy who fixed the bug nobody else could figure out”. They started to care about each other, and as a result worked stronger as a team. They would help each other because they wanted to, not because that’s what it said they should do in the career matrix for the promotion they were hoping for.

Look, I’m not saying you need (or necessarily should) be friends with your colleagues – boundaries are an important part of maintaining a strong work / life balance, and leaving your colleagues at work can be part of that. I’m certainly not suggesting you describe yourself as “one happy family”, but there’s no reason you can’t have work friends. In fact I (personally) think you really should.

Would you invite them to your birthday? Probably not. Should you huddle in the kitchen together and vent about management? Hell yeah! Should you tell them about your relationship issues? Definitely not! But sharing your passion for hobbies with them, why not? We’re not just cogs in a corporate machine – we’re complex, messy, multi-dimensional humans, with squishy, complex human lives. And its okay to be yourself. Just remember to keep your fluff safe for work, “off topic” does not give you permission to make people uncomfortable. Know your audience, folks.

From my first flippant mention of “fluff”, I never intended it to become one of the core tenets of my management style. But I’ve seen its power, and when I moved on to a new company and a new team, I decided to take it with me. To make fluff a word, and a way of thinking for that team too.

So, maybe next time you’re having a dead serious meeting, about important things. Take a look around you, look at each member of your team in the eyes, and ask yourself – is this person a cog in my machine, or are they a human? Could they benefit from and contribute to fluff? I bet they could.

Give it a try. Bring some fluff to your meetings and see what happens.

Andy

How To Make a Long Term Career Plan That Actually Helps

A career plan: we should all have one, right? But it can be hard to know where to start, or what you should do with it once you’ve made it. This can be especially challenging when you’re just starting off in your career – you manager asks what you want from your job, and don’t really know what you want beyond ‘just progression’.

A child stand in the countryside, holding up a map.
Photo By Annie Spratt

Today, I want to tell you a little about how I manage long term career planning for myself, and how I use that to make regular evaluations of those plans and my progress towards them.

A Plan Is a Guide to The Next Step, Not a Rigid Set of Rules

It’s easy to think of a career plan as something rigid and unchanging; a plan that you must stew over and perfect every detail, and then stick to forever. This can make a career plan a very intimidating document. How do you think it all through? How do you know if you’re on track or not? What if you’ve made the wrong plan and won’t be happy!?

Instead, think of a career plan as a framework to help you process your feelings and observations in order to plan out next steps. You can then regularly use this framework to evaluate your current path and chosen destination.

Imagine, you’ve been dropped in the wilderness without knowing where you are or how to get back. Perhaps you climb to the top of a large tree nearby and look out around you. As you look to the north, you can see smoke rising in the distance, maybe it’s a camp? You decide to head towards it and find out.

A person standing in the clearing of a forrest.
Photo by Robert Bye

After walking for a couple of hours, your progress is halted by a wide, rushing river, and there’s no way you can cross it. There’s no way to continue to the north now. It’s time to revaluate your plan, heading north was a great idea in absence of more information, but now you know about the river, is heading that way, still the best path? Perhaps you can see something else from here? Perhaps north is still the best direction, but you need head a different way for a little to find a place to safely cross and head back.

That’s the thing with plans: You need them, they give you direction of purpose, but the most successful people are always considering their plans – changing and tweaking them to ensure they’re making the best choices for the current data they have. Changing a plan is not a failure, it doesn’t mean your plan wasn’t good enough. Changing plan means you are in control and evaluating input data.

Where Do You Start?

Just like with the above example, you start not with the next step right in front of you, but with the destination, and figure out next steps from there.

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