This week I have a few updates to share. I think the main one is that it looks like my immediate family and I are recovering from covid-19. We don't really now how we got it, despite largely working from home in the last month or so. But in our case it kind of passed like a nasty flu and it seems to be kind of running in the background, too, even still. The testing took a long time, due to major spike in cases domestically here, so by the time I was certain we had it, the symptoms were disappearing.
I'm writing this to primarily just reassure everyone that this is a real thing, real people do get it, and there are varying levels of complications...so avoid it if you can. At the same time, I find it easier to have a more sanguine and less fear-tinged view of the pandemic, knowing how it ran its course in my personal context. It's not fun, especially in the early days of confirming you have it, as you know it can develop in any direction. But if you live, you have antibodies for this strain of the virus. If anyone wants to talk about having covid or dealing with it from a practical perspective, just drop me a line.
Fittingly, this week I appeared on the Working from Home show with Nelson Jordan. Nelson and I chatted about my experience managing remote teams before the pandemic. This is primarily in the context of working on the book called Align Remotely and helping to get the word out. The book is looking better and better and I want to release it officially in about a month.
Other than that, I have various facilitation sessions to help remote innovation teams deliver better and faster. I am starting to see that in many cases there is just not enough detail, particularly at the early stages, to be able to execute on a high level vision effectively. And that stops any efforts in their tracks. Such is the nature of the dreaded unknown unknowns. At the same time, the fastest way to start making progress is to go and deliberately explore them. If you'd like to get help with your riskiest assumptions or just to help your team identify the best way to spend their time, then give me a shout.