Wishing you a peaceful and joyful festive time, wherever you are. And also sending my hearty thanks for supporting this newsletter over the year.
I’ve got some practical work-y articles queued up to share with you early next year. But for now, it’s time to rest. And if you’re anything like me, resting also means reading! So I wanted to share a few of the books I’ve enjoyed this year …
(I realised after pulling the list together that each of these is in some way about working with the psychology of humans, both inside as well as outside your team/org.)
The Status Game by Will Storr. A brilliantly written and structured book that exposes the hidden games our brains construct and play without our conscious awareness. Will scales up from individuals choosing and competing in games, to groups competing with one another, to whole societies gripped by status games run wild. Status games can have great or terrible consequences, and this book gives you a powerful explanatory lens for the world.
Quit by Annie Duke. Annie, an ex-poker pro who knows exactly how important it is to make good decisions in high pressure situations, shares the psychology behind why we tend to stick for too long with things that are failing. Why do we keep throwing good money after bad? And crucially: what can we do about it? This is a great pairing with pivot triggers. Annie frames these as “kill criteria”, which is exactly where PTs started life!
Learning to Build by Bob Moësta. Over his career, Bob noticed 5 skills that innovators tend to have mastered. What’s in the book might sound familiar: empathetic perspective, prototyping to learn, uncovering demand, causal structures and making trade-offs — but Bob has a way of explaining them all that makes the ideas seem fresher, clearer and deeper. For instance, there’s a heck of a lot more to “empathetic perspective” than the surface-level empathy you encounter in Medium posts and Design Thinking. And his take on “causal structures” is closer to understanding system dispositions and consequences – a long way away from assumption validation, KPIs and most A/B testing.
Imaginable by Jane McGonigal. I’ve only just started this but it’s already proving fascinating. A game designer and futurist sharing the techniques she uses to forecast and prepare for the unimaginable and the unthinkable. Lots of exercises that promise to expand your own ability to imagine and be resilient to whatever might happen.
I also got a few strong recommendations that will be next up in the pile:
Figure It Out by Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast (recommended by Matthijs). Apparently sections 3 & 4 are the best bits, all about external representations and interactions.
Time to Listen by Indi Young (recommended by Adrian H). Indi always has deep and transformative thoughts about research and more. I’m looking forward to reading this, her latest.
Wherever you are, happy Christmas, happy reading, and I look forward to seeing you in 2023
Tom x