By LinkedIn’s count, this is article number 100. A good time to pause the effort, and take a break, at 100 posts of 100 words. It’s been a worthwhile and enjoyable challenge. Of course, it just means that writing precisely 100 words has become a skill – and it’s not quite clear to me if that’s a good skill to have. Sometimes writing 100 words daily has been a chore, and sometimes I’ve had to cut out some excellent prose, to meet the 100-word barrier. I’ll (probably) be back again in the future with some other writing gimmick like this one.

Competence. Credibility. Frameworks. Thinking. Skills. Known for. Known self. Character. Personality. Assumed abilities. Project start up. Black boxes no more. Too many. An experience. Experienced. Thoughts. Behaviour. Risk. Trust. Habits. Workflows. Show your work. Decisions. Inductions. Consequences. Principles. Incompetence. Exploring experience. Do the work. Better off. Please review and comment. Let’s go see. Topics. Approved. Context. Expectations. Task. Thought. Purpose. Respect. Check. The other leader. Behavioural. Changes. Switch. User. Invisible. Likeable. Productivity. Budget. Scope. Schedule. Other people’s writing. Knowledge transfer. Technical. Performance. Prescriptive. Productive managers. Human Factors. Antidote to uncertainty. Minimal effective documents. Document control. Deliverables. Training. Education. Word salad.

A 3x3 credibility matrix can provide a pathway from credentials to credibility.

There is more to competence than just having a credential.

The horizontal axis recognises the path of ability, from the categories of ‘develop’, ‘demonstrate’, and ‘be’. The vertical axis recognises the aspects of competency: knowledge, skills, and experience.

This 3x3 matrix results in nine intersections, starting in the bottom left and going vertically: credentials or potential; practise; exposure. The last column is what we are “being” – student, proficient, and finally achieving wisdom or expert. The middle column is where the action is at: documents and outputs; interactions; stories.

Industry conferences are a well-known way to interact with colleagues, make new connections, and get known. Sometimes they can be hard work, and sometimes they can be mostly fun. Networking is a skill, which some find easy, and some find exhausting. Regardless of your view on networking, it is a key part of any business.

Networking is not about showing off or doing all the talking. Share stories, but listen, too. Listen to what is going on in other people’s lives, so that you can understand them better.

Use the opportunity to meet new people and find out about them.

The role of a leader is to lead others, motivate others, and inspire others.

A key part of a business (in a capitalist environment, anyway) is to make a profit. The profit comes from money exchanging hands. Money exchanges hands because something with value has been produced.

When leading, a leader isn’t producing, they are motivating others, to produce that thing of value. 

Motivating, leading, and inspiring others is important, as long as those others are producing something of value, something someone else wants.

The world needs all types, and so does a business. 

Businesses need leaders, but they need doers, too.

It’s a hard truth in business, but likeable people go further than unlikeable ones do. It doesn’t feel right to promote or reward someone who is unlikeable.

And being ‘likeable’ is subjective too. If the right person likes you, then you are in a far better place than if the right person doesn’t like you.

On a technical competency assessment, there’s no line item for being likeable. Someone who is technically excellent may very well be not very likeable. And asking them to become more likeable is like asking the CEO to design the interconnect piping for a new tie-in.

Good work is often invisible.

And this is especially true in the infrastructure space: if nothing goes wrong, we’ve done it right. It’s a case of ‘no news is good news’. But if no one is talking about the good work being done, it’s easy to forget that it is going on.

In 2015, John Oliver did an entertaining piece called “Infrastructure” – including a fake movie trailer* that highlights how boring yet essential infrastructure maintenance is. It’s a cost on the balance sheet that is easy to cut out. There is, apparently, a fine line between appropriate maintenance, and gold-plating.

*The image is from the John Oliver item… it’s on YouTube. The movie trailer is at about the 17minute mark of the 21-minute spot.

There is an enormous amount of good work in documentation, websites, wikis, ‘bodies of knowledge’ and other attempts to get knowledge out there.

Always consider the user. Understand what would cause a user to visit your site or read your book or document. They probably have a specific question in mind that they are trying to answer.

Similarly, for documents, quality management, risk or competency, or anything that might need a framework developed, remember that the typical frameworks seem to be developed for the managers or contributors, not the users.

Keep the user in mind, when putting information out there.

Multi-tasking is not as effective as we might think. Cognitive load is impaired by the effort needed to concentrate on one thing, let alone concentrating on more than one thing. We now know that both things suffer.

The other hidden cost is the time needed to switch between tasks. It is underestimated in time management and productivity hacks. There is little recognition of switching time.

The effort to switch banks, or to switch health insurance funds, perhaps doesn’t directly compare to switching between responding to emails, to knuckling down and writing a technical report. Not really, but maybe almost.

Project delivery has changed. It used to be that projects were completed by large in-house teams who had been with the company or government entity for many years. Junior members in this team environment had consistent and informed expertise above them to learn from and progress with.

Organisational changes have resulted in outsourcing, reduced middle management, just-in-time hiring, shrinking training budgets, and little scope for on-the-job training of new and not-so-new personnel.

Outsourcing and privatisation (shareholder focus) have demolished this critical aspect of infrastructure development and management: consistent and repetitive exposure to someone more experienced, which naturally leads to learning.

Threats (or hazards) that affect safety exist in some sense, at some level, in many facets of everyday life. And they are accepted, or controlled, or feared. Achieving a sense of ‘risk management’ is not absolute: it depends on the appetite of those involved, and therefore, it is more behavioural than scientific. Applying frequencies and statistics and predictions and layers of protection are all good methodologies, but these apply within the context of the people involved, and their perceptions and behaviour at the time of the assessment.

Risk management is less scientific and more behavioural than it sometimes might seem.

The leadership reward system favours the confident, talkative, gregarious, think-out-loud type personality. There’s another type of leader, though: one who leads through knowledge and respect, and who passes knowledge on quietly and with reverence. The world (and businesses) has all types, and the world (and businesses) needs all types. The CEO role fits a certain personality, but don’t make that wrong. The quiet leaders are also worth reverence for the difference they make with their different style. They don’t need to be CEO – probably don’t want to be CEO. It’s a different view of executive leadership, without being an executive.

Quality control (QC) can be simplified into the act of checking output. A sample of the outputs, nominally known as ‘widgets’ in a manufacturing sense, is taken to check that the output has met the requirements. There’s a whole industry around quality control (and management), but fundamentally it’s checking the output.

Knowledge workers are in an interesting position of not being consistently, officially subjected to checking procedures – not like manufacturing plants are anyway, where a statistical sample of outputs are selected for a quality control check. The knowledge worker output is generally trusted upon receipt, without a statistical sampling check.

A definition of respect is:

having a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something, elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.

Or put another way, respect is the combination of credibility and competence.

And so, it is a feeling bestowed by one onto another; it's not achieved by declaring it about ourselves.

Respect is something that many want, but perhaps most would never say that out loud. Or, we wouldn't admit that's what we really want. Perhaps there's a deep human desire to be respected, but it's hidden by other, simpler wants: like being needed, or liked, or loved.

There are too many documents out there without purpose, without an owner, nor a defined lifecycle.

Strategic documentation saves money. Figure out the purpose, role and priorities of that document. The lightbulb will go on when you know why you’re writing or reviewing a document.

Be the one who retaliates a little, by culling your document responsibilities. Being asked to ‘review this document’ should always be accompanied with a thorough understanding of why, and what happens next to that document. If the requester can’t answer that, then politely say you’ll wait for the answers before you make time for it.

Competency is contextual. It is identified based on a role, a position description, or a title. For example: “we are looking for a competent civil engineer”.

Competency might be better measured against tasks rather than title. For example, “this civil engineer is competent at designing structural members.”

But it’s difficult to measure competency at thinking, and yet that is what knowledge workers – and creatives – need to spend time doing. Otherwise, the work is procedural, or done by rote, or can easily be automated. Innovative knowledge work relies heavily on the experience, skills and knowledge of the person doing the work.

Quality is sometimes defined as, simply, meeting expectations. A product that meets (or exceeds) our expectations is declared a quality product. The moment, though, when a product does not meet expectations (such as a new laptop failing within the first few weeks), then the quality of the product is immediately questioned.

In the knowledge work environment, expectations are often not clearly stated or known. Or, they are amorphous, ‘weasel-word’ type goals, like “be more productive”. These expectations are difficult to measure against, and so it’s easy to be disappointed. Move away from vague: set expectations that are tangible or measurable.

Recognising competence depends on the purpose, the outcome, and the depth.

The purpose recognises whether the assessment is for yourself, for another individual, for your team, or a company. The outcome depends on if the assessment is for a job applicant, a career path, or for a credential award. The depth recognises whether the competence is for a wide range of topics, or just one or two.

Competence has context. Without knowing the context, it’s like diving into an unknown waterhole without knowing how deep the water is, how to get out, nor why you’ve dived in the first place.

Documents are approved all the time, almost every day, in the offices of almost every professional services provider. That approval implies that the approver is aware of (and preferably has read) the content, and, if there are obligations included in the document, it is expected that the approver can meet those obligations.

In the risk, quality, and competencies arena, approval of documents means more than just being able to get to the next stage in a project.

Approval for activities related to the management of risk, quality, or competencies includes managing obligations towards the resources (people) needed to meet those requirements.

Exploring a technical topic to deepen knowledge about it takes time and effort. There doesn’t seem to be a unified globally accepted way to commence an investigation into a new or fledgling topic in our wheelhouse. It does seem, though, that every topic might have four things that can help with the exploration:

• Facts and data (the scientific and technical knowledge)

• Myths and mistakes (what has been, or is, wrong about the topic)

• Resources and references (the people and the books)

• Experts and Analysts (those with deep knowledge, and also, usefully, are those who question it).