An effective method for dealing with change, is at the project kick-off meeting, to loudly and clearly declare:

“There shall be no change!”

While this declaration is patently incorrect and impossible to abide by, it sets the position. There will surely be a considered approach to any change if the declaration is made that there shall be none. This also requires a particularly clear scope, budget, and schedule. Without a baseline scope, budget and schedule, it’s impossible to know if something has changed.

Recognising change also requires recognition of the difference between situational change (day-to-day) and project change (scope/budget/schedule).

When work is tough, or it doesn’t feel like any progress is being made, try this:

Do something each day that makes you proud.

It can be as simple as fixing a spreadsheet, getting in a key workout, or sorting out some files. But it is essential that in completing the task, you sit back and can honestly say you feel proud about doing it. It doesn’t count if the task is done because someone else wanted you to do it. It must be something you want to do, that you enjoy, and brings you the unmistakable feeling of pride.

Going through a job interview, seeking a promotion, or applying for a credential like professional engineer or chartered accountant, inevitably requires the seeker to demonstrate competence. Some competence is tangible – take a test, demonstrate a skill. Some is not – experience, and behaviours. The difficulties of assessing experience are obvious: what constitutes evidence of competence, and against what criteria. Evidence of competence tends to be provided via stories and recollections by the interviewee of past behaviour in various situations. The criteria are inevitably contaminated by the interviewer’s past, their knowledge, and, frankly whether they like – or respect- the interviewee or not.

In the knowledge worker environment, competency is evaluated by outputs, interactions, and stories. We are judged by how we behave and how we handle difficult situations or people. Those are interactions, and the resulting stories build a reputation. But most importantly, we are judged by what we write.

Consider an expert in a field, and inevitably that person will have a body of work, in a form of a book or a blog or, in the corporate environment, a long email chain somewhere along the way.

In the knowledge work environment, the best way to be seen is to write.

A “skilled engineer” brings to mind someone who is good at technical design or drawing, focussed on detail, and someone who delivers elegant technical solutions. Ideally this skilled engineer also communicates well, writes reports and meets deadlines. Focussing on development of these non-technical skills as an engineering requirement, while beneficial, may be producing engineering generalists who are adept at communication, and dealing with people, but who might not be so good at technical calculations, creative problem solving, or tasks requiring repetition or focus on details. A complex society will always need scientific and technical knowledge to be tested and stretched.

Experience is a key ingredient in determining competence. There is a “70/20/10” model that describes a view on optimal sources and weighted proportions of workplace learning. Looking at it in reverse, the lowest proportion of learning comes from formal instruction, at 10%. It is well known that training occurs at a moment in time. Next is feedback, interactions and relationships, which accounts for 20% of a person’s learning. This makes sense; feedback is essential to learning. The big one, 70%, is the experiences faced in the workplace, particularly the challenging and memorable ones. Gain experience by doing the work.

If competence is a combination of knowledge, skills and experience, then the opposite - incompetence – means being inexperienced, unskilled, and/or uninformed.

Looking at competence from the opposite side provides an alternative perspective.

If the knowledge is needed, there are books or courses or Google rabbit-holes to explore. If skills are needed, repetitive action on a task will develop that. But the one of most interest, and deep down for humans, what is truly looked for when looking for competence, is experience. Experience is crucial for demonstrable competence. The nominated experience need not be exactly the same but must be relatable.

Ray Dalio tells us in his book that “Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundation for behaviour that gets you what you want out of life.”

A good set of principles is like a good collection of recipes, for success. Having good governance systems – a system of checks and balances for ourselves will show us to be stronger and more reliable. Learning is a product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see the outcome, and improve our understanding of reality.

These can be built into principles that guide decision making in the future.

Underutilised in the business context is the use of consequences when a process isn’t followed, or a document isn’t read. Meeting requirements on a project or in business relies on, or assumes, that a business document or process is part of achieving those requirements. And yet, particularly in dysfunctional businesses or projects, the number of documents or processes that are not followed is often “most of them”. There are no consequences for not reading the document or not following the procedure. Hurdles requiring evidence of usage will quickly identify which procedures or documents are, actually, not useful after all.

In the construction workspace, safety inductions for the workers are legislated, expected, tolerated, and, simply, done. You wouldn’t (can’t) start a construction project without an induction.

Besides being legally required, and also potentially tedious and repetitive, there are still benefits to safety inductions: they can set behaviour expectations and introduce site-specific hazard identification.

For office-based knowledge workers, perhaps there is an opportunity for an induction approach to quality of work. A “permit to work” system for those who produce the pictures and words. A “knowledge induction” that presents design knowledge expectations and description of a project or company-specific technical hazards.

Making decisions – especially large or important ones - requires a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Using an algorithm, or model, or bias can help, and often does; sometimes in the negative. These mental models prevent us from being swamped with too much information.

But expertise contributes as well. The ability to act intelligently and instinctively is possible only after time and experience have honed the skills needed to make decisions. Children who are introduced to making decisions early in life, even as simple as what colour to wear, respond better as decisions get more complex and have more consequences.

Competence, for knowledge work in the built environment, is assessed through pictures and words (outputs), behaviour (interactions with others), and references (stories people tell).

Competency framework assessments typically require a user to declare whether they are ‘competent’, by ranking themselves at some level or some categorisation. This one-liner, “identify your competence level”, is loaded with a lot of unsaid behind-the-scenes work. The ability to define – and defend – a competence level is not something that is normally taught to us.

It's useful to have a reliable, intrinsic and painless way to record your daily growing applicable knowledge, skills and experience.

Does a habit develop into sustainable workflows, or, do we fall into workflow patterns that then become a habit?

Habits can protect us from decision fatigue. Habits help by just being a given, so there’s no decision – like deciding whether to have coffee or tea in the morning.

Habits are also known for providing “freedom in routine”. Performing the same actions in the same context or location or decision point means that there really isn’t a decision, there’s no emotion, it’s automatic and situational.

The brain functions more smoothly when it spots patterns and can respond without too much effort.

The quality management standard ISO 9001, over the years and over revisions, has provided a guidance for businesses to address quality in a systematic way. Originally requiring several specific documents and procedures to be prepared, the 2015 revision takes a step back, requiring that the business determine its important processes, and then determine which of those need documented procedures.

In effect, a successful quality management system is recognisable (authentic), predictable, and repeatable. This is what auditors look for. To demonstrate quality, a business recognises its priorities, and has predictable and repeatable processes.

To be effective, people should do the same.

There is no shortage of quotes and mantras that invoke the phrase ‘work hard’, or ‘hard work will get you there’.

However there doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of what that means, to ‘work hard’. And getting to that state probably varies with people. Someone can produce something and say, “I worked hard on this”, and we tend to take their word for it. Sometimes it shows, sometimes it doesn’t. But still, it’s an amorphous and vague thing to aim for, or plan for. “Try harder” or “Do better” are generalisations, and therefore allow for lack of accountability.

When we claim to be “too busy to fit that in”, it actually means we have higher priorities already scheduled in.

Rather than thinking or saying, “I’m too busy”, it’s more accurate to say or think, “I have other priorities taking precedence”.

It may not feel like it, but we choose how we spend our time. Choices have consequences, meaning other opportunities are missed. Sometimes it means not going out with friends, not meeting a deadline, or not writing that novel. It’s a choice to spend time on “X” instead of “Y”.

And that is okay. Just own that choice.

“Some skills and knowledge can be learned from university courses and other specialised training, but much of what people know (or think they know) about their work comes from experience. Experience provides an important way in which people link actions to likely outcomes, based on past feedback.”

These are not my words; they are from a research report on the impact on public safety of formal and informal design processes. It can also be observed that poor documentation is an underlying issue with many, if not all, built environment project failures. Experience, and effective documentation, are connected in many ways.

Most work can be viewed as a process.

With most work, there are people problems, and there are process problems.

Process problems always cause people problems. On the other hand, people will often set out to defeat processes, especially if those processes have problems.

As work becomes more complex, especially in the knowledge work field, simplifying the process so that it has no problems is a lofty goal. Once that is done, bring in the artificial intelligence. But there will always be problems for people to solve. In these early days, even AI will likely have problems to be solved.

Originally described by Paul Graham many years ago, there are two ways of working: being a maker or a manager.

A manager is dominated by meetings and fitting in short bursts of work in between ad hoc drop-in conversations and email responses.

A maker is dominated by deep work, creative and innovative thinking, and spending long chunks of time on one thing.

The real work – the work that should be valued – is done when making. It’s probably preferable to oscillate between the two approaches. Many won’t have a choice but to be in manager mode almost all of the time.

Accumulated knowledge leads to assumed outcomes, and these assumed outcomes guide our thinking. When using knowledge resulting in the same outcomes, over and over, it’s logical to expect that outcome each time we use that knowledge. However, conversely, assuming an outcome based on little or no accumulated knowledge will possibly be wrong.

Wisdom — or deep knowledge which has the luxury of being able to assume outcomes — is based on a lifetime of learning. It takes time. Trying to leap to wisdom after only a few years of accumulating knowledge may be like skydiving without knowing how to pack a parachute.