I agree that social and communication skills are incredibly important in groups and generally more important than technical skills outside of deep specialties.
One of the key points of the post is:
> Developing your thoughts and a clear position in a written form that you are comfortable with people reading and using as the basis of a discussion is a terrific quality bar for those thoughts.
The more you develop your thoughts and position, the better you'll be able to play the game in a discussion or another forum. You and your colleagues can win through deeper understanding of customers & stakeholders, the problem, and solution space. I expect your colleagues will recognize that expertise and understanding even if they don't want to admit their position is 'wrong.'
Of course understanding the landscape and the 'right' move does not guarantee success. You still need to influence decision makers to give it a shot, and then you'll see whether the idea works or not.
I learned a lot about how to do this from books like 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', Influencer (Grenny), and 'Getting More' (Diamond) I also benefited tremendously from an 2-day workshop on public speaking.
There's nothing like doing this where the outcomes matter and it's a challenge for your current skills. So in addition to the publishing challenges outlined in the post, you can develop your ability to influence by:
Changing some minds
Present your ideas at user groups and conferences. You can ground the talk in material you an expert in and/or written about, but the important bit is to practice developing and communicating a point of view that influences people in some way: challenge 'conventional wisdom' or help people understand when to use or not use 'Best Practice'. My colleague Bob Lalasz has an _excellent_ series on developing a point of view: https://scienceplusstory.com/tag/pov/
Changing your org
Plan and execute some change within your team or organization, scaling up the ladder of "we don't do X" until you're satisfied. I recommend starting with small numbers of people/HiPPOs: convince the one or two engineers you're working with to adopt unit testing or static analysis for this one project to see how it goes, then convince the team to try continuous improvement via retrospectives and 20% allocation to improve daily work. And work your way up.
I don't know if this counts as 'playing the game,' though I do think developing and executing strategy is fun.
I mostly think of these practices as making things better for myself, colleagues, and customers.
Rapidly losing faith in this one - and frankly even attempting it. Its very silo'd. The 20 odd people reporting to me I don't really need to convince/influence - they do whatever I tell them anyway. Influencing other silos is high risk low reward thus far. Way too many vested interest/stepping on someone else's turf. I've just decided fixing company culture is the owners battle not mine
> playing the game well is now front and center
As it always has been and ever shall be :)
I agree that social and communication skills are incredibly important in groups and generally more important than technical skills outside of deep specialties.
One of the key points of the post is:
> Developing your thoughts and a clear position in a written form that you are comfortable with people reading and using as the basis of a discussion is a terrific quality bar for those thoughts.
The more you develop your thoughts and position, the better you'll be able to play the game in a discussion or another forum. You and your colleagues can win through deeper understanding of customers & stakeholders, the problem, and solution space. I expect your colleagues will recognize that expertise and understanding even if they don't want to admit their position is 'wrong.'
Of course understanding the landscape and the 'right' move does not guarantee success. You still need to influence decision makers to give it a shot, and then you'll see whether the idea works or not.
I learned a lot about how to do this from books like 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', Influencer (Grenny), and 'Getting More' (Diamond) I also benefited tremendously from an 2-day workshop on public speaking.
There's nothing like doing this where the outcomes matter and it's a challenge for your current skills. So in addition to the publishing challenges outlined in the post, you can develop your ability to influence by:
Changing some minds
Present your ideas at user groups and conferences. You can ground the talk in material you an expert in and/or written about, but the important bit is to practice developing and communicating a point of view that influences people in some way: challenge 'conventional wisdom' or help people understand when to use or not use 'Best Practice'. My colleague Bob Lalasz has an _excellent_ series on developing a point of view: https://scienceplusstory.com/tag/pov/
Changing your org
Plan and execute some change within your team or organization, scaling up the ladder of "we don't do X" until you're satisfied. I recommend starting with small numbers of people/HiPPOs: convince the one or two engineers you're working with to adopt unit testing or static analysis for this one project to see how it goes, then convince the team to try continuous improvement via retrospectives and 20% allocation to improve daily work. And work your way up.
I don't know if this counts as 'playing the game,' though I do think developing and executing strategy is fun.
I mostly think of these practices as making things better for myself, colleagues, and customers.