What is This?
“Order From Chaos, Today” (or, as the cool kids call it, “OFCT”) is a newsletter about how to get things done in large teams. Each newsletter article will illustrate practical tips you can apply immediately (the “Today” part of the title 😊) for moving teams and initiatives forward, illustrated with stories from my experience over a career leading technical teams and projects at Google and other companies, in the US and Asia.
You can read the full newsletters at any time on this website, or you can subscribe and receive new articles in your email inbox, roughly every other week. For subscriptions, I have both a free tier if you just want to receive the newsletter, and an inexpensive paid tier that has some additional perks (as well as sharing in the warm feeling people get from supporting this work!). There's also an RSS feed, if that’s your thing.
Who's This For?
I’m writing this for anyone who would like to hear ideas, based on real-world experience, about how to make teams more effective. My career has been split roughly equally across roles in engineering management, operations management, and program management and I’ve concluded there is a core set of learnable skills, behaviors, and attitudes that make for happy, high-performing teams, that are common across pretty much any job title. I’ve always worked in “tech”, so most of my examples will be drawn from technical environments, but I think most of the concepts are universally applicable.
I’ve seen these ideas classified as “management skills” or “program management skills”... but I really believe they are actually “human skills”.
Who Are You, and Why Are You Doing This?
I'm Forrest Thiessen (LinkedIn, Mastodon, BlueSky). I’ve worked in both the US and Asia building telecommunication networks, data centers, developer tools, and most recently, professional education programs for engineers and program managers (I also spent a few years getting paid to play computer games, but that’s another story!). Across all of this I found my favorite parts of my work were listening to people, spotting and explaining patterns, understanding strategy, collaboratively setting priorities, and building the “social infrastructure” within teams that would enable them to meet their goals in ways that were fast, predictable, and scalable.
While there are certainly dysfunctional—even toxic—organizations and approaches, over and over again I’ve found that the same humanistic “engineering” principles and tools for getting things done in teams are things people can, and do, figure out for themselves… in time, with pain, anxiety, and with lots of steps backwards mixed with the steps forward. I get a real charge out of seeing the “light bulb” go on over folks’ heads as they “get” a new idea; my goal here is to reduce that pain, anxiety, and backward steps by fostering more of those “light bulb moments”.
What Kind of Content Can You Expect Here?
A "table of contents" for where we're going is over on the "Roadmap" page.
How Can I Contact You?
- Suggest a topic for a future article: ideas@orderfromchaos.today
- General support: support@orderfromchaos.today
- Anything else: woodrow@orderfromchaos.today
(These all actually come to me 😉. The different addresses are just to help me sort them).