182: Building a Strong Foundation for Event Streaming Platforms

Building trust for team, embracing the creativity journey and building a foundation for Event-First Architectures

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Off Topic: Building Trust in Teams

Holding someone hostage does not lead to peak performance. Creating a team charter helps answer critical questions about the team's purpose, values, and working style. It also helps coach team members, improve communication, and give and receive feedback. Showing appreciation for each other is a simple way to improve relationships within the team or community. The Membership is a group of passionate individuals who want to reclaim their way of working. 

Trust is the confidence that your peers have good intentions and aren't out to harm you. Teams that trust one another are comfortable being vulnerable and can admit mistakes and weaknesses. Teams should practice exchanging feedback in structured environments. In these safe environments, they can identify strengths and weaknesses without repercussions. Functional teams engage in ideological conflict. With trust, they know feedback isn't meant to damage a person but rather to improve them. Teams should seek out sources of conflict instead of avoiding them. High-performing teams hold each other accountable to high-performance standards. This means publishing team goals and standards and instituting regular process reviews. Great teams are focused on team results, not individual milestones. This is possible because individuals know their peers will call them out if their poor performance hurts the team.

Bureaucracies are no match for complexity. They can't handle the surprises we face every day, and worse, they'll never surprise us with an unexpected breakthrough. This brings us to one of the most important things leaders and teams need to internalize: our way of working is made up. This is different from how it has to be or has always been. Every organization has a purpose. But not every organization ensures that its purpose is fractal—that it shows up at every level. The team's purpose serves the same function as the organizational one. Legacy Organizations are obsessed with measurement, often using it as a form of control—to find and punish weak performance. But when we obsess over metrics, we fall victim to Goodhart's law, which states that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. You're doing it wrong if you aren't making decisions and taking action based on your metrics. Ask every team in your organization to articulate their essential intent. Clarify your purpose so you can see it three decades later. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year.

Purpose enables freedom and autonomy by ensuring coherent action. The sense at the bottom is that leadership doesn't trust anyone. In collaborative team projects, relationships play a crucial role. It's essential to allow local methods and tools to flourish instead of imposing uniformity. Prioritizing workflow coordination and improvement is more valuable than seeking a one-size-fits-all solution. All teams should be free to perform their work and enhance their processes. 

Many of us face bandwidth concerns that slow down our work. Working on small raw output rather than large polished chunks improves productivity. The goal is to optimize workflow to cut waste and maximize value creation.

[^]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Unrelated: The Journey to Enhance Creativity

A day job provides more than financial stability. It also establishes a routine that allows for daily creative time. To achieve financial security, consider finding a job outside your creative pursuits. Yet, be mindful not to spend too much time working. To nurture your creativity, find a hobby for pure enjoyment. Use the right tools to organize your life and support your creativity. Start with a calendar to track your progress, and aim to have an unbroken line of Xs for every day you work on your creative projects. Finally, embrace the creative influence of other artists and curate that influence.

Do you want to earn an income off your creative hobby or skillset? Do you dream about doing the work you love all the time? Once you’re ready for people to see your work, the internet is the best tool because people worldwide can find your work. Create a website and a social media presence. Share your completed work and some glimpses of your creative process so that others can learn from you (and you can learn from them). 

As you interact with people online, remember that you can’t please everyone. If someone doesn’t like your work, ignore them and refocus on the process of making your art. If their words make you angry, all the better: anger is an excellent motivator for creative work. These tributes take different forms—for example, You can post lists of the best books you’ve read lately with a review of what made each book so memorable.

As you share your work, you may become embarrassed of the work you’ve done in the past. This can feel not very encouraging and make you consider quitting altogether. Rather than taking it as a sign of mediocrity, please take it as a sign that you’re learning and growing. This should be encouraging because you’re never starting from scratch: You’re always building on what came before. Creativity experts cultivate a growth mindset. A growth mindset is crucial for progressing as a creative individual.

[^]: Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Current Work: Building a Strong Foundation for Event Streaming Platforms

Organizations should adopt event-driven architectures to go beyond their original goals. This enables new opportunities for analysis and functionality. Event-first thinking is crucial to build a strong foundation for event streaming platforms. When an event is emitted, it still determines which processors or functions will use it. This allows for decoupling, meaning that apps using the event can change without requiring changes in the emitter. An example is when entering a room and generating an "entered room" event, causing the light to turn on. This is a reaction to an event rather than a command.