You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly round-up of hand-picked articles and resources for people who make software products: designers, engineers, product managers, and organizational leaders. Brought to you by the team at Steady.
By the Numbers - The Human Alphabet
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1534 - Artist Peter Flötner’s Menschenalphabet, a woodcut where his body is reworked into elegantly balanced letters, was created in 1534.
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1782 - The Comical Hotch Potch, or the Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master, a publication showcasing men forming the alphabet with their bodies, was first published in Britain in 1782. It was later reproduced in 1812 by Philadelphia printer James Webster.
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1868-69 - The idea of teaching alphabet by forming letters with body parts was depicted in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, written in 1868-69.
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1897 - A photo series of human letters was featured in an article by William G. FitzGerald for The Strand Magazine in 1897.
— The Public Domain Review, 15m, #typography, #design, #history
Busted Trust
Trust in business leadership is at an all-time low, and that’s a ticking time bomb for companies, especially those navigating significant shifts like AI adoption and hybrid work. High levels of trust can yield up to 10-11x better performance in organizations, with trusted employees proving more productive, innovative, and customer-focused. But a recent Trust Barometer reveals employer trust has suffered an unprecedented decline, matching the dismal levels typically reserved for government officials and media. This trust deficit is more than a PR nightmare; it’s a performance crisis in the making. The culprits? Midnight layoff emails, tone-deaf return-to-office mandates, and AI implementation without transparency, among others. To rebuild trust, leaders must focus on clear goals with real accountability, transparency with guardrails, and showing vulnerability.
— Work Forward, 11m, #leadership, #management, #trust, #organizational-culture
The Future of Critical Thought
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives and professional tasks, concerns are mounting about the cognitive offloading it promotes. By delegating reasoning to AI, users bypass traditional methods of gaining expertise and reducing critical engagement with tasks. This growing reliance on AI is seen to diminish critical thinking and disrupt the development of human mastery. Recent research reveals alarming evidence of heavy AI use significantly reducing users’ critical-thinking skills, with younger users showing increased dependency on AI. Even worse, AI’s intrusion into areas requiring higher-order thinking and expertise is troubling, potentially eroding the expertise users develop through repetition, intuition, and unconscious competence.
— UXmatters, 10m, #ai, #cognitive-offloading, #innovation
Coordination Debt
If you’re bogged down with coordination debt, it’s time to hit the refresh button. This form of organizational debt represents the inefficiencies and friction that build up when teams fail to align their efforts, causing slowdowns, duplicated work, and eroding trust. The solution? Clear communication, visibility of work, and understanding the signals you send. Here are six rules to follow: 1) Clearly define who owns what; 2) Navigate the political landscape effectively; 3) Prioritize doing over deciding; 4) Make work processes transparent; 5) Align on outcomes, not processes; 6) Foster a culture of trust. Apply these rules, and your teams will be more coordinated, productive, and engaged. (Sounds familiar!)
— Forward Thinking, 7m, #coordination-debt, #teamwork, #productivity
Balancing Documentation
Kent Beck dissects the oscillation between comprehensive documentation and agile methodologies, likening it to the thermostat problem, where the delay between action and reaction leads to overcompensation. The push for more documentation is a reactionary response to its perceived decay, which isn’t noticed until much later. However, this documentation often becomes redundant and even misleading over time. Beck proposes alternatives like communicative code, readable tests, and a stable social network of peers. As AI gets better at answering software queries, he sees a potential decline in the need for extensive documentation in the first place.
— Software Design: Tidy First?, 8m, #software-design, #documentation, #agile, #xp
Autonomous Team Coordination
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