Me 'n the Beastie Boys want to know

I was enjoying the Beastie Boys, and it reminded me of you and my in-laws.

First, my in-laws.

They believe it is both proper and obvious to serve casserole on Fridays.

Casserole, every Friday.

If they subscribed to a newsletter that featured a casserole recipe they loved, they would find it irritating to receive culinary travel tips or a deep dive into the origins of bubble tea¹ .

My in-laws believe in the power of simplifying decisions and consistency.
If you’re doing casserole, you do casserole. No fuss, no muss, no debate.

Me? Not so much.

Casserole every Friday for the rest of my life? Hell on earth.

My inlaws seem perfectly happy, though. While I can’t understand how they endure the drudgery of their relentless meal plan, they can’t understand why I’d subject my family to one-time experimental meals.

They don’t believe my occasional masterpieces excuse any of the inedible disasters.

Is predictability better than variety? We disagree. Still, we get along just fine. 

We’ve enjoyed several lovely casseroles together, too. I love the occasional Friday casserole, and they tolerate culinary excursions on Saturdays.

So that’s my in-laws.

What about you?
Do you prefer predictability or variety? 

I think we can still get along just fine either way.

But I realized that this publication isn’t serving our predictability-loving friends as well as it could.

We don’t have a consistent publication schedule. And while the articles all relate to working with other people, that’s a giant circus tent under which we showcase a variety of wonders.

Our fabulous parade of newsletter acts includes:

How-Tos
We’ve published activity guides, tools, and recipes, such as:

• Tackling Team Overwhelm Together: Conversation Guide and Reader Tips

• Tailor-Made WoW: The Why, When, and How of Team Agreements

• The Engagement Decoder: Know Before You Go!

Interviews
We’ve highlighted fascinating thinkers, including:

• Ashley Goodall on The Problem with Change

• Alison Wood Brooks on the Science of Conversation

• André Martin on Finding Fit at Work

Mini Experiments
We invited you to try out:

• A Thought Experiment: Create an API for Working with You

• From Your Future, with Love: Run a Mini Experiment to Hone Your Intent and Shape What's Next

5D Thinking
We’re very excited about the power of perspective-taking and reframing using 5D Thinking. We plan to share much more about this going forward, adding to existing articles like:

• When Creativity Plays Hard to Get: The Framing Challenge

• Intentional Collaboration: Building Framing Skills Using the Tesseract

• Exploring Perspectives, Not Elephants

• Same is good. Same is bad. So is different.

Rethinking How We, As Collaboration Experts, Serve Organizations
Most recently, we’ve been questioning how we and other collaboration experts go about our jobs.

• The way we’ve been talking about teams is too one-size-fits-all. Instead, we need to recognize the Three Truths About Teamwork (and their Collaborative Twists).

• The way we promote one tool over another or focus on solving one layer of the problem without regard to the others doesn’t work. Instead, we need to Pay Attention to the Ripple Effects Across the Collaborative Ecosystem.

• The way we fight to promote each special framework and secure a budget for one precious methodology over another leaves clients with partial solutions and drains energy, value, and time from the expert community.
  Instead, we should consider Open Sourcing Our Expertise.

The point of this recap?

First, in case you missed something, check out the links above! The Labs archive is rife with good stuff, including the occasional masterpiece and only a few duds.

Second, we want to give you a choice.

This newsletter platform lets us segment subscribers based on survey replies. We recognize that, just like some folks only want casserole on Fridays, others may only be interested in the How-Tos.

What about you? Share your interests in the poll below, and we’ll try to send you only the articles you’re interested in going forward. (Sorry, there’s no multiple choice option.

Let us know in the next few days, especially if you DO NOT want to learn more about Open Sourcing knowledge work.

Because that’s what's coming next!

With very fond regards to everyone who expects casserole each Friday, and everyone who really, really does not,

Elise

P.S. For those who do not know the Beastie Boys, please enjoy this introduction.
And for all my Gen X friends out there, I see you.

1. Surprising fact: Bubble tea and the Beastie Boys were invented at roughly the same time!

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The New Rules for Work Labs is hosted by Lucid Teams. Learn more about our work with organizations at: lucidteams.com

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