Monthly Archives: July 2026

To The Fairest

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A picture of a golden apple wrapped in barged wire.
Image courtesy of PickPic.com

I really, really don’t like Discord.

I have it. I use it, to some extent, daily. I actually belong to quite a few different Discord servers.

But I hate it.

I’ve been trying to figure out why for a while. The platform let’s you choose the servers you want to belong to and the channels on those servers you want to see. Unless you’re on an incredibly popular server (which a few of the ones I’m on are) it’s not terribly difficult to stay current with conversations. The service is reliable and outside of the occasional advertisement (which I believe you can avoid if you pay them) it’s not a massive, algorithm-driven marketplace.

But it still makes my brain hurt, and I have finally figured out why.

Discord is too specialized, and it’s far too easy to set up a channel for every possible topic that people on a server want to talk about. Every server I’m on, for example, has a channel for animal pictures, food pics, and memes. Every. One. It’s repetitive and annoying. Not only that, but god forbid that you post about a topic in the wrong channel. “Chimichangas are triggering for me! You should only post about chimichangas in the chimichanga channel!”

Old Man Yells At Cloud meme from The Simpsons
I’m gonna use my memes wherever I damn well please.

I get it, I guess. People want to talk about what they want to talk about and they don’t want to mix their chocolate with their peanut butter. Here’s my “old man shouting at the sky” take on that, though – By doing this we are continuing to perpetuate what I perceive to be the fallacious belief that all communication should be catered to the preferences of the person in question.

We seem to have lost the ability to just adapt and deal with it.

And this isn’t just happening online, either. I’ve seen far too many (i.e. more than one) people tell a group that they needed to change a topic of conversation because it was bothering them. Instead of, I don’t know, just not taking part until it passes or politely excusing themselves.

I’m not naive. I’m fully aware that there are cases in which that isn’t possible or where the conversation is so clearly unpalatable for polite company that it make sense to speak up, but most of the time? Just…get over it?

And this is what I see all over Discord. A whole bunch of tightly controlled conversations that stifle the desire to speak, enforce cliques, and otherwise put a damper on just making connections with other people.

Here is my most controversial take on all this – I’ve been told that what I’m speaking about is exactly why neurodivergent people enjoy using Discord. They want rules and expectations spelled out explicitly for them, and by using specific channels Discord scratches that itch. I guess I even understand why that might be appealing if I constantly found myself in awkward situations because I didn’t know what was appropriate to talk about and where.

Problem is? The “real world” doesn’t work that way, and I worry that instead of trying to figure out a way to communicate with others who are not neurodivergent they are just isolating themselves further by inhabiting online spaces that enforce the belief that tight rules around communication are the way things should be.

What do I know, though? I used the old man meme above for a reason. I’m a Gen-X kid who was told to suck it up and deal with it most of his life. I wasn’t officially a latchkey kid but I came home to an empty house for much of my childhood. I’m an introvert whose entire professional career (both of them) revolves around interacting with other people on a regular basis, and I’ve had to figure out ways to overcome that because it’s a “me” problem. So maybe I’m just over here eating sour grapes.

I guess I’ll go post this to #hotTakesFromGenerationX or some shit.

Whatever.

It’s People

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Back in 2021 I took a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification class. It’s been five years since I took that class, and I haven’t completed my Green Belt project to become an official Green Belt, but that wasn’t really my goal at the time (and, frankly, it’s still not a priority of mine, even though I still want to get my official Green Belt at some point). I took the class in the spirit of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, specifically “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” A few years earlier we had hired a new CFO at our organization who came from GE and had extensive experience with Lean Six Sigma. Our Senior Leaders, who I was working with on a regular basis, were being taught about DMAIC and how it could apply at our company, and as I was one of the key figures in determining how we executed on strategic initiatives I figured it was important for me to understand what was being taught to the folks I was working with.

I learned a lot when I took that class. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was predominantly used in manufacturing, specifically in finding ways to eliminate waste and reduce defects. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was not a Project Management framework, even though when someone attempts to improve a process using DMAIC it is referred to as a project. As someone who absolutely loves data, I was enamored by how much Lean Six Sigma practitioners rely on data analysis to achieve their goals. I learned that Lean Six Sigma was not anti-Agile, and that if done properly the two methodologies could easily work together and produce some spectacular results.

The most valuable lesson I learned, however, is about what I perceive to be a misperception around Lean Six Sigma. I heard, and was myself convinced, that it was a soulless way of looking at human labor. That it was very Taylorist in that it treated people as cogs in a machine, and that if they just did exactly what they were supposed to do and followed the right process everything would be perfect.

What I learned instead was that, in the Lean Six Sigma world, “People are never the problem. Your process is.”

What this meant, according to my instructor, was that if people were not following a process, it was because they were incentivized not to do so. That circumventing all or part of a process served their needs better than following that process. That, in most cases, people want to do a good job and do not avoid a process because they are bad actors. They do so because not following the process makes their lives easier in some way.

In other words, having good processes is incredibly important, but if you didn’t focus your efforts on serving the people who are meant to execute them, they were bound to fail.

Sounds kind of familiar from an Agile perspective, doesn’t it? Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools anyone?

I saw this play out during a senior leader meeting a few years ago. We were reviewing our homegrown enterprise work management process, and we were looking for input on how to improve it. We had printed out flowcharts that detailed all the steps required to get an initiative through the complete lifecycle at our organization. Our new VP of Application Development (so new that he had not “officially” started and had flown down just to take part in this summit), held up the piece of paper and folded it in half so that the start and end points were touching. “If I can do this,” he said, “and get my projects done without going through all of these steps…why wouldn’t I?”

He was right. It was possible to get projects done without going through all those steps, and in many cases a leader did so they were able to get things done faster than by going through them. I won’t go into the reasons why he was right in this post for a variety of reasons, but he very much was.

People are complex. I often catch myself saying that people are messy, but that’s putting a negative spin on the outlook and I try not to do that. Human beings are unpredictable, because we’re all unique. As individuals our actions and beliefs are shaped by innumerable experiences we have had throughout our lives, up until the very moment we are in at any given time. One person might be having a bad day because they spilled their morning cup of coffee, while another person might be having a great day because they thought about someone who did something nice for them twenty years ago. We’re a beautiful and chaotic mix that has been thrown into a blender and turned on to puree to make us what we are today.

No process in the world is ever going to account for that.

That does not, however, mean we shouldn’t try to optimize our processes. Quite the opposite! Part of the spirit of continual improvement is that we should constantly be looking at the ways we work and exploring ways to make them better! Lean Six Sigma is an amazing, data-driven tool that can help you do that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s entirely possible to turn the outcome of an Agile Retrospective into a Lean Six Sigma DMAIC project.

Just don’t forget the people along the way.