aka how to onboard yourself or new folks onto a team
I liken to onboarding at a new company to being tasked with organizing a tacklebox when you know nothing about fishing
A tacklebox- it holds things in a super configurable hierarchy
Someone hands you a hook: that’s pretty easy, you know a fish hook, and you easily slot it in the first bin
Then they hand you a heavy metal thing. You know it’s clearly not a hook, so you put it in the second bin
Then they hand you a light plastic thing, and that is clearly a “NotFirst” and a “NotSecond” classification, so you put it in a third bin
This goes on until—Oh no—you’ve been given something that fits in between categories. Or you run out of bins in the tacklebox, but this new thing feels like a whole new category. Most of the times you can rejigger your classification to account for this new information. But in the worst case, you have to dump out your whole tacklebox to adjust to this new classification system
You might also find that you can’t actually close the tacklebox: because you were so laser focused on organizing, you never got a chance to actually get out into the world and test it
You may also find that the state of the world is different from your initial conditions: the person handing you these things might be a fly-fisher, but your job is boat fishing. They might be a lake fisher, but you’re focusing on trying to establish a fishery in a river
It’s also worth mentioning that you were hired to catch fish—not classify the tools that allow you to catch fish, but so much of your initial onboarding is focused on the thing before the thing
Some things that might help avoid these errors:
Here’s how I think this shows up in work:
Things that I suggest (either that I do myself or have seen done):
