Show Notes
In this episode, Mon-Chaio and Andy discuss the future of their podcast as they prepare for significant changes in their professional lives. They explore various ideas for continuing the podcast, including changing the format, inviting guests, or even pausing it. They use the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ technique to brainstorm and evaluate these options, aiming to find the best path forward.
References
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Transcript
Mon-Chaio: It is another beautiful day for us to learn about tactics for technical leadership. Uh, fortunately we won’t be doing that.
Andy: we will, we will. I have a structure for what we’re gonna be doing.
Mon-Chaio: Aha. Okay. Andy and I thought we’d take today to talk about the future of the podcast. Folks that have been, I regular listeners, uh, will have heard in the last few weeks that this podcast might be changing format, timing, shape, everything as Andy moves on to become a professional woodworker, uh, or master woodworker, is that what they call it?
Andy: I have no idea. Professional furniture maker.
Mon-Chaio: Professional
Andy: I don’t know. Well, it depends on what kind of woodworking I end up doing, but yeah,
Mon-Chaio: Just make sure to stamp it with the TTL brand as you each piece that you make a little brand
Andy: I do need to come up with a brand and a logo and all of that, so yeah. Yeah, maybe I could connect it to TTL somehow.
Mon-Chaio: in either case. Um, for those that didn’t listen to, uh, previous episodes. Andy being a professional furniture maker will make it very difficult as he’s in a intensive training program to podcast. So we thought we’d talk today about how this podcast might change and where we might go from here. Sort of a very exploratory conversation because I don’t think either of us really know how it’s gonna go either.
But Andy, as he does for a long time, listeners of the podcast. Is gonna connect this a little bit with a tactic
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: or that technical leaders can use, um, in technical leadership. So take it away, Andy. Talk to me about the six hats thing.
Andy: All right, so what we’re gonna be doing here is we’ll be brainstorming, we’ll be coming up with different ideas and maybe evaluating them and. There was a guy named Deb Bono. He created a technique called the Six thinking Hats. And the purpose of the technique is to get people to stop brainstorming. Against each other. So you’ve probably often, when you do brainstorming, people say, oh no, don’t shoot down the ideas as they come out.
We just want them coming out. And what you’re getting there is you’re getting people working at cross purposes. Someone says, well, we could do X. And then another person says, but you’re gonna have all these problems. And then another person says, well, then we could do why? And another person says, but you’re, then you’re gonna have these things.
And maybe another person says, I wanna be very positive about this stuff. Yeah. Let me, yes. And that, let’s keep going with that. But at the same time, Mancha, maybe you’re very pessimistic and you just keep kind of shooting it down and coming up with reasons that it won’t work. And what that’s doing is it creates a situation where the group is kind of fighting against itself. And it can be demotivating. And it can kind of shut down the brainstorming. So the six thinking hats is a, is a structure to avoid that. And you start out with what’s called the blue hat, which is actually what we’re doing right now.
So the blue hat, you use it to manage the thinking process. You use it to kind of structure the conversation. So at times you might say, okay, let’s transition back to the blue hat now and let’s talk about where we go next. And everyone’s putting on the same hat at the same time.
That’s the key. So. As the facilitator, you need to keep an eye on what’s the hat we have on right now and work to keep people in that hat.
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: So at the moment we’re kind of thinking about the way this might be structured and how this might work. We, we’ve got the blue hat on the other hats that we can go through, are the green hat.
We will be focusing on things, that are about creativity. We’ll be thinking about what are the possibilities that are open to us? What are the alternatives or what are new ideas, things that we haven’t come up with before. Then, uh, at some point we’ll be going through the red hat, which is about feelings, hunches, intuitions.
This is where emotion usually comes
Mon-Chaio: Mm. Okay.
Andy: This is where you want to keep those strong emotions. Where you’re just like, oh my God. I, I don’t know why, but I’m just afraid of what’s gonna happen here. This is where you get to have people talking about that or, ’cause someone could say, my emotion is, I think this is amazing and exciting.
I’m energized about this. Then you’ve got the black hat and the black hat is a really important one because it’s the one that a lot of people tend toward. You have to be careful with it because everyone tends toward it and will start showing up everywhere and darken all of your colors.
And that’s risks and difficulties, problems. That’s the one where you start thinking about, well, it’s, you’re gonna, you’re gonna hit this and you’re gonna encounter that and you’re gonna have these issues and uh, if you do that, then this isn’t gonna work. That’s where the black hat comes in. Then you’ve got the yellow hat, which is about optimism.
Let’s look on the bright side of life.
Mon-Chaio: Hmm mm-hmm.
Andy: And then you’ve got the white hat. And the white hat is the facts. And the reason you want that one is because in a lot of brainstorming sessions, people seem to kind of forget about what are the facts of the situation. Then you kind of start working through what’s this right structure, what’s the thing and what’s the thing that we’re gonna be talking about? We’ve already discussed that it’s, well, what is the structure of this podcast after I’m off making furniture,
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: how, how’s this going to work?
So given that, I’m gonna suggest that. We start going through, we start on the white hat. collecting, what are some facts about what’s going on?
Mon-Chaio: Okay,
Andy: What, what’s in my life? What’s in your life? Uh, that kind of thing.
Mon-Chaio: got it.
Andy: What’s the podcast like? How, that kind of stuff. Then we move on to the Red Hat feelings, hunches emotions.
We’ve just heard a bunch of facts. We’ve already got this. What, what emotions might be sitting there that’s gonna drive everything?
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: Then you go to the green hat. We start thinking about, well, let’s just start throwing out what could be done, what could be completely different? What options might there be out there?
Then go to the black hat. ’cause now we’ve heard a whole bunch of stuff and they might be very scary. How could this all fall apart? What could this, what could just go wrong? And all of that. And then we can go to the, to the yellow for what are the positives? Where could you find profit or motivation or something in this?
And then at that point we can decide, we might be out of time, but can decide is there something else to go onto.
Mon-Chaio: Uh huh. Okay.
Andy: Um, ’cause at that point, usually you’d go back to the blue hat and you’d say, okay, how can we bring this to a conclusion? What’s a structure for that? Maybe, maybe we say, let’s look at this one particular thing and see is that the most likely of a way of moving forward?
And that’s the way that you can kind of iterate on the six thinking
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Okay.
Andy: And sometimes you might not go through all of them. Sometimes you’ll go through them multiple times. Uh, yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Seems reasonable.
Andy: Yeah. And, and this is why I thought it would be useful to do it this way because, uh, MCHA, you’ve never done this.
Mon-Chaio: have not.
Andy: Uh, and it’s a thing I’ve used multiple times in leadership, and it’s always seemed to get the group aligned and moving together.
Mon-Chaio: Let’s give it a shot. Sounds like, uh, it sounds like you have a lot of good experience with it, so, uh, you can help facilitate us through these hats.
Andy: Yeah,
Mon-Chaio: I starting with what the white hat?
Andy: the white hat. So we’re gonna take off the blue hat and we’re gonna put on the white hat,
Mon-Chaio: mm-hmm. Facts.
Andy: So an easy fact. Um, I am going to be full-time on something else for about a year. Starting in a, let’s say four weeks.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Well, in fact, about that, that’s probably important. Is fulltime for you means Well, full, full time? Yes.
Andy: Y Yeah. Possi possibly more than five days a
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: And many, many hours a day.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Okay. Um, let’s see. So for me, uh, a fact is that I’m now commuting, uh, from Seattle to Denver quite regularly. Um, three days a week on average, um, most weeks. So that’s a fact.
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: What other facts do we have? I think a fact is, um, our current podcast episodes take, I don’t know, I would say maybe four to six hours to prep for, um, about an hour and a half to two to record and, and. I would say maybe two to four hours to edit.
Andy: Yeah. And we’re doing those, uh, every week.
Mon-Chaio: Right? And we’re doing those every So if we add that together, let’s call it like three hours to edit, to record, call that four, call that, uh, three hours to research. We’re at seven. So seven plus minus a little bit. So seven plus minus hours a little bit. That’s like. A day’s worth of work a week.
Andy: and, and at the moment, because there’s two of us we hand off who’s editing. So that, uh, two to four hours to edit is only every other week at the moment.
Mon-Chaio: Right. So the individual person spends maybe, uh, seven to eight hours a one week, and then five to hours the other week, something
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: right? Okay. Yep. That’s a fact. Um, what other facts do we know? What do we know? Any facts about our listeners, um, what they enjoy, why they tune in?
Andy: Strangely enough, no.
Mon-Chaio: We’ve never engaged the market research company to help us with this. Have we, Andy?
Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, at, well, this wouldn’t be a fact. I would say this would be a guess. So my, the facts would be that I guess, that people are interested. Because we look for things that are out of the ordinary and talk about them
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: and going into the research articles and, and thinking through what that could mean.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Well, the fact is that is what we try to differentiate ourselves on. And the and I think it is a fact to say that we are extremely different than almost all podcasts or other engineering leadership content out there because of that.
Andy: Yeah. I think that’s one of the things. We don’t have many guests. I think in total we’ve had three.
Mon-Chaio: I believe so. That’s right. Ethan, Edward, right?
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that’s three guests. That’s a fact. We’ve had three guests over. About a hundred episodes.
Andy: Are we at a hundred now? Yeah. We’re probably getting close to a hundred.
Mon-Chaio: So, okay, so that’s a fact. Um, a fact is that episodes are approximately 40 ish minutes long after editing, when we publish them. Uh, what else?
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: I think a fact is that I’ve heard a number of times anecdotally that people like the back and forth conversation between us.
Andy: Uh, one last one is that we seem to get around 40 to 50 listens per episode increasing slowly over time, but. To go above that, but I think within the first few weeks we end up with about 40 to 50 listens. Is that what you remember?
Mon-Chaio: that’s about right. Yep.
Andy: Yeah. Okay. So as you can see, some of these are, are squishy facts. We, we can kind agree on what we’re talking about at the very
Mon-Chaio: Uhhuh. Absolutely.
Andy: So, uh, do you think we should move on to the, the red feelings, hunches emotions?
Mon-Chaio: Feelings, hunches, emotions. Yeah. All right. Let’s move on.
Andy: All right. So, uh, I’ll say one thing is I do feel a little sad to be moving on from this, um, but I’m also somewhat relieved because I have to schedule so much around all of this. Um, like just today, Mancha, like, I’m pretty sure we’re scheduling around something for you because this morning I got the message from you, can we move the recording to 8:30 AM PDT? And I had to check my calendar and I was like, yep, we can. But in the past it’s been like, no, that won’t work for me. Can we do this day instead?
And yeah, we.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. And a lot of last minute changes. Right. Which we can often accommodate, but are difficult, right? Like today, I didn’t know if I was gonna be available this morning or not. I had to talk with the family about certain things that we were doing. so when I landed on that, I was like, okay, well I think we can make this slot work.
And then I had to check with you and many time zones away. So, um.
Andy: Yeah, you sent it while I was still asleep, and so then I had to reply a while later, and then you go to bed pretty late compared to me, and so you were, I think, probably still awake.
Mon-Chaio: which was good. ’cause otherwise I wouldn’t have known by the time I went to bed. Um, I’ll go with an emotion next. I think. Um, I’m actually a pretty sad that like you are going to be doing something else because I think that I agree with the anecdotes. Not only are we unique because of the topics that we explore, but we’re unique in the way that we do it.
And you talked about this with the guests part. We don’t do a lot of guests. Um, and I think having two people on the podcast allows ideas to bounce off of each other
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: just a one person rant. Um, or maybe, you know, rant against AI or something, it’s not a one
Andy: that, that’s, that’s the vacation cast I just recorded.
Mon-Chaio: Oh man. So, um, so I think that’s kind of an emotion that I feel. The other one is that, um, I worry that my pace of learning is gonna go down because this podcast was sort of forcing function in some ways, even when I was too tired or too not motivated.
Andy: well, I have to find something to read about and talk about.
Mon-Chaio: Right, or we’ve already found something. And my partner is, this is the pair programming part, right? My partner is expecting me to have something to talk about so it’s not just a monologue on their part. Uh, so I’m worried that like, without that forcing function, uh, sort of speed of learning and and diversity of learning is gonna go down for me.
Andy: Right.
Mon-Chaio: Um.
Andy: All right. I have to say, I am a little worried about the amount of work that this puts on you. If, if you keep this going, the, the amount of work that you’re gonna have, uh, on a weekly schedule.
Mon-Chaio: Right. Yeah, I’m definitely worried about that too. Um. And it may not sound like much you may, uh, like sometimes I feel like it doesn’t sound like much. It sounds like, oh, well it’s five to six hours one week or, you know, six to eight the next week. I think it is a big difference. I often feel on weeks that I’m not editing a sense of relief, that I’m not responsible for editing and getting content up and posting and getting the show notes written and all of that stuff.
Andy: Doing the copy and getting it onto the, the little WordPress site that we have, putting it all up there, getting the schedule set, none of it is hard, but it’s all a mental load to, to get it all through.
Mon-Chaio: And I think to your point, another emotion I’m feeling is I’m kind of relieved that this might be a chance to, um, free up time possibly. Whatever we decide do with the podcast. Maybe make it so that it fits into your schedule a lot better or fits your life a lot better. Um, ’cause, you know, life’s circumstances I think are changing for both of us since we started this podcast a couple years ago.
Andy: yeah, yeah. Okay, so I think we got some of that move on to the green, some creativity. ’cause I heard a little bit of green starting to shoot out of your, out of your red
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I, yeah, I was like, this is green. I’m, I’ve got my red hat on glitter hat.
Andy: Should we move on to the green then? The creativity and possibilities. So in terms of just. Things that can happen. So one thought, I mean, just an obvious one to me is, uh, move from weekly to fortnightly or monthly or something like that. Just to, to e to, to reduce the burden of it going.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Yep. Another idea that we could be, that we change cadence as well as format.
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: So there are other formats that may lend themselves better to a shorter podcast. So it’s not. An hour recorded episode and edited down to 40. Maybe it’s a seven minute episode, edited down to five something like that,
Andy: Hmm. A lot more shorts. A lot. Okay. Yeah, I like that.
Mon-Chaio: and possibly, um, that may affect the cadence. If you’re only recording a five minute episode, maybe you can do that weekly.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Um, one thing that we chatted about earlier, um, that we haven’t done a lot is do guests.
Andy: That, that’s what I was thinking. Uh, I was thinking guess, but I wasn’t, I was thinking rather than guess as they often get done, kind of do guess of the people who don’t normally get onto these things. Because we get emails all the time, or least I because my email is on, is on the, uh, on the RSS feed.
I get emails all the time of, Hey, let’s have this person on your show. I’m just like, I don’t, I don’t want you because you want to be on the show.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah. I get a lot of these. I’ll give you, um, we’ll do $40 of promotion, but you have to have this person on the show.
Andy: I haven’t gotten that. No, I haven’t
Mon-Chaio: Yeah. They’re like, we’ve promote it for free. Um, but you have to have this person and they’re great because
Andy: Yeah. Well, and, and, and thinking about who are the people who wouldn’t normally be on these, discussing these topics, um, the listeners,
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.
Andy: like do, do a, like who, who wants to be on the show this time? Let’s talk about whatever’s on your mind.
Mon-Chaio: Okay. Yeah, it could be just random listener. What’s on your mind? Kind of a, uh, live coaching, live discussion session, something of that sort. Mm-hmm. Um, the other types of listeners that might not normally want to come on the show are stakeholders. So the non-technical people in an organization,
Andy: Hmm.
Mon-Chaio: thinking about CEOs that are like, don’t understand why you all talk about this stuff.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: me why I need to worry about tech debt in a way that I can understand. Or something like that. Right? Or marketing managers saying, how come. Everybody else can tell me when I need to market something and something’s coming to market, and you all are always telling me you never, you don’t know when things are coming out and just wait. am I supposed to do with that? Right? So it could be those types of people.
Andy: Yeah. There’s also, um.
Dropping the show entirely and shifting to a different focus. Uh, uh, MCHA at one point we were thinking about putting together kind of like, um, uh, a conference or what were they called?
Mon-Chaio: I know what you’re talking about. I don’t recall us finding a different name for it.
Andy: But something along those lines. So do, uh, almost a a, a kind of meetup, a regular meetup or a regular conference, um, where the discussions happen much more broadly and on, on those things.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. And I’ve certainly heard people that wish that existed. That could be very interesting. Um, it could be local or it could be even remote.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: Um, the other thing we’ve talked about in conjunction with this, um, around the consulting that we, we’ve done is putting together some sort of, um. Some sort of framework that we could teach
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: around building technical organizations or building culture and trust or whatever. So they’d be more frameworks and then you classes attached to them and that uh, thing. So that’s a possibility as well. Um, we’ve talked about writing a book,
Andy: Yeah,
Mon-Chaio: so that’s another way this could evolve. And of course these are all. Probably not podcasts, but podcast content in a different form.
Andy: yeah, yeah. Okay. Any more along the green shoots?
Mon-Chaio: We could do nothing.
Andy: yeah.
Mon-Chaio: that’s the other thing. It could
Andy: Just stop. Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Or the other part of that is pause, sort of an ad hoc type of So there’s no regular content. There might be content every now and again, and then we pick up, you know, in nine months or a year as you finish your program and see where things, see where things are for both of us, and, and, uh, decide from there what, what we want to do with it.
Okay.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And there’s also the stop it and look to pick it up thing too, rather than just the pause. So those are kind of two sides of the same coin,
Andy: Yeah. Okay. I’m gonna suggest, normally I, we, we would’ve moved on to the black, but I’m gonna suggest we go back to the blue really fast. Uh, and the reason for that is we just came up with a lot of different ideas that I think take us into a lot of different directions. I’m gonna propose that we try to select one of those and go through black and yellow.
Uh, so risks and positives. And see what that gets us. And then if, if we don’t really like the outcome of that, we come back to the blue and select a different one and kind of see where that one gets us and kind of iterate a little bit right there. What, what do you think?
Mon-Chaio: Yeah. I mean, I think that works. I, I don’t think that’s much different than saying just going to black and yellow. I mean, we don’t have to do all blacks and all yellows. Right. We could do black, yellow, black, yellow, but
Andy: Yeah. No, but it’s, it’s to make us, uh, make sure that we’re focused a little bit on, which is. What are the risks or problems related to what this case? Uh, and the reason is a lot of these are so different that I’m a little worried that we’d start going across purposes at times is like, you’re coming up with risks to one.
And I’m like, I’m not, I’m not paying attention to that one. I’m paying attention to this one.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right. I’m thinking about this other one. I’m not paying attention at all.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Okay?
Andy: So are any of the ideas that we came up with something that, uh, catches your eye? I have a list, so I’ve been typing notes as we go, so if you want, if you need a refresher,
Mon-Chaio: I don’t know. I think they’re all, um, I. I think the one that I hadn’t thought about, uh, ’cause I have been thinking about this a little bit, but the one I hadn’t thought about was the Interview of Stakeholders podcast.
Andy: okay.
Mon-Chaio: I think the yellow on that for me is it is, again, something that doesn’t really exist. This type of content. I haven’t seen it in any sort of format, podcast, video, uh, written we’re engineers or engineering leaders.
Interview non-engineers and it’s, it’s kind of like ask an engineering leader in some ways, right? What’s your, what’s your problem? How can I explain things so that you can understand them? How can I answer your questions? Um, how can we debate about a topic that interests you around engineering? I think that’s the yellow.
I think it’s unique. I think it would be broadly useful for people
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: I think there’s a lot of people that have a lot of questions about engineering that they just don’t have a forum to ask. Or talk about.
Andy: Yeah, and I think, I think it can also be very beneficial for engineering leaders to hear what those questions are and what the understandings or misunderstandings are.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. Absolutely. And and it really is both ways, right? Like I feel like sometimes engineering leaders and their teams will think about the business side as, oh, well, they just don’t understand. They’re not grounded in reality. Um, they should all be just in time development people anyway, too. Why can’t they learn that or something?
Um, and it’s good to build empathy and knowledge that, oh, it doesn’t always work the way we think it does. So that’s the yellow for me. Um,
Andy: so in some ways it becomes the, that outward facing tactics. Rather inward facing tactics, which I always drove us towards, uh, those outward facing tactics that people can learn from listening to the conversation happening.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right.
Andy: Okay. Yeah, I like that.
Mon-Chaio: Um, the yellow for me on that one is it doesn’t require a lot prep. I think it can be really useful with no prep
Andy: Yeah,
Mon-Chaio: then I think some prep can make it even more useful, but it doesn’t require a lot.
Andy: I, I, I actually almost think that it would be more useful with no prep because you would then have to go into it with that curiosity of. Tell me about why you’re asking these questions about your business. How, how does this impact you? What’s going on there? Because if you went in with too much prep and you think you already understand it, you might not ask the questions.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, that’s true. The other side of that for me is. You may not have enough tools to help steer the conversation.
Andy: Yeah. Okay.
Mon-Chaio: but like, either way, right? I could definitely see it either way. I think both of them have merits. Um, and so maybe it’s a balance, right? You think, do I have enough tools? If so, I don’t feel like I should, you know, turn over everything to get all of the tools and learn things that I haven’t learned before, just for this conversation.
Or if you’re like, I have no idea what I’m gonna talk about here. Then you might go, okay, well let me at least dig up some stuff. So I’m a little bit prepared.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice.
Mon-Chaio: Um,
Andy: oh, if you have more yellows, let’s go through them. I
Mon-Chaio: I was gonna move black.
Andy: Let’s move to black. I.
Mon-Chaio: so I think the big black here is lead sourcing,
Andy: Yeah. That, that’s what’s what immediately came to my head was, how the hell are you gonna find these people?
Mon-Chaio: right? Especially since I, I’m not gonna speak for you. The biggest part of consulting that I was terrible at was lead sourcing,
Andy: Yeah. No, I, I, I’m, yeah, I, I, I’m terrible at it.
Mon-Chaio: so not a skill set of mine. It’s not something that I particularly enjoy in terms of cold calling, reaching out to folks, that sort of a thing. So I don’t know how I would do Um,
Andy: I, I think
Mon-Chaio: it or something,
Andy: I was gonna say, I, I think that the risk or problem here is that you would have to find someone you trust and you’d have to pay that would do a lot of this for you.
Mon-Chaio: mm-hmm. Yeah.
Andy: Um, and then you have the, the risk of you’re spending all of this money on this thing and problem, what, what are you getting out of it?
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Um, other black is that from a time perspective, you save on the research time.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: the record and the edit time is still the same. Um, and so,
Andy: I am gonna say it’s gonna be even worse because now you’ve got another person who isn’t one of us who’s going to probably want to, and you’ll, you’ll probably want to, to protect yourself. Give them a preed of the episode to get them to Okay. It. Especially on some of the topics that you’ll be discussing so that they’re okay with how you’ve presented it. So I, I think there’s a big risk there.
Mon-Chaio: Mm. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Turnaround time will be, I mean, you’ll have to edit faster so that you can give them a pre, and there may be back and forth, which essentially there’s none today
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: when we edit. Right. Like we just publish.
I, I think another black is that. There might not be alignment here. This may be uninteresting both for me and the guest. And so what I can see happen is the guest is thinking about content or thinking about problem in such a shallow way that we can’t untangle that in the episode.
Andy: Hmm.
Mon-Chaio: Right? Like, um, well I just need to know how much to dedicate to CapEx.
Well, let’s talk about why. Well, because I need to. Why? Because my board asked me, well, why? Because
Andy: board’s asking me, I need to provide this budget. I don’t understand why. So just give, give me a way to work through getting my CapEx together. I.
Mon-Chaio: Um, it could totally be the other way as well, where the way that I explain something simply doesn’t land. Um, and they’re curious, but I have nothing to offer them in a way that they can make useful. Um, that’s a little more useful than my previous example. I feel like, because listeners can then at least maybe take something from what I’m talking about.
But, um, it’s possible that for certain topics I just can’t communicate that in a way. And then you have an episode that just isn’t
Andy: Yeah.
Right. Okay. So gone through a lot of blacks there. Did the yellows back on blue. Uh, where do you wanna go next with this? Do you want to. Continue with that one a bit more, or do you wanna say, well, actually let’s, let’s look at a different one now and I think we can do this with one more and then we have to wrap up probably.
Mon-Chaio: Okay. Yeah, we can do it with one more. Um, I don’t really know. What’s another one? Um.
Andy: I mean, there’s the ad hoc content. it’s more of just a pause and, and then it’s do what you can because it’ll make it not a, a fixed thing. And then I think that, that, that also opens you up to kind of like, if you have an interview with someone, great. If you have an individual episode, great. If you have something else, great.
It’s just kind of like
Mon-Chaio: Okay.
Andy: by whatever.
Mon-Chaio: Okay, let’s talk about that. ’cause that’s similar to a lot of things, right? Ad hoc content could be once a year, which is essentially pause,
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: or once a decade, which is essentially stop, right? So, um, okay.
Andy: So I think a, a yellow, a positive on it is it removes a lot of
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Right. It’s sort of whenever I feel like, however, I feel like could, content can change from day to day. I think a yellow on it is, it’s also more spontaneous in, if I see a LinkedIn post, I can just say, Hey, I, I want to talk about that. It’s fresh on my mind. I just read it. Um, um, it doesn’t require a lot prep, so.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: If I’m reading a LinkedIn post in the evening or whatever, I can just like grab my mic right then just be I’m gonna whip out something in seven minutes or whatever. And then, you know, I’ll edit whenever I have time and I’ll publish whenever I have time. that part is nice.
Andy: it’s a, it’s a little bit more like just, it’s a, it’s almost like a blog, but it’s an. It’s an audio blog where I, I was thinking about this. Here, here you go. Or something like that. Um, I think it also lets you experiment. So you, you can, you can do the thing that we were just talking about. You could say, well, I’m gonna get a stakeholder on here.
I’m gonna try this conversation, or I’m going to, um. Do this as, uh, get one of the listeners on and say, well, let, what’s the topic you wanna talk about? Let’s work on that and let’s get that out. And as an episode you can just kind of try out whatever
Mon-Chaio: Right. I like
Andy: I could, I could join halfway through my, my course and be like, Hey, let me tell you what I can tell you about software engineering that I’ve learned as an analogy and woodworking.
Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. I think that’s a really important one to, to consider that experimentation. And along the same lines of experimentation, I often feel like variety allows you to be, um, a little more motivated at times. Because you’re not constrained to this certain set of things.
Andy: Mm-hmm.
Mon-Chaio: I’ve certainly had times when we have a topic I’m like, ah, I don’t know.
After reading about it, I don’t really think I like, but you know, we’ve already spent time reading about it, researching it, so we record an episode about it
Andy: recorded an episode about it and we’re like, was there any point in reading this? I think we had at least one episode where we just said that.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right. Is there any point, and I think one we decided there was kind of no point in de delve into, uh, uh, a rant about ai, which you just replicated another one, I think in your vacation cast. So, uh, yeah. So I think those are, those are types. There’s spontaneous and so like, you know, it’s something that I’m interested in at that point in time.
Right. Um, and so it gets it moving. So I like that. Um. I like that. Um, it allows for a number of different formats too. Like it doesn’t have to be a podcast. Um, you know, we could do a LinkedIn Live, for example. Um, you could do a YouTube live if I wanted to. Um, just whatever felt right.
Andy: And, and to, to put it on the podcast feed, you can just export that and, and get the audio and throw that on. Okay?
Mon-Chaio: Um, it’s not a lot of work. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work simply because of the ad hoc nature. Um, you know, one week can be short, two weeks later. It could be long, just depending on how much time I have. You just be very varied, so. Mm-hmm.
Andy: Alright. Moving on to black. I think the biggest risk on something like this is once you get rid of the schedule, you get rid of the pressure to create.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, absolutely. There’s other things that are gonna come in and we’re no longer paraprogramming anymore.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: So one of the benefits of Paraprogramming is that motivation factor, right? You have somebody else, I don’t even wanna say keeping you accountable. It’s you feel accountable to them because it’s something that you, the both of you have agreed to and you’ve all put work into.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: So not only is there no schedule pressure, but there’s no partner pressure. So really it’s just kind of whatever you want to do and yeah, I agree. I think the other part of it is it’s a bit muddy, right? Like. Listeners don’t know what they’re gonna get.
They may enjoy one type content and not another. Um, how do they know what type content they’re gonna get that week?
Andy: Yeah. are they signing up for?
Mon-Chaio: exactly. And so why pin the TTL podcast or start? If you don’t know what content you’re gonna get, you might as well just check in every now and again. Listen to a few episodes, um, which is a lot different than I feel like our stats show for our listeners today.
Which is there are core set that we publish and within 68 hours, a bunch of people listen, right? Like I, I don’t know if it’s those same listeners, we can’t tell. Um, but the same number regularly hit, um, immediately after publish,
Andy: Yeah. It kind of gets rid of that core group and then it starts opening it up to Well chance.
Mon-Chaio: right? Absolutely.
Andy: Yeah. All right. Back to blue.
Mon-Chaio: Back to
Andy: Where do we take it from here? Do we just wrap this up and, uh. mull over these ideas for a bit.
Mon-Chaio: yeah, I don’t think we have enough time to go over another idea,
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: so I think we probably should wrap up. Um, and what I’ll say is this was useful, Andy. I like hats. Let me, let me step back. I don’t know if I like the six hats, but I think it was useful in this case. Um, I’ll have to give that some more thought. This brainstorming episode certainly introduced new ideas and forced me to think about new ideas that even though I’d been thinking about this off and on for quite a while, um, were absolutely new. I was like, Hey, I hadn’t thought about that. Why hadn’t I thought about that? So that was good.
Andy: Good. Good.
Mon-Chaio: And I think it’s something we talk about a lot, or I think it’s something I talk about a lot. The more heads the better. Right? That’s, uh, that’s why we like Paraprogramming too. And so now we have two people talking about it instead of just me, my own little world. But I actually, I want to invite our listeners to talk about this too. We talked about there’s a core set of folks that listen all the time.
I would love to know from y’all what you want. What excited you about what we’ve done, what didn’t excite you about what we’ve done for the last two years, and what do you want going forward? Or maybe you are a first time listener and um, we’ll troll through some episodes and have some ideas too. Um, or maybe you are, you know, a hater and you’re like, I’m so glad you’re getting rid of this.
Turn it into this. But really the more heads the better. ’cause like, um, I think the more ideas we come up with, the more likely we’re gonna land on something that’s exciting. That moves forward instead of, well, let’s just pause or stop, um, and, and go on from here. So I think that that would be my last sort of, uh, plea ask, um, for our group. well we don’t have another planned episode yet, Andy.
Andy: No, we don’t. I don’t know. This might be my last episode. I don’t know yet. Probably not. I’ve still got a, a few weeks until I, I need to really wrap up, but, uh.
Mon-Chaio: Right. And so we’ll have to chat about that and see. Um, but we certainly don’t have anything on tap or any ideas in our queue. So I would say, you know, stay tuned. Uh, it may be some vacation cast as we figure this out. I’m not, I’m not really sure either. But yeah, please write, please let us know. Please let us know what you think is missing, what you’d like this to turn into, what you think might be enjoyable, all of that sort of stuff. And I think then I’ll just wrap up as we normally wrap up. Right. Until next time, listeners, be kind and stay curious.
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