Month: June 2025

Off The Cuff

Off The Cuff

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Despite having had a number of opportunities to do so throughout my career, I’ve never progressed beyond being an average public speaker.

Thankfully I don’t have any particular phobias about it, and I can do a decent job relaying facts while being mildly interesting, but I’m far from a great orator, especially when I have to speak on the fly.

Still, every once in a while I’m happy with my ad libbing. This past week I spoke at a conference, and came up with this turn of phrase that I quite liked:

Universal problems are often best-solved through many local partnerships.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy building for state government so much?

Tipping Point

Tipping Point

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Sitting on a late flight to New York City last night, I spent a few minutes time rereading my previous writing on radical responsiveness (yes, I do this sometimes). In the former post I said the following (and yes, it’s absolutely self-indulgent to quote myself, but here we go):

Being known as a responsive person 95% of the time usually means others will assume the best of you for the 5% of time you fail.

That ratio got me thinking: at what response rate will others start losing faith that you’re a responsive person, and thus begin not giving you the benefit of the doubt? It’s gotta be higher than 50%, because I can’t imagine thinking a person who’s likelihood to respond is no better than a coin flip could be viewed as a reliable responder. Maybe 70% or so? I bet a plot of actual response rate against fraction of people who will perceive said rate as responsive would look something like this:

The lesson: earning trust in responsiveness is hard, and keeping it is even harder!