Mike Bowler

Helps IT teams and their management improve through coaching & training. Agile, kanban, technical, neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis.

When not doing any of that, he can often be found out in the woods with a camera.
Kelowna, BC, Canada.

Last Notes

2026-07-03 14:11:03 UTC

You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.
That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.
Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/116/856/442/630/127/373/original/ae58eb82597c5b77.png

2026-06-18 15:32:03 UTC

When COVID hit and we all switched to video calls overnight, everyone started reporting how tired they were at the end of a day of meetings. Part of that was obviously that we were in a pandemic and stress levels were high, and yet there was something in the video meetings themselves that made it so much worse.
Someone proposed that the culprit might be the video self-view, that little window showing your own face while you talk.
So I ran an experiment and turned mine off. The difference was noticeable after even just one meeting. I was much less tired when I couldn’t see myself.
When your self-view is on, you’re doing two cognitively different tasks simultaneously: monitoring and adjusting your appearance while also following the content of the meeting. That double-load is cognitively draining, across every call, all day.
Turn off the self-view and your brain gets to do just one thing: the meeting itself.
Research backs this up. The continuous self-view creates what’s been called “the mirror effect”. The psychological stress of perpetually monitoring your own image has no real-world equivalent, and it compounds exhaustion across every call.
The fix takes about thirty seconds. Go into your video software settings and look for a self-view or mirror option. In Zoom it’s under Video settings. In Teams it’s accessible during a call. Turn it off, then check in with yourself at the end of your next meeting day.
This isn’t the only contributing factor to zoom fatigue. In my experience, though, it’s the easiest change we can make, and it makes a significant difference. Try it for yourself.

2026-02-26 16:11:28 UTC

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@nprofile…eqsh @nprofile…s80c The article makes it sound like living in conditions where mold thrives is a new problem to solve but surely this is a solved problem in tropical countries.

2025-08-04 15:52:04 UTC

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@nprofile…xrm4 The whole article is a great summary of what I've also seen. This line at the end is also the theme of my newsletter this week, which is interesting timing.
"Don’t optimize for individual productivity; optimize for the team."

2025-07-15 18:45:07 UTC

When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I'm often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.
I took my car in for service this morning and I was asked if it was ok that they split the bill across two transactions. "You're being measured on number of cars through?" I asked. The answer was obviously yes, and this way I counted as two cars.
It's not just a matter that the numbers are now wrong, we have now introduced waste into the system. There were two credit card transactions rather than one. Two receipts instead of one. There was additional time for the workers to explain why they wanted to do it this way. Overall, this was complete waste, but because they felt they were being judged on the count of cars through, it was justified.
If people think that they'll be judged based on measurements then they'll game those. The more judgement, the more the numbers will be inaccurate, and the more waste will be introduced into the overall system.
You might think that I'm opposed to measuring anything then but that's not at all true. I'm a big proponent of measuring those things we want to improve. I'm just a realist and recognize that we have to design our measurements very carefully. If we measure the wrong things, or in the wrong way, we'll drive the wrong behaviours and that's our problem to solve.
#metrics

2025-07-11 12:58:52 UTC

When I talk to teams about their goals, I'm continually surprised how often the answer is framed as "meets our deadlines" rather than "delights our customers".
We get what we focus on. Perhaps we should have better goals.

2025-07-03 15:21:15 UTC

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@nprofile…pye9 Aside from the insane arrogance shown, I really have to question the assumption that anyone actually wants their content pulled into a GenAI tool.
I've seen no evidence that GenAI tools reliably send people to the original source material so the argument of "AI will bring more traffic to you" is invalid. The next argument is "AI will get your ideas shown to more people" and while that may be true, the ideas are without attribution so that's only good if I only care about my ideas being spread and don't care if I get credited as the source. I'm sure there are cases where that's true but it isn't for anything I write.
I do want attribution. I do want people to come back to look at more of what I've done. I do want people to engage with me about the things I've written. GenAI doesn't help with any of this, and in fact makes it worse.
So I have to seriously question why I would want GenAI tools to ingest my writing. Perhaps your writing style is actually an advantage for you, in that it's difficult for GenAI to parse.

2025-06-22 15:44:27 UTC

We often talk about the scouting rule of “always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it”, or in a software context “always leave the code a little bit better than you found it”.
If you see duplication in the code, then remove that before you leave the method. If you see poor variable names then fix those before you leave.
What we don’t talk about as much is how a culture of branching and Pull Requests (PR’s) actively discourages making small changes for that purpose. If I want to rename a method to make it clearer and know that making that little change is going to require real effort to go through a review process and manual merges, then I’m more likely to decide to just live with the original name, even if it is is poor.
Whereas if I can make that little refactoring and directly check it into mainline then it’s a very low effort change that contributes to the quality of the product. It’s become easy to do the right thing.
How many things do we have like this, that actively discourage us from doing the right thing?

2025-01-29 03:01:03 UTC

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@nprofile…wjfe As much as I don’t want to support Musk properties, I am grateful that iPhones do support satellite at all. I say this as someone who hikes in areas where satellite is the only way to call for help. This is entirely a safety feature for me.
What we really need is a viable satellite alternative to starlink.