Nothing changes on Groundhog Day?

[#1]

As the indomitable @Jimmy Seddon has already mentioned in his Welcome Wednesday post, today is Groundhog’s Day in the United States and Canada (or Canada and the US from Jimmy’s POV).

One of the lessons we learn from Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors in the 1993 Film Groundhog Day is that there is a statute of limitations to failure. Being gifted with the chance to repeat the same day over and over again, Phil continues his rude and abrasive behavior towards others, waking up each morning to repeat the previous day’s antics and growing more frustrated, depressed and despondent until he hits the tipping point.

What’s the tipping point? When he learns from his mistakes and commits to being a better person. He develops skills that he never knew he possessed - he becomes a pianist, orator, ice sculptor and community personality that is altruistic in his words and actions.

In business and in life there is a term - failing upwards. While this is generally a term that carries negative connotations, it can also be called learning from our mistakes.

With that in mind, and in the spirit of Groundhog Day, let’s share something that we repeatedly failed at within the Atlassian Ecosystem and how we learned to succeed. It could be an example of a Trello Trouble, Jira Jack@$$, Confluence Conundrum, Bitbucket Bumble.

And when you finally succeeded, I know it felt like this:

Wishing everyone a Happy Groundhog Day, knowing that we’ll be better on February 3 than we were today!

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great article @Andy Gladstone!  Really well put together!  Loved reading it!

[Andy Gladstone]

Here's my #ConfluenceConundrum. I took too long to empower our internal users to create and contribute to Confluence. I thought that baby steps were better - let them share the information with me and I would create the page on their behalf.

The fallacy? That they would be too afraid of the blank page to commit.

The reality? We are all imperfect beings - why should our Confluence instance strive for perfection, when completion is more important? I flipped the script by encouraging individuals to contribute and not fear their lack of design capabilities or formatting experience.

The result? An explosion of AMAZING content that has helped the company disseminate knowledge and best practices which helped us come out of the other side of COVID related shutdowns stronger.