What are you eating?
What are you drinking?
Who actually checks these things?
How do you know if they are doing their job?
Judicial Watch is the successful model for the people's oversight of an important service.
So, where are the independent labs regularly testing and reporting on food producers?
We need to find the corrupt incompetent farmers,
The sleazy meat packing plants
And the unethical supermarkets
So that we can drive them all out of business.
Solver Teams – “Sail and sink together. Get-Shit-Done!!”
Solver team is a self-sufficient set of people who are tasked to ‘Solve’ a defined problem. Together they are accountable for the outcome.
It is called ‘Solver’ team, as the intent is to solve a problem, not just build features. Often a problem can be solved just by using docs, spreadsheets or even pen-paper itself. The success metric is same for all team members. This motivates members to help each other and avoid failing together.
Characteristics of Solver Teams
Focused alignment and accountability towards goal. The success of the project is a success for all members and so is the failure. By analogy, if the boat sinks it doesn’t matter hole was on which side. Everyone should have proactively helped each to avoid sinking or suffer together. There are only two states ‘Done’ or ‘Not-Done’.
accountability
Trust and synergy among members. Members always ready to help each other for achieving the common goal. A deeper understanding of end to end flows. Greater empathy for each other’s work complexities.
trust-and-synergy
Proactive course correction. Members ready to change plan, even when it needs rework, as long as it helps in achieving the goal. Any disinterest or incompetence must be highlighted asap F2F with their seniors. So that corrective action can be taken well ahead in time.
Very high speed of execution. Members follow F2F Phone > Chat > Email. Quick decisions are taken without bureaucracy and email chains. Members involve their seniors to make decisions, in case decision deadlocks.
Strong sense of ownership. Members are party to transparent decision making across departments. This builds strong ownership of decisions taken.
Passionate members. Get-Shit-Done’ attitude is rampant to make their decisions successful.
Move Fast, Fail Fast, Iterate – is only possible when there is a trusting and synergistic environment. That’s why startups having <20 employees have the fierce agility. Later the same company loses steam owing to internal friction and factions.
Get raw data
Run your own computations and analyses
Start with installing a decent SQL database here (use PostgreSQL 12):
https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/postgresql-installer-2ndquadrant/
Then add the 2UDA analytics toolset based on Orange3 here:
https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/2uda/
This software is free, open source and works on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Once you have this you can download all kinds of historical data, and data from other countries. Run the different data through the same analytic pipeline. No coding is necessary. But if you have access to people who can code in Python, then they can build custom components for your pipeline.
Or learn Python yourself. It is becoming the language of choice for scientists and people doing data analytics.
If this is beyond your technical skill save a copy of this post
Print it out and shop it around people that you know, or random strangers at coffee shops. Sooner or later you will find someone who never realized that these kinds of professional tools are available for everyone to use, at zero cost.