#do they enable each others bad habits and make each other worse for everybody else involved? Yes.

[snakesandstone]

My loki and sigyn are incredibly funny to me because by all rights with the amount of issues they both have going on that they refuse to address they should be horrendously toxic, however it just so happens that all their respective mental illnesses cancel each other out and leave them with one of the most stable relationships in asgarðr

[danciingflame]

credit (x)

&. BASICS

Full Name: Evelyn Ines Barbosa Phoenix

Nicknames: Phoenix, Phoebe, Ballerina

Age: 96 years old

Sexuality: bisexual

Date of Birth: August 9th 1924

Place of Birth: Lisbon, Portugal

Gender & Species: cis woman & (fire) sprite

Current Location: Ardora, Concordia

&. MORE BASIC INFO

Languages: Portuguese, French, English

Religion: atheist

Education: Graduated from Lisbon’s dance and acting university

Occupation: Principal Dancer/Prima Ballerina of Lisbon

Drinks, Smokes, & Drugs: she began drinking and using Concordia-native drugs after becoming a sprite, otherwise it would have been too damaging to her human body.

&. PERSONALITY

Zodiac Sign: Leo -- The Leo woman is a regal Lioness, queenly in every way. From her royal bearing to her personal style (which tends to be extremely expressive and bold), the Leo woman is strong and comfortable in owning her power, like her planetary ruler, the Sun. Though slightly sweeter-natured and usually a little less over the top than her male counterpart, a lady Leo can still be counted on to take no bull – if you try her, you may live to regret it. It’s best to avoid inciting that Leonine temper if you don’t want to see claws. Should you attempt to mess with her way of being or quality of life (especially anything related to survival: her family, home, or income), she will take you down – hard. Lady Leos are vivacious, full-of-life personalities, and their enthusiasm and ebullience can be completely infectious. They want you to do something wild and fun with them, so being a bump on a log or a stick in the mud will simply not fly for these big cats, who take deep delight in feeling their freedom and exerting their autonomy. 

MBTI: ESFP -- ESFPs are vivacious entertainers who charm and engage those around them. They are spontaneous, energetic, and fun-loving, and take pleasure in the things around them: food, clothes, nature, animals, and especially people.ESFPs are typically warm and talkative and have a contagious enthusiasm for life. They like to be in the middle of the action and the center of attention. They have a playful, open sense of humor, and like to draw out other people and help them have a good time.

Likes: her family (both her human and sprites family ofc), dancing, teaching, partying, the warmth, recklessness, the warmth within Mt. Ardora, silent nights, learning, freedom.

Dislikes: getting her heart broken, liars, people who end up depriving Phoenix of her freedom, people who give up after failing, indifference, injustice, the cold weather, boredom

Bad Habits: lip biting, always has to walk around somehow, or, if everything else is impossible, taps her foot and plays with something (mostly her hair)

Secret Talent: dancing, teaching, love

Hobbies: the wide and dangerous spectrum of love (and she’d like to punch herself for that, actually, lmao), ballet, getting together with her friends to cause some trouble and go on adventures, gossip (but in a non-malicious way), 

Fears: waking up and realizing it was just a dream, being left alone, people avoiding her.

Five Positive Traits: passionate, fiery, compassionate, coquette, ambitious

Five Negative Traits: vengeful, temperamental, distrusting, vain, destructive

Other Mentionable Details: uses her ballet to get rid of her energy, uses dancing as her fighting style to contain her flames and direct them/to engulf herself in flames.

&. APPEARANCE

Tattoos: none

Piercings: earlobes

Reference Picture: ref picture

&. FAMILY INFORMATION

Parent Names: Jaco Barbsa (former soldier) & Linda Barbosa (retired nurse since Phoenix cared for their finances) 

Parent Relationship: she had an excellent relationship with her parents, they mean everything to her and she prays every day for them (despite not being religious, but her parents were)

Sibling Names: she has no siblings

Sibling Relationship: --

Other Relevant Relative: NAME UP TO POSSIBLE PLAYER -- (technically) husband. His whereabouts are unknown, but Phoenix believes he’s dead. And if he isn’t yet then he better run.

Children: --

Pets: --

&. BIOGRAPHY

( tw: war, heartbreak, stalking )

Little Evelyn Barbosa was a creation of pure love. Her father, Jaco Barbosa, had returned from war and was celebrated within Lisbon as one of the few making it back alive. He’d fallen in love with a shy and compassionate but stubborn young woman named Linda. The charme of a soldier appealed to her and, not even a few years later, Evelyn was born into a world torn apart by coups, death and anarchy.  No one questioned legitimacy as she’d always been a calm and sweet baby, smiling at the silliest pee-a-boo jokes. Despite her parents not being married, they stayed together despite the backlash from their families and even friends. A strong, grounded love in the midst of war. A love like her parents was the first she got to know. It was a love that made her childhood so comforting despite the ongoing wars within their midst. While the government struggled to uphold rules and even leaders, Evelyn remained in close proximity to her parents and their warmth. She grew up in a small, but lovely cottage in Belém, hidden away from the terrors of this world. One could even say she’d been sheltered and smothered with love -- others might, she certainly never did. Evelyn decided, at an early age, to repay her parents by aiming for a higher education, to eventually buy them a beautiful finca and enough food so they’d never have to worry about anything else. She turned out to be a little miracle, a progeny, a muse.

Dancing lifted her spirit, made her feel alive, burning with passion and dedication to the craft. Especially ballet. The pirouettes and poses, the blood, sweat and tears one had to give to perfection such beauty -- Evelyn enjoyed the idea of being excellent at something so extraordinary, watched and admired by thousands. She trained for years to come and, with a scholarship at one of Portugal’s best ballet companies (what would later rebrand and become the national ballet of Portugal in Lisbon), Evelyn fully committed to becoming a professional ballet dancer. With such a natural talent like hers, paired with the passion needed to survive against all the competition, enabled Evelyn to graduate with honors. This is when love intervened. Not only after a year of performing on the big stage, Evelyn met her match -- a young, handsome and charming man. They locked eyes and Evelyn was fun over, just like that. Five times he went to the same play before Evelyn eventually gave in and decided to get to know him. Saying she wasn’t in love would’ve been a lie, no, in reality she’d fallen in love with him the moment they locked eyes. With her career unfolding and with herself slowly making some decent money, Evelyn eventually bought her parents the finca she’d always promised them. With herself on top of the world, Evelyn let herself fall into the arms of one of the only people she truly trusted.

The war arrived in Portugal at a time in which Evelyn finally tried to talk to him. Both her father and the stranger she’d fallen for were drafted and Evelyn put all her energy back into ballet. Each day her anxiety increased and the news got worse with more and more people dying. She’d hoped for good news -- her father arrived first, wounded by a gunshot wound in his right arm, then, a few days later, he returned -- perfectly fine and barely changed. While this should've raised red flags for basically everybody else, Evelyn remained clueless and naive. Maybe he was just one of the lucky ones and had been able to prevent any injuries. She dedicated a large portion of her time to him after the war in the hopes of making up for all the lost minutes with him. Evelyn got engaged rather quickly after spending some wonderful weeks with him and, not even two months after their engagement, the two got married with all the glitz and glamor possible in their post-war world. They honeymooned on the coast of Portugal while reality struck her like lightning. All her belongings -- gone for good. Evelyn spent most of her honeymoon searching for answers, she even went as far as to believe he’d been kidnapped. Yet, her search ended up in various dead-ends.

Like a bird with broken wings Evelyn found herself grounded, completely lost of all her innocence and naivete. Her pink tinted glasses turned red and with that her mood completely changed. Instead of channelling her passion for ballet, Evelyn requested the next few weeks off to find out more after there’d been rumors of him being spotted in the Caribbeans. A fire ignited inside of her, pushing Evelyn forward towards her husband. The closer she got towards the Caribbeans, the more hope she had that everything would be alright in the end. There was still the possibility of him returning to her, of him just being kidnapped. Evelyn would never find out since the plane she’d boarded crashed and burned before she could even reach him. She awoke in a strange, but beautiful world. Evelyn survived her personal hellfire and emerged as a new person. Less naive, less tender and with her innocence lost she joined the fire sprites on her quest to true love. The passion located in her heart fit perfectly into the ranks of the fire sprites, as did her rage. She channelled the intensity of her personality by using fire and from that a Phoenix arose out of the ashes of everything she’d lost. Ardora not only provided her with the perfect opportunity to change, but it also opened a completely new world to her in which she could start anew without worrying about anything, or anyone, else. Phoenix completely devoted herself to the social structure of her new home, like she always did. From her fighting skills to her place within Ardora -- she cared and made sure she’d remain important and respected. She rarely got out of her shell at first, but it didn’t take too long for Phoenix to warm up to everyone else. With self-love everything seemed possible now. Phoenix arose with an appetite to express herself, to dance surrounded by fire, to test her limits. A sense of freedom completely took over from there and with the new name a completely new person entered this world: hardened, free, passionate. She crammed all her missed out years into a few months, went from exciting activity to the next big thing, hoping to keep that rush alive inside of her. It would never go out, that she’d only realize a few decades later. The fire inside of her, bright and warm, would never go out again. And that naive, little girl described in the beginning, eyes as bright as stars and her heart filled with love? Phoenix loved to surround herself with fire now, fully embracing the previously asleep firebug within -- her spark would soon ignite the hearts of many -- and she would gladly pour all her energy into welcoming the next generation.

[aroworlds]

Fiction: The Pride Conspiracy, Part Two

December isn't the best time of year for a trans aromantic like Rowan Ross, although—unlike his relatives—his co-workers probably won't give him gift cards to women's clothing shops. How does he explain to cis people that while golf balls don't trigger his dysphoria, he wants to be seen as more than a masculine stereotype? Nonetheless, he thinks he has this teeth-gritted endurance thing figured out: cissexism means he needn't fear his relatives asking him about dating, and he has the perfect idea for Melanie in the office gift exchange. He can survive gifts and kin, right? Isn't playing along with expectation better than enduring unexpected consequences?

Rowan, however, isn't the only aromantic in the office planning to surprise a co-worker.

To survive the onslaught of ribbon and cellophane, Rowan's going to have to get comfortable with embracing the unknown.

Contains: A trans allo-frayro trying to grit his teeth through the holidays, scheming aro co-workers, a whole lot of cross-stitch, another moment of aromantic discovery, and many, many mugs.

Content Advisory: A story that focuses on some of the ways Western gift-giving culture enables cissexism and a rigid gender binary, taking place in the context of commercialised, secular-but-with-very-Christian-underpinnings Christmas. Please expect many references to said holiday in an office where Damien hasn't figured out how to run a gift exchange without subjecting everyone to Santa, along with characters who have work to do in recognising that not everybody celebrates Christmas.

There are no depictions or mentions of sexual attraction beyond the words "allosexual" and "bisexual" and a passing reference to allo-aro antagonism, but there are non-detailed references to Rowan's previous experiences with and attitudes towards romance and romantic attraction as a frayromantic. Please also expect casual references to amatonormativity and other shapes of cissexism.

This section contains multiple depictions of platonic physical intimacy.

Length: 4, 789 words (part two of two).

I’ll have a pride coat! And nobody will have the least idea what it means!

On the last working day of the year, Rowan staggers into the office holding a plate of homemade shortbread—the top layer of plastic wrap bearing the Sharpie-written words “NOT FOR HOUSEMATES BUY YOUR OWN FUCKING BISCUITS”, his mood sour. On the one hand, he’s free until January (although he’ll prefer that circumstance more should this be a paid break). On the other hand, Christmas and its family awfulness tag-team with the heat to curse him with mind-racing, restless 4 AM wakefulness.

He chose right. Didn’t he?

In six days, he’ll have survived the family dinner and his housemates will be with their people or travelling for the holiday. He can bag up his presents for their customary donating, buy something online and spend the day baking food he doesn’t have to share or hide.

Christmas will be an exercise in endurance, but it’s a known terrible. Better to suffer one day of hell and leave than to poke the hydra in each of its eyes and allow it, enraged, to hunt him across the earth. Right?

“Rowan!” Melanie greets him at the door, today wearing a silky blouse with a poinsettia print, a pendant shaped like a miniature tree bauble, and stocking-shaped earrings of the heavy, dangly kind. A Santa hat trimmed with silver sequins and a large golden bell sits atop her short hair. “Merry Christmas!”

“Uh … back at you?”

“You didn’t wear anything Christmassy!” Melanie flutters her hands at him: she painted her glossy crimson nails with white and green stripes like the fancier sort of candy cane. “Can’t you get anything in your size?”

“No...” Rowan glances at his usual outfit: dress shoes, jeans black enough to resemble slacks on forgot-to-do-laundry days, navy shirt.  

Couldn’t he have worn his cherry-red Docs?  

Her suggestion gives him a convenient out, but isn’t he trying to be honest about his feelings? “I didn’t look. Christmas … isn’t that exciting when you’re enduring family.” He barks a laugh, hoping Melanie understands. “At least being trans, nobody asks me if I’m dating anyone or when I’m going to bring someone home to meet the family, because they don’t want to think about trans people in a relationship.” He steps sideways, hoping to navigate around her, put his plate down and move the conversation towards something less fraught. “I made shortbread. Do you like shortbread?”

He stiffens, trying not to panic, when Melanie envelops him in a bear hug, smushing Rowan’s chest and one arm against her necklace. “You spend Christmas with your family?”

“Don’t most people who celebrate it?” He shuffles out of her embrace to slide his cling-filmed plate onto Shelby’s desk beside a plastic container of pizza scrolls. He slips the ingredients card from his jeans pocket, straightens the creases and rests it by the plate. “Uh … is cling-film better or worse for the environment than biscuits in a freezer bag? I had a set of clip-seal containers, but my housemates left me two condiment-sized ones in the cupboard. I could use a bit of plastic or defrost frozen stir fry, except I didn’t know what I’d put that in if I used the stir fry container for the shortbread...”

Rowan realises he’s rambling and presses his lips together before he rants on how his containers must be growing five types of mould in the bottom of Matt’s backpack.

“Happy Holidays, everyone!” Shelby, both arms burdened by plastic cake containers, enters wearing a red T-shirt with the legend “All I Want for Christmas Is a Unicorn”, a glittery ribbon tied around the end of her braid. Only twice before has he seen her without a blazer. “Mel! Your earrings! Millers?”

Rowan swallows a laugh and, freed from awkwardness, heads for the relative comfort of his desk.

A party day, he soon realises, possesses a distressing lack of work. He acquires plates and spoons from the kitchenette, he works on a few photos from last week, he sorts his emails. He notices Melanie pulling Damien aside to talk about something that requires the waving of candy-cane fingernails, but, before he can start to wonder, the volunteer ropes him into a conversation about a loving family with unusual pavlova-eating habits. Shelby saves him from that oddity only to tell the story of her family’s chipping in to get her granddaughter a four-hundred-dollar dollhouse. “My parents wouldn’t have spent that much on a toy! How can anyone charge four hundred dollars for plastic?”

That seems like a good time to head over to the food table.

Shelby does make a good chocolate cake.

“Rowan.” Damien heads towards him, his approach signalled by a trailing, bell-ringing Melanie. “A minute?”

Nothing good has ever been heralded by this question. Nothing.

Rowan nods and follows them over to the whiteboard, standing in front of the List.

“Do you,” Damien says, at least doing the decent thing of asking straight out, “need somewhere to go for Christmas?”

Oh, god. What provoked this horror? Melanie?

Why...?

“We’d non-romantically love to have you.” Melanie’s smile beams as bright as her nails—her lips a close match for their glossy crimson basecoat. “Me and my daughter and her partner, I mean—not me and Damien together. It won’t be anything fancy, but you’re welcome to come.”

“My wife said my telling her about being recipro makes so much sense, and she’d like to ask questions of someone who actually knows things.” Damien nods, his holiday cheer demonstrated in the absence of a tie, rolled-up shirtsleeves and reflectively-shiny shoes. “And I make beer batter fritters.”

Never has Rowan heard Damien speak in aromantic-identity terms with that much casual fluidity, and he would smile but for two co-workers waiting, expectantly, for his answer.

How does he express appreciation for their kindness while explaining that he can’t not go home for Christmas?

A few moments pass before Rowan’s lips and tongue produce sounds that aren’t “I”, “uh” and “I … uh”. “Thanks? But … well, I’d be fine being alone on Christmas and I'm not doing that because … that’d be bad, so... And, you know, family? And I want to see my dog? So ... thanks, but...”

“But you’re one of us,” Melanie says with unusual solemnity, resting a hand on Rowan’s shoulder. “Just like Damien’s now one of—wait, we need to get you a mug! Why didn’t we get Damien a mug?”

“Well, actually...” Rowan, thanking the Aro Gods for Melanie’s willingness to head down any conversational tangent, darts towards his desk and satchel, the latter housing a heavy tissue-wrapped box. Pinkish-red, of course. “Here. Have a mug.”

“Oh! You should have told me!” Melanie’s lips tremble as she and Damien follow him back across the room. “I would have gotten a mug with you!”

Rowan rests the box on his lap, startled. Why didn’t he think to tell Melanie that he bought Damien a mug? (How else does one welcome another into aromantic kinship?) Why didn’t he wait until Damien was busy and order a mug with Melanie, instead of buying one on his phone on the train home from work?

Rowan owns skill in list-making, cross-stitch, baking, fixing other people’s photos and designing his own leaflets. He’s quietly proud of the many arts in which he dabbles with varying degrees of success. He’s mastered, too, survival on the fringes of other people’s lives, survival in a world where few are worth trusting. That ability though, makes him a man too comfortable in isolation. It makes him, in ways that have nothing to do with allosexual frayromanticism beyond his living in an aromantic-antagonistic world, a man who doesn’t know how to welcome other people into the house behind his five-metre fence.

He keeps everyone at arm’s length, even when—perhaps especially when—he plies his crafts for their benefit.

Does everyone experience acute flashes of insight at inconvenient times, the irrevocable sense that their personhood is one bewildering state of immeasurably fucked up?

“I’m sorry. Really.” He passes the mug to Damien, looking at Melanie. “I’m used to doing things on my own. I should have thought, but I didn’t.”

“We do realise that,” Damien says, tearing both wrapping paper and the box lid in a sharp tug. “You got the green-stripe one—oh, wait, it’s got both?” His hands render the mug’s size almost laughable, but Rowan couldn’t find soup-sized variants from a store willing to custom print aromantic flags on crockery. “Mel, there’s both. The recipromantic-only one and the shared one. Thank you!”

Is Rowan imagining that hint of passive-aggression? “You realise...?”

“That you’re independent, that’d you’d rather suffer alone than risk asking for help, even when it causes problems for you. That you’re only comfortable with people when you’re in a position of knowledge or authority. We learnt early on that you work best when we get out of your way.” Damien sets the mug on the desk with a soft clink. “I’m not completely useless in my job, so try harder to stop rolling your eyes over my photos.”

“They’re terrible,” Melanie says, squeezing Rowan’s forearm—apparently forgiven. “You know that, right?”

“The next person to say they can do better has to prove it—”

“My dog photos prove it!”

“At an event! Not in your backyard!”

For a reason likely tied up in internalised ableism, Rowan thought anxiety his designated, annoyance-causing personality failing. His tendency to overreact, freak out, let things get to him; his tendency to shaking hands and rambling incoherence. He didn’t consider that, in the company of people more inclined to decency and less inclined to avoid criticism on deadnaming and cissexism by casting him as the problem, they may find something else frustrating or difficult.

“Is this...” Rowan halts, thinking better of it, before he says the words “being fired just before Christmas”. Even he doubts Damien capable of inviting someone to join him for the holiday only to retaliate with a firing on Rowan’s refusal, although logic doesn’t still his hands. What’s the good of logic if my anxiety still ignores it? “What is this?”

Damien shrugs, tapping a finger against his new mug. “Yearly performance evaluation, maybe? Shame that I’ll have to write it down. I’d rather just call this sort—”

“What’d you say on mine?” Melanie blurts, clapping her hands.

Damien raises both eyebrows. “As if I’d answer that sober!” He shakes his head; Melanie trills her laughter. “We realise that there’s reasons, Rowan. It isn’t a real problem for us, but it may be one for you. If you find yourself in the company of a therapist at some point, consider mentioning it?”

Reining in Melanie wasn’t the reason Damien asked her to work with Rowan, he realises in yet another dizzying, revelatory moment, but that isn’t the cause of Rowan’s spluttering. “If? You think it’s only if? I’d have more aro shit on my desk if I weren’t paying a psychiatrist and a psychologist!” He sighs and nods. “January. I see them January.”

“I don’t like to assume.” Damien shrugs again; Rowan guesses it his attempt at conveying casualness. “Given that this isn’t quite the … er, situation for this conversation, I should—”

“I’m fine,” Rowan says, thinking Melanie’s heedless interrupting a contagious quality. “Really. It’s good. Like actually...” He doesn’t know how to voice this feeling that, for the first time in his life, someone has voiced a critique that doesn’t feel like he’s being disdained or unravelled. “Melanie … again, I’m sorry.” He thinks the time right for another distraction and grabs the second parcel from his bag—tissue paper tied with strands of aro-coloured embroidery floss. “Here. I’ve been working on this. I got your name.”

Melanie lunges for the parcel, struggling to untie the knot with her long fingernails until Shelby—was she close by?—hands over a pair of scissors. Blades click shut; Melanie pulls away the paper.

Twenty square embroidered patches in the purples and greens of many aro-ace and aromantic pride flags cascade from Melanie’s hands onto the worn carpet.

Melanie has always been given to laughter, but the way she bends over, resting her elbows on her knees as though she can’t hold herself up, has Rowan fearing that he’s given her a heart attack via pride patches.

“Aro-ace! Are these all of them?” She draws a shaking breath and carefully kneels, gathering patches. “I didn’t know there were this many!”

“Aro and aro-ace. The ones I know about, anyway. There’s probably a few I don’t.”

“Did you make all these?” Shelby asks. “You should sell them!”

Rowan considers explaining why he’ll never make even minimum wage selling hand-embroidered patches in aro pride flag colours, but Melanie’s pulling him into another grasping hug has him scarce able to breathe, never mind speak. He doesn’t know for how long Melanie smothers him, just that she, like an eventual retreating tide, steps back, leaving Rowan bewildered and giddy. Perhaps this is too much?

“You’re a liar, and this must have taken forever, and you shouldn’t have. I can’t believe you sew!” Melanie shakes her head, shuffling through the patches. “There’s the aro-ace flag with blue and orange, and a combined one, and one without black stripes—oh, thank you!”

Rowan shrugs, relieved that she seems happy. “Do you have something to put them on?”

“I have a coat. I’ll have a pride coat! And nobody will have the least idea what it means!” Melanie grins, shaking her head, before leaning over to tap Damien on the forearm. “Should the rest of us swap gifts now?”

Damien settles himself down on the closest chair. “Good idea. Do you want to—”

“We’re doing Secret Santa now!” Melanie stands on her tiptoes, waving the hand not clutching a handful of patches. “Find your person and give your gift, and then come here and show me what you got! Rowan made me aro-ace patches! All the aro-ace patches!”

“You know your evaluation says ‘needs to stop interrupt—’”

“Quickly, because Damien’s nattering on about performance evaluations!”

Damien sighs, shakes his head and leans back on his chair, looking up at the ceiling. “Lord give me—is that mould up there?”

“Probably,” Rowan says, hoping that he doesn’t look like a man expecting to open a set of golf balls. Did Shelby get him and lie about Melanie? Does that explain the voice recording? “Does the janitor have a step ladder? It’d be easier to tell if we got up close.”

“She does, because of the lighting.” Damien shakes his head. “Remind me first week back to get someone in to look at that. Or to write it on the whiteboard before we leave.” He reaches inside his left trouser pocket, removes a small card-sized parcel held between thumb and pointer finger, and flips it onto Rowan’s lap with surprising deftness. “I think this will be appropriate? While I didn’t know what you planned for Melanie, I saw you working on the train one evening. You had earbuds in and were too busy looking at your hands to notice, but I guessed then you’d made your bag’s patches.”

“It’s hard to cross-stitch on a moving train,” Rowan says by way of apology, a shade confused: what gift needs this explanation? “Hard to cross-stitch well. Not so hard if you don’t care about neatness.” He peels back the tape—Damien wrapped the card the way he presses his suits, the edges inhumanly crisp—and finds a gift card for his local sewing store. Rowan stares, drops the card on his lap and slides his hands under his legs, doubtful he can say anything comprehensible past this isn’t a gift pack of golf balls.

“That’s what you got him? A gift card?” Melanie shakes her head and pokes Damien in the shoulder with startling vehemence; only Damien’s size and his feet, firmly planted on the ground, keep him from falling. “Did you put any thought into that? I don’t like to be that oldie—” She stops, scowling: Rowan can’t hold back his spluttering laughter. “As I was saying, gift cards are the laziest way to—Rowan’s laughing at me, isn’t he?”

Damien tucks his hands behind his head and leans further back in his chair, grinning up at the popcorn ceiling.

Moments—in which Shelby gives Damien a six pack of fancy-looking artisanal beer—pass before Rowan’s ribcage resumes its regular pattern of movement. Finally, he manages to rasp an explanation: “Buying a gift card for a department store? Impersonal, but okay if they shop there. Buying a gift card for a trans man at a clothing shop where every tag has woman on the label? Hateful, unless you know he wants it. Buying a gift card related to someone’s interests so they can pick what they want? Good. And I need fabric, so … thank you.”

“Did someone get you a Millers gift card?” Melanie asks, her hands raised to cover her mouth. “That’s horrible!”

“That’s Aunt Laura,” Rowan mutters. Melanie’s expression of horror, Damien’s surprising evaluation and the wonder of a good, useful present leaves him inclined to truth: “That’s the most considerate gift I’ll get. One with thought that isn’t ‘outright cissexism’ or ‘you’re a man so we’ll ignore your personality to give you the most generically-male of generically-male items’.” He places the gift card and paper on his desk before nodding at Damien, who continues his overgrown Cheshire Cat impression. “Really, thank you.”

Even though Rowan isn’t standing atop his desk to blather about names, the room falls into an uncomfortable quiet.

Shouldn’t someone rustle some wrapping paper? Bite into a biscuit? Thank somebody for their gift? Why aren’t they making noise?

Melanie breaks into a broad smile, threading her fingers together like a self-congratulatory cartoon villain. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

Rowan’s body, ever alert to strangeness in the people around him, stiffens long before his brain concurs that this change in conversational direction is at minimum odd and veering towards confronting with a high likelihood of I’m so not going to like it.

Damien jerks upright, chair creaking. “Didn’t we talk about how to do this—”

“His aunt gave him a Millers gift card!” Melanie grabs Shelby by the arm and drags her towards the meeting room like an illegal firework gone out of control.

Damien isn’t much an arbiter of this office’s brand of chaos, but he’s the closest thing to a pillar of stability inside this mouse-scented bewilderment and therefore the person at which Rowan directs his questioning: “What...?”

“You know how Melanie gets all enthusiastic?” Damien runs both hands through his already-mussed hair. “She comes up with plans and you can’t so much stop her as guide her in the safest direction and hope you’re alive come the landing?”

Does Damien know that is the worst answer anyone can give to a man with more than one anxiety disorder? At least short of pronouncements like “we volunteered you to give year 12 biology students a seminar on recessive genes and you’re starting right now”? Wasn’t that something to do with the monk who grew beans? Hendel? Mendel? Or did he just grow beans at a monastery for some reason? Or was it peas?

“What...?” Rowan croaks, staring at the dark meeting room like a man waiting to face a starving tyrannosaurus.

“She thought we should demonstrate our acceptance of you, after our failures in this. And then she realised Christmas isn’t a great time of year for you, which made her even more … uh, enthusiastic. I made her promise she’d do this after everyone else left, but...”

Melanie staggers out of the meeting room with a large basket held in both hands, a basket covered with glinting cellophane and decorated with a mix of blue and green ribbons.

Shelby trails after her, clasping another pair of scissors.

Rowan will never understand, never mind be able to explain, the thought processes leading to his diving off his chair for the sanctuary underneath his desk—just that one moment he’s sitting on his chair and the next he’s crouching beside computer cables and a lid from someone’s Pikachu lunch box. Some primeval sense of cave as safety, perhaps … but didn’t prehistoric humanity fear cave bears and cave lions? Aren’t large, bright spaces, with visibility and room to run, safer than small, dark places concealing unknowable predators? What about drought, then? Or deserts? Are there any safe places, really...?

Melanie holds no respect for the ancient tenets of let the hiding man hide undisturbed until he’s ready to stop hiding, but she does rest the basket on the ground at the entrance of Rowan’s desk-cave, blocking legs and chairs from sight. “Merry Christmas,” she warbles from behind the mountain of cellophane and wicker. “We hope there’s something there that you like!”

“Happy Holidays!” Shelby echoes, followed by a few more rounds from the rest of the office. “Do you want scissors? Melanie wraps things like she’s paid to use sticky tape by the metre.”

“We only have cheap tape in the office! It won’t stick unless you use heaps!” A thunking sound echoes from above Rowan’s head, and then Melanie’s candy-striped hand reaches around the leg of his desk, offering Shelby’s scissors. “Here. You’ll ... probably need them.”

There’s something to be said for this workplace’s willingness to treat escapades atop and beneath office furniture as normal, Rowan thinks. Breathe. “Than—uh—thanks.” He takes the scissors, staring at the back of shining cellophane; a miscellany of shapes wrapped in green paper sit within like an aromantic dragon’s treasure hoard.

“Damien, can you make them give us better tape next year?”

“We can have good tape if we stop spending the stationery money on good coffee and your fancy teas?”

“The tape’s fine,” Melanie announces before changing the subject: “Rowan? Are you opening anything? You have to tell us what you’re opening if you’re going to do it down there. Oh, do be careful—I think Liam used to shove his chewing gum under the table.”

Rowan shudders, but better his hair brushing old chewing gum over seeing his gift-opening become the focus of everyone’s attention! He draws a steadying breath, tells himself delay won’t help and slits the cellophane until he can draw out a wrapped box, one suspiciously weighty. At least fifty pieces of tape fasten the flaps on each end; Rowan promises himself that he’ll wrap everything in string and tea towels from now on before ripping into the paper. A mug with five horizontal bands wrapped around its body, the trans flag fading into the aro flag—blue into green, pink into green, white unchanged, pink into grey, blue into black.

Shelby, he thinks in disbelief, the non-existent golf balls making their appearance inside his throat. He rests the mug in his lap before reaching through the cellophane with shaking, sweating hands for another box. Another box with the same dimensions and weight...

“Oh, god,” he whispers.

His co-workers got him a basket of pride mugs for Christmas.

Melanie breaks into ringing laughter.

He needs a moment to find his voice, a moment in which he unwraps a mug with a gradient allo-aro design and another with the aromantic flag on one side and the bisexual flag on the other. “Did you  … did you … uh, get me any coffee to go with all my mugs?”

“It’s on the bottom!” Melanie trills. “And it isn’t just mugs!”

“Mostly mugs,” Damien says.

After another couple of minutes, a gradient frayromantic and a frayromantic-and-allo-aro mug join the collection precariously balanced on Rowan’s thighs. He sighs in relief when the next item in the basket feels soft, flat and light, something rustling underneath the wrapping paper, but a second lot of golf balls settle in his throat when he spots the pink and blue stripes, the drape of fabric: a trans pride flag.  

He can’t swallow, can’t lessen the burn in his eyes or ease the stiffness in his jaw and neck; his fingers fight to tear, peel and grasp. Bewildered to the point of dizziness, he finds an aromantic flag with its glorious green stripes, a frayromantic-and-bisexual mug and the expensive coffee Rowan permits himself on special occasions.  

He scoops wrapping paper and boxes back into the basket before hugging his clinking pile of mugs and flags.

Inchoate feeling abounds: a tangle, a knot of emotion with trailing threads of pleasure and overwhelm, surprise and gratitude, guilt and shame ... and something like the shock of being slapped across the face. They shouldn’t have done this! He shouldn’t be like this! Why is this too much? Why can’t he say “thank you” and express a normal, sensible gratitude for these people doing what Rowan’s family can’t ... instead of struggling with the feeling that Rowan, ungrateful and demanding, doesn’t deserve anything from people who have provoked his annoyance, frustration and alienation?

Mugs. Mugs and flags.

Why does something this wondrous have to hurt so much?

After a few moments, the only sound from him the chink of shifting crockery, someone moves the basket. Melanie sits on the floor and wriggles herself backwards underneath the table, grunting, to sit beside him. For once, she doesn’t speak; she rests a hand around his shoulder and lets him be a shivering mass of man clasping mugs.

Finally, Rowan’s rasping, croaking voice manages a few words: “Is this why Shelby recorded me ... talking about my identities?”

“I told you he thought it was suspicious!” Shelby crawls to Rowan’s other side, her braid trailing over the carpet. “Mel said you’d think it was just me being old—no, nobody does that!” She clasps his forearm, squeezing like a vice on wood. “Mel tried seeing if you’ve got a … all those accounts that aren’t Facebook, where you might say what you are? But she couldn’t find you, so I had my granddaughter show me how to record you. We knew we wouldn’t remember if you just said them.”

“I don’t know all the flags yet,” Melanie says in apologetic tones. “And I thought if I made the others check, they’d learn more about us!”

Part of Rowan feels a habitual spike of terror at the thought of offline people finding his social media accounts; part of him feels a quiet pride at Melanie’s using him to educate others in aromanticism. Most of him, fearing a blubbering breakdown, clings to the lifeline of asking questions: “And why Damien started that whole conversation?”

“We had to know where your mug seller was.” Damien bends down to peer underneath the desk and, at Melanie’s brow-arched stare, adds: “I’m not getting under there! You’ll have to call the SES to cut me out!”

Rowan nods and draws a breath. “I … I...”

“You’re very welcome.” Shelby squeezes his arm again. “Can I have your shortbread recipe? They’re good!”

“Yeah. Bag. Front pocket, left-hand side. People ask, so...” Rowan tries for another slow inhale. It’s supposed to help. Supposed.  

His family expects gratitude said clearly and directly, even when undeserving; they’ll never take emotional speechlessness as its shorthand. They want the formula followed, interactions never deviating from the same narrow structure: gift given, thanks provided, everything right in their world where it’s the thought that counts justifies disrespect of another’s personhood. They avoid messiness and honesty; they fear navigating and acknowledging mistakes and missteps.

They won’t see him as a man, or understand the pain they cause in believing his masculinity something he can put aside for their comfort, because they fear a world with unpredictability and fluidity.

Mum and Dad will never conspire to give him a gift like this. They’ll never want to get to know Rowan well enough to try. They’ll never put his needs ahead of their comfort. They’ll never speak of challenges or difficulties with Damien’s kind casualness. They’ll never want to acknowledge their failures. They’ll never give him an awkward, chaotic Christmas that veers from their notions of how things are supposed to be.

Does he want to endure their narrowness, now that he knows what better looks like?

Does he want to endure their truth that Rowan Ross isn’t a real man to them—and won’t be a real person until he remembers his deadname and the stereotypical trappings of the gender presumed to accompany it?

Or does he want to expect and get something else?

Maybe he doesn’t want a world so predictable his erasure becomes acceptable collateral damage for sticking to the pattern.

Maybe, despite his anxiety, he wants a world where people can surprise him.

“Melanie? Damien?” Rowan, shaking, pokes his head out from underneath the desk. “Can I … can I still spend Christmas with one of you?”

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

proust’s narrator also contrasts the conversation of bergotte (the writer friend his description of whom i quoted in the last post) with that of his dad’s friend norpois:

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions [of a recent performance of Phèdre] had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. “Ah! the designer will be glad to hear that; he’s a real artist, and I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I don’t care for it much, it bathes everything in a sort of sea-green glow, little Phèdre standing there looks too much like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. ... [A]fter all Racine isn’t telling us a story about love among the sea-urchins. Still, it’s what my friend wanted, and it’s very well done, right or wrong, and really quite pretty.” ... And when Bergotte’s opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were less valid than the Ambassador’s; far from it. ... It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality. (2.185-6)

norpois is a career diplomat; the narrator’s other big implicit criticism of him is that he talks about everything the way he talks about politics--namely, like this:

M. de Norpois entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his diplomatic colleagues, quoting now some ludicrous period uttered by a politician notorious for long sentences packed with incoherent images, now some lapidary epigram of a diplomat sparkling with Attic salt. But, to tell the truth, the criterion which for him set the two kinds of sentence apart in no way resembled that which I was in the habit of applying to literature. Most of the finer shades escaped me; the words which he recited with derision seemed to me not to differ very greatly from those which he found remarkable. ... All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind. (40)

so basically the reverse of how bergotte talks. Good Politics Talk rephrases a familiar maxim or demand in a persuasive way; Good Art Talk shows us reality from a new angle. when i put it that way these seem really similar? but i think this is behind the difference the narrator perceives btwn disagreeing with bergotte and disagreeing with norpois. like: the goal of political argument is either a. for your opponent to endorse your view instead of the one they held previously and/or b. to show those on your own side that you agree with and understand their opinion. so, unanswerable is good; making all other ways of seeing the issue look stupid is kind of the goal. (is this why slogans often posit oughts as ises? “gay rights are civil rights”--not “should be considered.” or like, “black lives matter,” instead of, “american cops need to stop killing black civilians.” stating an obvious fact in order to imply an imperative.) whereas bergotte wants to enable his interlocutors to understand and acknowledge the validity of his view also--not instead.

i think this is why i feel uncomfortable around people who talk about politics a lot. ime, the habit bleeds into how they talk about other things too. like the way norpois talks about bergotte’s work. he begins by saying to the narrator’s parents, “I do not share your son’s point of view”--meaning his admiration of bergotte. but the I statement is... kinda fake? he goes on,

“Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, there’s no more to it than that, and that is not much. ... At a time like the present, ... you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.” (61)

notice the passive tense, the pleas of objectivity, the way he has to turn his personal dislike into an argument as to why we should disapprove. you can’t frame an effective counterargument to this? all you can say is “yeah well i like art for art’s sake,” or, worse, “actually bergotte has an important social message about x.” either you agree to disagree (which ends the conversation) or you’re reduced to arguing that the thing you like is important, quite possibly for reasons that have little to do with what you like about it. (n.b. the narrator, who at this point knows bergotte only from his books, originally brought him up in hopes of learning more about him from someone who’s met him in person--not of learning merely norpois’ opinion of him.)

...of course i’m not saying art shouldn’t be political, lmao--and neither is proust, who, for example, goes on a lot of long digressions later in these books about why anti-semitism and homophobia are bad. i just really like his argument that art-motivated eloquence and politics-motivated eloquence have different interests, and different effects on conversation. it helps me understand why i get so frustrated in classes when people spend the whole discussion time trying to persuade each other that x character is or isn’t evil

[porfirioenserafinakg73insur-blog]

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[gabrielcollignon]

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet

Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]

Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet

Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet

As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

[lucyariablog]

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet

Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]

Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet

Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet

As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/03/disconnected-teams-high-performers/

[hotspreadpage]

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet

Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]

Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet

Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet

As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm

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Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet

Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Confused About Agile Marketing? Your Questions Answered [With Video]

Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet

Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet

As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers posted first on http://ift.tt/2maTWEr