Gijs Verheijke

Timeline

Working with me, in short

💡 I like work, and what I want is to generate progress together. You can trust me to have integrity and transparency. I’m not a political agent and in fact I strongly dislike unnecessary bureaucracy and politics. I want to know what is actually happening on the ground and learn what the true blockers are to progress.

💡 My primary mode is to be an ‘answering machine’. If presented with a question or problem I am inclined to spit out an answer on the spot. If this is not what you are after, it helps to explicitly let me know what output you need from me: a decision, advice, or just a listening ear.

💡 When presented with a new device I don’t read the manual but just start pressing all the buttons first. I tend to learn and work in an iterative way.

  1. I don’t usually know in advance exactly what the end-product should look like. It’s hard for me to provide super specific instructions. I have learned to do it, but please help me make the time to sit down with you and generate the instructions if that’s needed.
  2. I have a lot of random (probably dumb) ideas and I like to throw them out there to see what comes back. I function best when I have people around me who can ‘argue’ with me to some degree, to separate the good from the bad ideas.
  3. I don’t like detailed processes because I believe those stifle critical thinking, common sense, and reduce both quality and speed. I prefer to operate on principles while leaving room for exceptions, rather than very strict and all-encompassing process.

💡 I can argue convincingly for and against things from very few inputs. This is probably one of my ‘superpowers’ but it’s also a pitfall. I can appear to be defending a wrong or ridiculous point of view, or seem to be flipping between polar opposite opinions on the same topic. Please use the following tricks on me if you need to ground me and get a better sense of my level of confidence:

Which other positions have you considered? Is this the only way to look at it?

How sure are you about this on a scale of 1 to 10?

💡 I can come across as stubborn and combative. I tend to have strong convictions, and strive to hold them loosely. But if I feel that someone is trying to convince me that 2+2=5 I will never back down. I also have trouble being outright told what to do, or given constraints without any argumentation backing them up. In various contexts this can be a feature or a bug. It’s something I’m trying to be mindful of.