Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Category: culture

  • Wholeness Is a Lie

    Wholeness Is a Lie

    Over the past decade, the idea of wholeness—to bring the whole self to work—got quite some traction. The sources are many. It rides on the wave of increasing acceptance of individualism. It appears to align with diversity, which has become a major topic across HR departments.

    Last but not least, it’s one of the pillars of Teal Organizations. Teal might be far from a household name that Fredrick Laloux, who coined the term, envisioned a dozen years back. However, it successfully grabbed the wider attention of many forward-looking companies (for better or worse).

    Why Wholeness?

    Laloux’s argument for wholeness is straightforward. He juxtaposes the old-school bringing our professional, ego-driven, masculine, rational selves to work with getting access to emotional, intuitive, and even spiritual resources. The latter, he argues, is not a simple upgrade. It’s a whole different game.

    This is not mathematical, but it is only 1/16 (of us) that’s showing up. When that is the case, we also show up with 1/16 of our energy, of our passion, of our creativity.

    Frederic Laloux

    One could easily envision the yields we’d gain if only we could access 10x as much creativity pool as we can now.

    Then, for many of us, it’s only a humanistic reaction. We might think of ourselves as tolerant, welcoming, inclusive people (I know I do), and accepting others’ whole selves seems like a natural consequence of that view.

    I didn’t need much more convincing to get on board and push the wholeness agenda at Lunar Logic.

    Truly Whole Selves

    Fast forward several years, and I was trying to understand what went wrong. I was looking at a workplace equivalent of a tribal war.

    People hurt each other. In extreme cases, they even refused to work together as a team.

    While it didn’t happen out of the blue, and circumstances added a lot to the mess, none of that would have occurred without years of fostering wholeness.

    You see, no matter how we don’t like that thought, our whole selves are not all roses. We carry our dark passengers within us. We view the world around us through the lens of our biases and our prejudices. We can’t leave that dark guy at home. It doesn’t work this way.

    If we let him out, we act out. That’s when we start hurting others. The worst part, we don’t even notice.

    The Case in Point

    A few years back, environmental activists from Extinction Rebellion stopped commuter trains to London by climbing on top of them. It made the news back then, including the social media wave of comments.

    It was interesting to see how people I knew sided with either the protesters or the commuters. Interesting enough to watch the footage of the events.

    If you’ve just watched the video, you might have had more sympathy and understanding for either side of the conflict.

    Make an experiment. Pretend you know nothing about environmental activists and their agenda. Pretend you don’t understand the anger of the crowd. Rewatch the video.

    What do you see?

    See the man on top of the train trying to kick a person climbing the train in the head. Notice the crowd pulling the man down on the platform and kicking him. At its most basic level, what you see is people physically hurting others.

    These are people who bring their whole selves to the scene.

    Intentions Matter

    – But Pawel, clearly, we can’t ignore actors’ intentions before judging their actions!
    – Fine, be my guest.

    The protesters’ agenda is clear. They aim to raise awareness of the ecological crisis that humankind is engineering for itself. The commuters? They want to sustain themselves and their loved ones. For some, the delay may just be an annoyance, but for others, it may trigger serious financial consequences.

    Their intentions are clear and pure.

    I bet no one came to the platform with the intention to hurt another human being physically. Not a single person.

    And yet, here we are. We want it or not, wholeness includes our dark passengers. What follows is that, when unbounded, it brings harm. Probably, more harm than good.

    Bounded Wholeness

    So, what was the grand finale of our tribal war? We lost 20% of the people who mentioned the situation as the primary trigger for their decisions to move on.

    We found an expert to help us organize rules and norms around non-discrimination and inclusion. A big part was learning what is and is not safe for work.

    It seems a hell lot of things are not safe for work. In other words, if we want to be inclusive and non-discriminatory, we must limit ourselves.

    It’s anything but wholeness.

    Well, you could call it bounded wholeness. However, it’s akin to bounded freedom, which essentially is not true freedom.

    – But Pawel, freedom is limited, too. You can’t do anything. Your freedom ends when you start violating someone else’s freedom.
    – Sure, the lines are blurry at best. But if you want to avoid people hurting others, they need to constrain their wholeness a lot. And I mean, a lot.

    Respect as Guidance

    Before the whole thing happened at Lunar, I believed it would be enough to follow a simple rule of thumb. Something that would tell us to respect one another.

    Make sure people give more consideration to others than they demand for themselves. It is more inconsiderate to prevent people from exercising their rights because you are offended by them than it is for them to do whatever it is what offends you. That said, it is inconsiderate not to weigh the impact of one’s actions on others, so we expect people to use sensible judgment and not doing obviously offensive things.

    Ray Dalio

    Or, as my favorite conference puts it in their code of conduct: “Don’t be a jerk, be excellent to each other.”

    The harsh lesson, though, is that it leaves too much space for interpretation. The closer we are to someone, the easier it is to empathize with them. As a result, the generic guidance will work for folks within our ingroup but not necessarily for those outside of it.

    The more different the outgroup from my circle, the harder it is to give them “more consideration” than I expect for myself. It’s even worse when we consider groups polarized against each other. Think modern politics.

    Suddenly, almost everything may theoretically offend someone.

    Clear Boundaries

    That’s why we need very clear boundaries. When my behavior is within those boundaries, I shall feel safe. Even if someone feels hurt, I am free to ignore it, and the other person has to get over it.

    However, when I violate the boundaries, the opposite is true. The other person has every right to expect me to stop doing whatever I’m doing, no matter whether or not I think it should be OK.

    As a team or an organization, we can negotiate these boundaries. We can bring them as far as we collectively agree upon. However, with a diverse team, we will necessarily constrain acceptable behaviors quite heavily.

    It’s not ideal. We still agree that some more sensitive individuals may feel hurt every now and then. That’s the price we pay for “unfreezing” everyone else.

    Otherwise, we’d be petrified that something we do may hypothetically harm somebody.

    Conclusion

    Wholeness, sold to us as “let’s freely bring more of ourselves to a professional context,” is a lie. As appealing as it sounds, it overlooks a critical part. While focusing on the upside, it entirely ignores the risks.

    I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but in this case, the potential downside is more significant than the gains we get.

    If we reverse engineer the whole process and start with building a (relatively) safe work environment, we won’t end up with wholeness. At least not the kind we were sold in the first place.

    If I’ve succeeded in getting you interested, here’s a video that covers the topic in more depth. A fair warning, though. There might be triggering content inside.

  • Why Wouldn’t an Intern Fire a CEO?

    Why Wouldn’t an Intern Fire a CEO?

    The question seems completely wrong. Obviously, because they can’t. An intern could not possibly let go of a CEO.

    But what if they could? Would they? And if not, why?

    Right now, you may be thinking, “But Pawel, what do you mean by imagining an intern could fire a CEO? It’s a completely abstract problem.”

    It is not. In fact, at Lunar it is possible.

    Radical Autonomy

    I wrote about our radical way of distributing autonomy many times before. In short, anyone can make any decision (in a structured way). So why don’t people abuse that power?

    Why don’t I need to worry that an intern would launch a letting go process for me?

    And yes, they totally can.

    While this decision is somewhat more complicated than the vast majority of others, anyone has the authority to start this process. Including people who joined us yesterday.

    The Dynamic of the Organizational Culture

    Whenever we join a new group, we tend to be more withdrawn than whatever is our norm. That’s one of the basic social dynamics.

    First, we observe and learn. Subconsciously (or consciously), we look for patterns to understand the group’s norms. What’s acceptable? What’s not acceptable? What’s rewarded? What’s punished?

    We orient ourselves in a new environment.

    That’s precisely what happens in an organization when a new person joins. Even when rules as written say something, we observe whether it’s really so. After all, if rules contradict the norms, it’s the latter which prevails.

    No one will fire the big guns before they learn to navigate a new environment well.

    Peer Pressure as Safety Mechanism

    OK, but the same intern will still not fire a CEO 6 months later when they already learned the norms. Why?

    In a system based on distributed autonomy (again, anyone can make any decision; that’s the ultimate distribution), we have very different power dynamics.

    We don’t have a person in power entitled to make the call, that entitlement being the ultimate get out of jail free card. After all, there’s no one else to make that decision.

    In this case, anyone can act. But then, such a decision will be judged, challenged, commented on. If it’s controversial, let alone outrageous, people will be very vocal when opposing it.

    Through that, we introduced peer pressure as a safety mechanism that basically prevents the most extravagant decisions from being made.

    Reputation as Currency

    What follows is that whoever volunteers to make any decision makes a bet. A bet of their reputation. If the decision goes well, the bet is won.

    The more obvious the decision, the smaller the bet.

    After all, if everyone thinks something is a good idea, it’s unlikely that they’ll complain, even if it goes sideways.

    It’s a different beast altogether when the call is controversial. If I go against a big group, I better end up right, or my reputation as a decision-maker gets slashed.

    Before anyone’s ready to make such a bet, they must accumulate some of that reputation. Which means they will have been around long enough that we no longer talk about an intern firing a CEO.

    In fact, when someone is around that long, and they still want to fire me, well, they probably have some damn good arguments.

    By the way, if you’re interested, the most radical proposal coming from a fresh hire we’ve ever discussed was changing the salary system. Admittedly, a serious call, yet it didn’t even reach a stage where it was an actual proposed decision. The person gave up way sooner after receiving peer feedback.

  • Levels of Slack Time

    Levels of Slack Time

    I learned the meaning of slack time years back in the context of Kanban. Once we start managing workflow for effectiveness, we necessarily create these moments when we want to stop the work. Otherwise, we’d overload the bottleneck.

    When we design the slack time in the system, the natural question is, what’s next? How do we use it?

    The Use of Slack Time

    My first natural, although with the benefit of hindsight simple, answer was to optimize the teamwork.

    There’s always a colleague who would appreciate help. There’s always a stage of the process that no one loves (code review, anyone?). There’s always an improvement task that just never makes it the top priority (like paying technical debt back).

    Then, there’s a whole another context. Individual. Slack time creates a perfect opportunity to invest in oneself. Catch up with what’s new with technology (with the AI race, it seems like there’s something to catch up with almost every week). Learn something outside of the immediate context of the project. Sharpen one’s saw.

    But then, when we start considering the value of slack time in a more generic context, we realize that it goes way beyond the team level.

    Think of a fire station. Their whole system is designed around slack time. We don’t try to optimize the work for fire brigades for utilization. It would mean that we want firefighters fighting fires all the time.

    Thus, we’d either have an excess of fires or firefighters moonlighting as arsonists.

    Cross-Team Slack

    We can then abstract away the idea of slack time and consider how it applies in different contexts.

    The most basic context would be individual. Slack time helps me to get better.

    Going just a bit further, we have the team level. Slack time helps the team to become more effective. We achieve that either by coordinating around the ongoing tasks (short-term help) or working on improving the long-term performance (continuous improvements, paying technical debt back, etc.).

    So far, it’s all the basics. But what if we take another step into a broader context?

    Then we end up in cross-team/cross-project land. We start considering coordination problems. We look at interdependencies. We analyze an entirely different layer of work design.

    As much as we have a bottleneck within a development team (let’s say it’s testing), we will have one if we consider a cross-team initiative (let’s say it’s passing the security acceptance).

    Once we understand this high-level picture, we can use slack time to help the entire initiative become more effective. It’s likely that one team being able to deliver more features or deliver them more predictably will not move the needle of the whole product by a millimeter.

    The actual bottleneck may be in the design, or release, or even grand product-related decisions.

    That’s where cross-team slack time can be redirected. It would mean we’re asking the question: what’s the best way to help when I see the big picture?

    Organizational Improvements

    Can we go further up, though? Once we consider individual, team, and cross-team levels, is there more?

    But of course, there is.

    Once we strip the context from the product/project work, we look at the bare bones of any company—its organizational design. And there’s always plenty to do around these parts.

    At this level, we wouldn’t ask questions about improving my project/product. We’d look for ways to make the whole company improve.

    Think of any novel initiatives. Of course, “novel” is in the context of this company; I don’t expect us to routinely do world-changing stuff. Starting a self-help group. Running a new product experiment. Looking for fellow folks to challenge existing management paradigms. Opportunities are almost endless here.

    The more extravagant you become with the ideas, however, the less likely you’d be allowed to implement them. And here comes our culprit.

    Role of Autonomy

    We established different levels of slack time:

    • Individual
    • Team level
    • Cross-team
    • Organizational

    The further down that list you go, the bigger the potential impact of the changes. But most people wouldn’t even consider going beyond the team level. Why?

    Simplest answer? They don’t have enough autonomy.

    The degree to which we can impact our organization depends on our sphere of influence. And that is strongly correlated with how distributed autonomy is in any organization.

    It’s not binary, of course. It’s not that I can or cannot make a decision in a cross-team context. Sometimes, even when I can’t call the shots, I can influence the decision-maker.

    But if I don’t have autonomy on a team level, I shouldn’t expect to have influence on a cross-team level. Thus, we can use the autonomy distribution as our measuring stick.

    Limited Autonomy, Limited Impact

    Whenever I teach that stuff during workshops and university courses, I ask people a series of questions to assess how much their organizations distribute autonomy.

    The questions are separated into groups, roughly referring to the three levels mentioned above: team, cross-team, and organization. The outcome is the same every single time.

    We see a lot of autonomy on a team level. Teams can freely decide about many things. I think we have Agile to thank for that.

    But then, it breaks. Once we get to cross-team, the perceived autonomy goes from “significant” to “barely there.” And it won’t be a surprise that when we touch the organizational level, it’s non-existent.

    In such an environment, we shouldn’t expect to get that much out of slack time.

    So, the next step after introducing slack time to our systems is to get more autonomy in it as well.

  • Respect (and How It Makes or Breaks Culture)

    Respect (and How It Makes or Breaks Culture)

    It seems my Milk Kanban article has made a stir. I kinda expected some backlash along the “it’s not really Kanban” lines. However, when the post hit Hacker News, I got a swath of remarks attacking it from a different angle.

    The problem is, as the comments go, that someone’s job is outsourced to random colleagues. In this case, it would be Kasia (our office manager) outsourcing her job (ensuring that the office is supplied with milk) to macchiato drinkers who can’t be bothered because they have more important stuff to do.

    Oh boy, where do I start?

    Get Out of Your Cave

    It took me quite a while to grasp that some commenters perceived managing the milk supply as a priority job for an office manager.

    Yes, I know our context so much better; we’re a small company, and everyone wears multiple hats. But even in big organizations, I’d be shocked if such a matter was anyone’s top priority.

    For Kasia, it’s like the 100th thing on the list of stuff she takes care of.

    But again, even if we consider a generic example, it would be so easy to figure out how many things, big and small, an office manager takes care of. Then, there’s probably twice as much of stuff that’s not visible on the surface.

    I mean, any developer, whose primary task is working with code that’s inherently invisible, should grok that concept.

    Effectiveness versus Efficiency

    However, then things only get more interesting. Even when people considered doing something to help, they’d instantly play the efficiency card.

    “I can’t be bothered to let someone know that we’re running out of milk because I’m doing this important work, and me being a 10x developer requires absolute focus.”

    Weird that they have time for a coffee break then, but what would I know?

    But yes, having someone do 30 seconds of work, which may save someone else 10 minutes, is a sensible tradeoff. Even if the latter is paid less. Even if that half a minute wouldn’t be efficient.

    That’s the most basic effectiveness versus efficiency consideration. I can be efficient as hell, but unless we, as the whole team, can reliably deliver value, it doesn’t matter.

    It’s the equivalent of a developer whose coding pace would be fabulous, except there would be no one to code review or test their features. They may feel like they were being productive. The team, however, would be so.

    In fact, the amount of work in progress they’d introduce would make the team less efficient. It would introduce more multitasking, more rework, and more context loss.

    One has to wonder whether people showing such a lack of understanding of how the whole organization delivers value should really be valued as highly.

    A narrow focus on efficiency, especially in an isolated context, is typically detrimental to the effectiveness of the whole process.

    Respect

    However, if anything in that discussion makes me sad, it’s the lack of respect.

    “If checking the milk reserves once a day is too much of a pain for a person hired as an office manager, the person should self-reflect on his/her choice to take the job.”

    And that comes from developers, a group that is notoriously crappy at filling time tracking data, even when companies rely on that data to bill clients.

    However, my beef here is with a lack of respect for another job. Yes, this job is not paid as well. But I’m sure as hell that as much as an average office manager would fail miserably if they were to do software engineering, an average developer wouldn’t fare better in an office manager’s shoes.

    In our case, just as an example, we’re yet to have a single foreigner who wouldn’t be deeply grateful to Kasia for help with all the formal stuff related to employment papers, work permits, etc.

    In fact, it would be easier for us to lose a couple of our best engineers than to lose Kasia.

    The point is, though, that it doesn’t even matter whether we really understand someone else’s job. It matters whether we respect it as a part of the bigger whole.

    If not, it’s easy to boil it down to “I want my goddamn coffee to have milk, and someone better make sure I have it.” It’s easy to subordinate everyone else’s work only to whatever I might need of them. Then, of course, people won’t be willing to spend half a minute helping anyone with anything. Even if that someone makes sure that the milk is in the cupboard.

    I understand that in many companies, this is the norm. People are not respected, and, in turn, they don’t respect others. They won’t be willing to help with anything that’s not explicitly their assignment.

    It’s not a Milk Kanban problem. It’s a (lack of) respect problem.

    Now, establishing respect as a part of organizational culture is so much harder than making the milk supply work effectively.

    Wrap Up

    I understand the specific context of these comments. The software industry made us, in a significant part, spoiled kids. It’s still easy to sustain a lucrative career by focusing only on one’s technical skills, individual tasks, and not much more.

    I’m not necessarily surprised by how the comments disregarded the work of others, the broader context, and common goals. The sentiments, though, are not unique to software developers. I see a lot of similar attitudes in management.

    And the ways of dealing with the issue will be similar. Understand others’ roles and jobs. Understand the difference between group effectiveness and individual efficiency. Most importantly, respect others and their contributions.

    Milk Kanban or not, it’s easy to get enough milk in a cupboard. Building a culture of respect, on the other hand, is damn hard.

    And it starts with the very people who have disproportional leverage on the organization. Yes, the same folks who tend to earn more and fill the most prestigious roles.

  • The Case for Subjective Assessment System

    The Case for Subjective Assessment System

    I admit I designed or helped to design 5 assessment systems in my career. No, I’m not proud. Frankly, I’m pretty sure the first 3 brought net negative value, i.e., they created more harm than value.

    So when we set out to reinvent our salary system, I said publicly (and more than once): “An assessment system? Over my dead body.”

    Fast forward 7 years, and it was time to eat my own words. While the change to transparent salaries was a big thing, and literally no one would instead go back to what we had before, we saw issues piling up.

    An interesting fact, among others, some of the issues were:

    • Raises not happening frequently enough
    • Too little money spent on salary increases

    And yes, that was all in a system where anyone could self-set their own salary.

    Long story short, a part of the best way out we could devise meant introducing an assessment system.

    The Fallacy of Assessment

    Assessment systems are a standard in organizations, big and small. There are broadly accepted good practices, like including perspectives from everyone around (so-called 360 assessments) or focusing on facts (outcomes, observable behaviors, etc.).

    The bottom line is the aspiration to improve the objectivity of any given assessment.

    And that’s fool’s gold.

    The fallacy of assessment systems in a professional context is that there’s no such thing as objectivity. There can’t be.

    As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall eloquently explain in Nine Lies About Work, we’re fundamentally incapable of answering questions like “How good are Pawel’s software development skills?” or “How good of a leader is Pawel?”

    That holds true even if we pretend to assess observable artifacts, like Pawel’s code or his behaviors during staff meetings. We could observe but a fraction of what a person employs to deliver the outcomes.

    To make things worse, even when we consciously focus on observing Pawel’s visible behaviors and outcomes of his work, we will only see a tiny part of it. After all, we have our work, too, let alone all the other people in the team that we need to take care of as well.

    Curiously enough, the closest person to objectively assess anything about Pawel will be himself. He knows most about his trials and tribulations as well as triumphs. He knows when he thrives and when he struggles.

    Except we intuitively dismiss his assessment as subjective.

    Thinking: Fast and Slow

    One of the fundamental observations Dan Kahneman made in his Thinking: Fast and Slow was that whenever our brain faces a difficult question, it subconsciously changes it to a similar albeit simple-to-answer one.

    Another one is that we typically make snap decisions and only then look for arguments supporting our choice (also actively dismissing those that would go against it).

    Couple these two with our assessment example and the challenge described above. The question about Pawel’s development skills is difficult. The most honest answer I can give is that I don’t really know, and the best I could do would be to spend a lot of time trying to inform myself better, but a) I don’t want to do this, and b) it would only improve my answer by a thin margin.

    But here’s a simple question that I can answer instantaneously. What is my opinion about Pawel’s development skills? Yes, the change may look subtle, but it makes all the difference.

    The new question doesn’t force me to consider facts, outcomes, and observable behaviors alike. It literally goes for my judgmental opinion, which, of course, may take data into account. It may also include all the prejudice, bias, hearsay, and other sources of misinformation.

    Obviously, it is explicitly subjective.

    Yet, our lazy brain answers the simple subjective question while pretending it deals with a difficult and more objective one. Oh, and once it has the answer, it follows up by justifying it with all the supporting arguments it can find.

    All the efforts to make the assessment system “more objective” are then thwarted by our brains.

    No wonder so many people consider their assessment systems unfair.

    The Way Out

    Following Buckingham and Goodall’s advice, one might ask what would happen if we ditched the pretense of objectivity and embraced subjectivity. While I can’t give a general answer, here’s a story of what happened at Lunar.

    The starting point was that we had a 360 assessment in place. We designed it around observable behaviors. The measured satisfaction with the assessment (and, broader, the salary system) was a whopping 80%.

    If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, they say. So that’s precisely what we did. We redefined our categories of flexibility, experience, effectiveness, and people skills with straightforward and subjective questions, such as:

    • I would always want [that person] to be my leader.
    • When a team requires multiple organizational and technical skills, I would always want [that person] to be on the team.
    • Whenever there’s a role no one is willing to take, I would always count on [that person] to take the responsibility.
    • etc.

    We answer them on a scale from “I strongly disagree” to “I strongly agree.” Also, the “always” qualifier is important as it stretches the answers across the scale.

    Initially, there were about a dozen of such questions. We wanted to ensure that all the aspects of the existing solution are covered.

    After another iteration of the “old” assessments, I suggested we experimentally try the new approach and compare the results. It should have been an easy sell.

    That’s when all hell broke loose.

    I didn’t appreciate how much resistance there would be against trying something new, even when it wasn’t supposed to affect anything. Not unless we would have validated the outcomes, at least.

    The new approach was considered explicitly subjective (as opposed to the perceived objectivity of the old one). It was expected its outcomes would affect the fairness of the payroll. People feared we would lose a lot of sophistication and details in assessments as the new questions were necessarily broad and generic. For example, we stopped mentioning any specific technologies we work with. Then, there was concern that people would start playing their favorites (I like you, so sure, I would love you to be my leader).

    The Experiment

    No amount of discussion could get everyone on board, but at least I could play the “let’s try it” card. If we didn’t like the outcome, nothing would change, after all.

    What have we learned?

    It was easier to answer the questions. We got significantly more answers in the new scheme (up from 47% to 65% of all possible responses).

    It also took much less time to answer the subjective questions than when we pretended to be objective (about a half time spent on the activity, despite providing more responses).

    The best thing?

    The results correlated almost perfectly with the old system. The correlation coefficient was 0.98. That’s math for “these series are as identical as it gets.”

    We literally generated the same results (or, in terms of quantity, better) with half the effort.

    Many still felt uncomfortable with a blatant admission that we use individual opinions as assessments. Nonetheless, the experiment’s outcome spoke for itself.

    We have been doing it all along; we’ve just cultivated an illusion of objectivity.

    Summary

    Two years down the timeline, no one looks back. We reduced the set of questions to just five. And if I wanted to get super-radical, we could stick with just one: “I would always want [the person] to be my leader.” This single response correlates most with all the categories we used to assess.

    When you consider it, it makes perfect sense. There are many interdisciplinary traits and skills we’d expect from an ideal leader. We’d want them to support us as a person and professional. We’d turn to them with problems, both technical and interpersonal. We’d look for guidance and challenge in them. We’d want them to make the team better. Be fair to everyone. And many more.

    If someone does well on all those accounts (and more), it is only fair to expect them to shine in a traditional skill/trait-based assessment, too.

    Still, we want to stress some other aspects of our work explicitly as well. But that still leaves us with only five questions, which, in most cases, we can easily answer from the top of our heads.

    I won’t say that we somehow started loving assessments. No one does that. But we:

    • get the same quality
    • but better quantity
    • by spending much less time on the activity
    • and are similarly satisfied with the system

    What’s not to love?

  • (Non-)Challenges of Distributed Decision-Making

    (Non-)Challenges of Distributed Decision-Making

    An internet discussion (yeah, I know, quite a bad idea for a trigger) inspired me to share some of the uncommon things we do at Lunar when it comes to decision-making.

    In short, as Lunar, anyone can make any decision as long as they go through an advisory process. The latter means consulting with people with expertise on the topic and those affected by a decision.

    Very few edge cases (like letting people go) have a somewhat different process, but the vast majority of calls follow the pattern described above.

    So how come people don’t get extravagant and give themselves hefty raises, go for super-fancy events, buy tons of gadgets, etc.?

    Care

    There are a few prerequisites to distributing autonomy that I could spend hours talking about. In fact, I’m doing exactly that during my course (called Progressive Organizations) at a local university. Anyway, for this consideration, the key prerequisite is care.

    When I say care is needed when we give people the power to make (any) decisions, it means that they need to feel responsible for the outcomes of their calls. Whatever happens, good or bad, they won’t be like, “Meh. Whatever.”

    They will care.

    That is enough to avoid an obvious extravaganza. After all, if we can predict something might be, well, not very wise or cause controversy, we’d think twice before putting our reputation at stake.

    Hard decisions

    It’s easy to make an obvious call. Let’s organize a company offsite! We’ve been doing it to great success for a decade, so it’s kinda no-brainer, isn’t it?

    But when it comes to tough choices, believe me, people don’t queue up to pick up the responsibility. It’s where it falls to the usual suspects: people who you’d consider leaders.

    And sensibly so. After all, these are people who are equipped with experience, knowledge, and intuition for such situations. They’ve been doing it for years. That’s one of the reasons we keep them around.

    Also, when in doubt about whether going for this fancy conference abroad is extravagant or not, the leaders would use past experiences and provide some context.

    “Why wouldn’t you consider a more local event instead? Here’s one we’ve sent people to, and they’ve been happy.”

    “Have you considered how everyone might treat these trips if we treat such an escapade norm?”

    And suddenly, no one really wants to push for that.

    Learning the culture

    I love one challenge I often get when I talk about radical autonomy. “What stops people from giving themselves a hefty raise?”

    That’s the best part. Nothing. And they still don’t do it.

    When you join a new group–any new group–two things happen. First, you influence the group. You provide a new behavior, perspective, thoughts, needs, etc. However, the bigger the group, the smaller your influence. After all, you’re but one person.

    More importantly, though, the group influences you, too. Whatever is the norm in how they behave, what they do, what is accepted and what is not, strongly influences how you act. That’s obvious. We want to belong.

    The very same thing works when anyone joins an organization. No one on their first day (or week or month) attempts to reinvent how things are done here. We wait and orient ourselves. We observe and learn norms.

    With decision-making, it means considering how, when, and what kind of decisions they make. What triggers controversy, and what goes as expected.

    So, if a healthy norm is that we try to keep our payroll fair, no one in a blatant way violates the norm. It would be too high of a price to pay in social credit.

    Not making decisions

    OK, but that whole thing means that we departed from the idea that every decision has a designated decision-maker. My team leader accepts my time off requests, my director gives me a raise, and a VP greenlights strategic efforts. We’re no longer there. It’s like anyone who wants to act acts.

    And if no one wants to act… Then what?

    Ultimately, there are the most mundane or unpleasant decisions that no one would fancy. Show a person who actually likes to let people go because of economic reasons, and I’ll show you a psychopath.

    Normally, we’d have a designated person who is responsible for those tough calls, but hey, we gave up on that idea.

    We do, however, have a person who serves as a safety net. In Lunar case, it’s me. I’d do anything that no one else is willing to do (and yes, that’s why I throw rotten food from a fridge in our cantina). Part of that burden is making the toughest decisions.

    Think of it not as a designated decision-maker but rather as a fallback decision-maker.

    Is it enough?

    Would that be all that needs to work in order to distribute autonomy? Especially when we talk about the most radical way of doing it (remember, anyone can make any decision).

    Surely not.

    And I’m happy to be challenged. We most likely have a good answer to that. We have been using this system for 12 years, and it’s doing just fine.

    If I learned anything during that time, the most difficult parts are really not the ones people think. And the gain from everyone’s involvement and care is immense.

  • Choosing Partners: Make or Break

    There’s been an interesting long-term study on graduates. Those who prioritized wealth and financial success in survey responses were significantly more likely to achieve it 20 years later. It seems almost intuitive, doesn’t it? Their choices, actions, and focus were likely geared toward accumulating wealth and maximizing financial gains.

    This phenomenon isn’t confined to individual career paths. I’ve observed a similar pattern across organizations within our industry. It’s quite telling to look at the trajectory of companies over a decade or more.

    Some organizations have had a laser focus on growth, and subsequently, they’ve experienced remarkable expansion. Others have chased public recognition and local fame, their representatives becoming well-known figures in relevant communities. Still others have invested heavily in technological excellence, attracting top-tier engineers.

    The intriguing part is this: often, you could predict these outcomes simply by understanding the priorities of the company’s leadership.

    Why? Because leadership’s influence on an organization is immense. Their personal aspirations become the organization’s goals. Their decisions, consciously or subconsciously, are often optimized to serve their own individual objectives. It’s no surprise, then, that an organization’s achievements frequently mirror the priorities of its leadership – much like the undergraduates in the study.

    This observation, by the way, also translates to the prevalent issue of short-term thinking in the corporate world. After all, the top leaders are typically manipulated to “increase value for their shareholders” with hefty rewards. But that’s a discussion for another time.

    Acknowledging the above, here’s a valuable tip: before partnering with any company, try to understand what truly motivates its top leaders. Not what they say officially on their website or in the materials they send you.

    Find who’s on the very top of the organization and do a little bit of research. Heck, ask AI to do it for you if you can’t get a report from someone working directly with them. And if you can get them to talk to you, it’s a home run.

    Ideally, get them to articulate their priorities, values, and beliefs. That should be easy, especially when dealing with a smaller organization. This insight will be a telltale of how your collaboration will look like.

    You’ll gain a picture of how you, your company, your product, and your goals fit into their agenda. That fit should be a critical factor when choosing a technical partner, business collaborator, or, really, anyone in whom you want to invest loads of money.

    Looking back on my 13 years at Lunar Logic, every long-term collaboration we’ve forged serves as a testament to this principle. Our (often unspoken) priorities were consistently aligned with those of our clients and partners.

    And if there’s one reason to explain our record 17-year-long (and counting) collaboration with one client, it’s precisely this match. By the way, not only is it the longest gig in the history of Lunar, but also, hands down, the best client we could have dreamt of.

    Coming back to Lunar’s focus, it’s never been on rapid growth, widespread fame, or even undisputed technical superiority.

    We’ve been this crazy company that decided to experiment with radical organizational culture. We have no managers. Anyone can make any decision (in a structured way, of course). By many accounts, we are rebels.

    Does it work, though?

    I bet Michael, who has collaborated with us for 17 years, would confirm. And he’d be far from the lone example on this account.

    People stay at Lunar for over twice as long as the norm in our niche suggests. So, it’s another voice that we do something right.

    But walking the talk, if you want to get an accurate picture of whether there’s a match, let me know. In the spirit of transparency, which is one of our values, I’m happy to share a lot about Lunar.

    Then, it’s anyone’s choice whether we are a good match or not.

  • Figuring Out Organizational Culture

    Some time ago, I had a lengthy exchange about how we work at Lunar Logic, which behaviors are OK and which are not. At one point in the discussion, I realized that the source of the different stances in the dispute was a very different perception of what organizational culture is.

    Organizational Culture

    When I’m referring to organizational culture in my presentations and writing, I typically use quotes from Wikipedia.

    “Organizational culture is the behavior of humans within an organization and the meaning that people attach to those behaviors.”

    “Culture includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits.”

    Interestingly enough, over the years the exact phrasing of Wikipedia article on organizational culture has evolved so you won’t find identical words there anymore. Either way, the original quotes stand the test of the time.

    If you need a more concise definition, I could propose something like “a sum of behaviors of everyone in an organization, or a part of it, and the reasons behind these behaviors.”

    Even shorter: “how everyone in a group behaves and why.”

    Building Blocks

    From the perspective of a person who wants to learn an organization or to influence the culture shift, not all the building blocks are equal. It is near impossible to change people’s fundamental beliefs or core values. It is neither easy nor fast to alter subconsciousness. Habits, assumptions, and perceived systems often reside in the subconscious part of our thoughts.

    What’s more, all of the above, except for some habits, aren’t easy to spot. Ultimately no one has their core values tattoed on their forehead, and very rarely we are aware of these inner drivers of others’ behaviors. It’s no wonder. No one teaches us to pay attention to that.

    The most visible aspects of culture, and thus, the easiest to work with, are rules and norms, respectively. Rules, by definition, should be written down, so they are accessible to anyone interested. Norms are a bit trickier since they’re defined by what people believe is, or is not, appropriate. Either way, if one pays attention, it is not hard to derive organizational norms by merely observing what people do and what they do not.

    The Role of Observation

    Let’s assume that you’ve just joined a new company. You enter our office cantina and see me having a beer with my lunch. You realize that there was nothing about that in the rule book you read during the onboarding. However, a societal norm is that we don’t drink alcohol during work hours. How do you react? Most likely, you look at other people to probe their reactions. If they ignore my behavior altogether, it appears that it is OK for me to have a beer during lunch.

    Note: it’s too little to tell what the norm is yet. It’s a decent first step, though. You may still want to watch whether other people do the same thing or instead I am a special case, and I can do things others can’t. Oh, and it may be relevant whether a beer was a regular or non-alcoholic one.

    Either way, eventually, you have a good sense of whether you (or anyone else) can safely have a beer for lunch. You will derive that knowledge by merely observing and absorbing the environment around you.

    Observation is indispensable too in the context of rules. Something can be written down as a rule and still get ignored. We could tweak the story above so that there is a rule, e.g., in the employment contract, that explicitly states that drinking alcohol at work is forbidden. This way we’d have a situation when a norm (having a beer with lunch is fine) contradicts a rule (it is prohibited).

    The outcome would be the same altogether. The norms trump the rules. Without observation, it is neither possible to figure out the norms nor to learn which rules are there in the name only and which are the law.

    Figuring Out Organizational Culture

    If one aims to understand the organizational culture of a company they just joined, there is no real shortcut that would be an equivalent of prolonged observation. Some tricks may hasten the process, of course. Not too much, however. You can’t learn the organizational culture in several weeks. At best you can familiarize some parts, but it would be far from a complete picture.

    Again, let’s imagine that you’ve just got hired. You joined a team of five, which is a part of a division of 40-something, and the whole company is around 200 people. Figuring out how to safely operate and behave in the closest neighborhood — your atomic team — should be a straightforward process. You’ll get plenty of opportunities to observe, and feedback loops will be short. You’ll have validation paths readily available through the means of chatting with your team lead and your peers.

    This way, you would explore, however, only one small area on a big map of organizational culture. Yes, it is by far the most important for your everyday work, but hardly enough for a complete understanding of how to act in all situations, including some that may get you fired.

    There are interactions within your division, both cross-team and division-wide. There are all sorts of rules and norms that apply to a company as a whole, or specific ranks, or even particular people. Discovering all these uncharted areas takes time.

    The Tricks

    There are a few tricks that can speed the exploration a bit. By no means, they are a substitute for awareness and observation, but they help.

    The higher up in the hierarchy someone is, the bigger their influence over the culture. To get a roughly accurate, even if a vastly incomplete and imprecise, image of the organizational culture, you could shadow the company’s CEO for some time. Since the behaviors of higher ranks often get copied at lower levels, a sneak peek at the very top of the hierarchy gives you a potentially most statistically significant representation of the culture.

    Ignore officially expressed company values, its vision, or a mission statement. It is such a rare case that a company indeed follows an aspiration expressed in either of them that they most usually are a source of noise, not signal. Look at the actual behaviors, not aspirational statements.

    Seek conflicts and watch how they get resolved. Controversial situations require parties to take a stand, and thus, they trigger action. On such occasions, it is easy to see who calls the shots and whose opinions count. The friction that is an integral part of any conflict is a natural fuel for shaping and reshaping norms, challenging rules, and expressing less visible drivers of the culture: values, beliefs, and assumptions.

    Ultimately, though, there’s no better trick than patience and perceptiveness.

    Crucial Role of Understanding Culture

    OK, but why is understanding the organizational culture so important? Unless we have a good grasp of it, we are bound to either traveling only through well-beaten paths or risking frustration.

    Well-beaten paths are safe. It’s easy to follow what everyone else is doing. It means, however, that our influence on the organization would be limited to the face value of our everyday contributions. We wouldn’t be challenging or changing our team and our company. Typically, that’s perfectly fine, even expected, during an initial period at any organization. Later on, not necessarily so. At least not in a firm that hopes to use the potential of its people.

    The other scenario is quickly jumping to the acting mode, challenging rules, status quo, opinions, behaviors; it’s a departure from a beaten path. The problem is when such a departure happens in uncharted territory. There are things which are appropriate and those that are not. There are norms, beliefs, assumptions, and values. Blindly flailing around means that we would inevitably violate these informal constraints.

    This way we will, of course, uncover the part of the uncharted territory, but the price is high. One part of it is frustration: “Oh, we don’t do such things here; I wasn’t aware.” The other part is reputation. Opposing or challenging things with little effort to understand them first doesn’t score much respect. There is a world of difference between being a contrarian who understands the culture and one who doesn’t.

    If we aspire to influence organizational culture eventually, learning it first is a crucial and obligatory prerequisite.

  • Autonomy and Transparency: Both or Neither

    How does transparency feel? Early in my career, I had an occasion to experience that. I was working in a typical organization where lots of things, payroll included, were secrets. Then the salary list leaked out. It wasn’t a huge leak, i.e. it didn’t go public, but I was close enough to the source that I could take a look.

    When I was about to open the spreadsheet with the data, I was thinking about my expectations. I hoped that information about salaries would help me to make sense of how people in the company are perceived by the leaders. I thought that it might provide me with role models to look up to. I was ultimately looking forward to transforming new knowledge into some inspiration and motivation for myself.

    That was totally not what happened.

    What I saw on the payroll was a lot of unfairness. I saw numbers I couldn’t possibly justify. I couldn’t make sense of the system that produced these numbers. Most of all, I was painfully aware that there was literally nothing I could do to change that. After all, I shouldn’t have seen the data in the first place.

    Ultimately, I got frustrated.

    Transparency without Autonomy

    With the benefit of hindsight, I see a broader picture of that experience. On one hand, I am aware that back then I couldn’t have had the whole perspective on what was valued in the organization and thus my sense of unfairness might have been exaggerated. I didn’t have insight on systems thinking to be able to rationalize the shape of the payroll as a pragmatically predictable outcome. Should I understand that my outrage and my frustration wouldn’t be that big.

    The bottom line remains the same. I should have been expecting frustration as the only logical outcome of such an experiment. I put myself in a situation when I was about to get access to data that was important to me on an emotional level and yet I knew I had no influence whatsoever on shaping the future state of that data.

    I got transparency with no autonomy to act. Heck, I couldn’t even ask all my “whys” to better understand what was going on. I put myself in a position where my frustration was guaranteed.

    Transparency without autonomy is a recipe for frustration.

    It’s like telling people stuff that they don’t like, or agree with, and then telling them to live with it. You don’t like who gets a raise? Live with it. You don’t agree with who gets promoted? Live with it. You don’t agree with disparities on the payroll? Live with it. You get the idea.

    A side note: I refer to autonomy and not authority. There’s a significant difference between the two. For the sake of this discussion, the crucial part is autonomy defined as the actual use of decision-making power, not just the availability of decision-making power.

    Autonomy without Transparency

    What about the opposite situation? Can we let people act while keeping them from accessing sensitive data? The answer to this case is rather obvious, I think. Acting in an organizational context means making decisions. Can we then make decisions with limited access to relevant information?

    Yes, we can. The question is: would that be good decision-making? Even though a common perception that more information available to a decision maker would result in a better decision is a myth, it is still crucial to have access to a few most important bits of data.

    In our context most important often translates to most sensitive and thus available to few. If we let people decide without making such information accessible we’d set them up to fail. Their decisions simply won’t be informed and thus random and low quality.

    Decentralizing control requires decentralizing both the authority to make decisions and the information required to make these decisions correctly.

    Don Reinertsen

    To stick with the original example, just try to imagine people deciding on raises without knowing what salaries are.

    Transparency and Autonomy

    OK, so neither autonomy nor transparency alone does make sense. What does, then? If we aim to improve either one we need to think about both at the same time.

    Each time we loosen transparency constraints we should answer: how can people act on newly accessible data? What will they be able to do if they aren’t satisfied with what they see? The answer doesn’t have to be full control over changing the part of reality that we’ve just made transparent. They do need to have influence, though.

    When we were making salaries transparent at Lunar Logic we didn’t give people the power to set the salaries. Well, not initially. We gave them as much as, and as little as, influence: an option to start a discussion about a salary and space to share their opinions about any raise under discussion. Even if the final decisions were still being made by the same person as before the change there were clear options anyone could exploit if they were dissatisfied with any number on the payroll.

    While eventually influence has transformed into full control over decisions, the key move was the initial one. The one that gave people influence.

    The guidance is much more straightforward if we start with the intention of extending autonomy. We simply need to answer what information we consider when making this kind of decision and then make that information available.

    Most often the hard part is realizing what range of information we really consider. When we started experimenting with the decision-making process at Lunar Logic, the first step was to let people spend company money without asking permission. The part of the process was, and still is, what we call the advisory process.

    As a part of advisory processes, I was often consulted about planned expenses. The most important lesson for me from the advisory processes was how unaware I was of all the data, experience and mental models I was using when I was making decisions myself. This, in turn, made me realize how much more transparent with all these we need to become to get autonomy working. A simple example: if we want people to spend company money wisely they should know what’s the financial health of the company and how specific expenses may affect it, i.e. regular financial reports should be available to everyone.

    Moving the Bar

    The bottom line is this: when we raise the bar of transparency we need to raise the bar of autonomy as well. And vice versa.

    It is not as obvious as it sounds. Each change fuels and influences another. It is more of a balancing act than a prescribed set of moves one could repeat in every situation.

    There is a caveat too. Transparency is a one-way street. You simply can’t undo making salaries transparent. You can’t make people unsee the payroll. Then again, transparency doesn’t go alone. It must be followed by autonomy. This means that changes on both accounts are almost impossible to reverse.

    In fact, rolling autonomy back is a bad idea not only because it is connected to transparency. Even if we looked at autonomy in isolation there’s a painful penalty to pay for removing autonomy that has already been granted. It is an equivalent of saying “we weren’t serious in the first place about giving you that power”. Not only we are back to the square one but also people would be discouraged to embrace autonomy in the future because they got burned.

    The obvious advice in this context would be to tread carefully and to take one’s time. We will find ourselves in a place where we feel like we took a step to far. What we can do is to take a break until we learn how to embrace the new situation.

    At Lunar Logic it happened sometime after we made salaries transparent and gave people influence over raise decisions. Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of what we now call the raise spree–a lot of raises were happening simultaneously with little consideration of their ripple effects. Instead of removing autonomy or double guessing individual decisions, which would end up the same, we focused on educating ourselves. How individual raises would influence other decisions about salaries and the overall financial condition of the company. Only as soon as we felt comfortable with the autonomy we had we moved the needle again.

    Neither or Both?

    If we stick to the assumption that increasing autonomy and transparency should go together, the question we should ask is: should we even bother? If it’s the choice between both and none, why not to choose none and stick with the status quo?

    The younger version of me would say that more transparency is always better than less. Well, now I would argue with my younger self. There are edge cases, like the one that I started with. However, in general, I believe that it is easier to lead a company when more information is available to everyone. At least in a part, it comes from a fact that not only is it more transparency, but also more autonomy. The latter releases a part of the burden of people in leadership roles.

    I do have a better answer when it comes to autonomy. Dan Pink points autonomy as one of the crucial factors that our motivation depends on. Little autonomy, little motivation, he says. Given how discouraged autonomy is the modern workplace we can only do good if we pursue it more. It won’t happen unless we care about autonomy and transparency together.

    For me the answer is obvious. It’s both; not neither. As difficult as the evolution can be, it’s worth it.

  • Cultural Fit versus Cultural Fit

    There is a remark on hiring I’ve heard quite a few times recently. It’s about sending a rejection message to a candidate. It goes along the lines: “Just don’t tell them that they’re not a good fit for the culture. That’s bullshit. That means nothing.”

    A Bad Fit

    I can’t say that such a remark lands well with me. I do, however, understand where it is coming from. As the industry, we started paying attention to the culture. It’s on our radars. We may have only a vague understanding of what organizational culture is but it is already a part of the discourse. This vagueness of understanding of the concept actually comes handy when there’s no tangible reason to reject a candidate but we still somehow didn’t like them.

    They are a bad cultural fit.

    Whatever that means.

    See, the problem I have with many of these statements is that they’re used as a bludgeon without much thought invested to why “we didn’t like” a candidate. Because of that we often throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    A Good Fit versus Likability

    When hearing about lack of cultural fit I often follow up ask what it means that a candidate wasn’t a good cultural match. The answer, most often, is something like “that’s a person we wouldn’t get on well with”, or “that’s not a person I’d like to hang out with”, or “it’s not my kind of a person”. These boil down to how likable a candidate is for an assessing person.

    The problem is that likability is a terrible way of assessing cultural fit. Not only is it not helpful, but it is also counterproductive.

    If we chose likability as our guiding principle to judge cultural match we would end up with a group of people similar to each other. They’d have similar interests, many shared views and beliefs, etc. We would be building a very homogeneous culture. An echo chamber.

    Sure, there wouldn’t be much conflict in such a group. There wouldn’t be much creative thinking either. There would be premature convergence of the ideas, little scrutiny, few alternative options would be explored.

    If we consider knowledge workers such a team would have appalling performance. Thus my problem with such a shallow understanding of cultural fit.

    Shared Values, Diverse Perspectives

    So what is an alternative? How to define cultural fit in a way that would yield a high performing team? General guidance would be to optimize for representation of different, diverse points of view while creating an environment where people are encouraged to contribute.

    These two ingredients—diversity and enabling environment—balance each other in a way.

    We want diversity to have an option to learn about other, non-obvious ideas. Such ideas won’t come from people similar to ourselves. We thus want to have a range of different people in a team. And when I say “different”, I think of different walks of life, different experiences, different beliefs, different preferences, different characters, etc. This might be translated to maximizing diversity.

    However, diversity for the diversity sake is not the way to go. This is exactly where the second part kicks in. We want to sustain an environment where people share their diverse opinions, and not simply have them. For that to happen we need to have a common base that encourages people to feel comfortable enough to contribute.

    That common base is a set of shared values. I won’t give you a list as I don’t believe there’s the way. There are many ways to build such an enabling environment. There are, of course, usual suspects: respect for people, emotional safety, or autonomy, just to mention few. The important part is that such a set of shared values provides an informal, and typically implicit, contract that makes it safe to contribute.

    Cultural Fit

    With that founding principle, the definition of a cultural fit would be very different. A good match would mean that we share core values but beyond that, a candidate is as different from current team members as possible.

    This means that friction will happen. Conflict too. Not everyone will feel comfortable all the time and not everyone will be getting on well with everyone else.

    This means that when we decide there isn’t a good fit we may come up with a much more tangible explanation why. It is because we don’t share values—e.g. we perceive a candidate as disrespectful—or we don’t sense any aspect in which a candidate would stretch diversity of the team in one of the desired dimensions.

    Note: not all dimensions of diversity are equal. There’s little, if any, value in my experience as a sailor in the context of product development. There’s more value in, say, cognitive studies that someone else went through. That’s why I add a quantifier “in the desired dimension” next to “diversity”.

    Some time ago at Lunar Logic, we rejected a candidate for a software developer role whose focus was purely on their technical skills. There’s nothing wrong in that of course unless this is the only dimension a candidate uses to look at themselves and at others. There was some mismatch in shared values, e.g. little understanding and appreciation for teamwork and collaboration. We didn’t see much diversity that they would add to the mix either—we already have quite a bunch of excellent developers.

    Interestingly, the decision was made despite the fact that we liked the candidate and were getting on well with them. That’s a complete opposite of what a naive approach to cultural fit would suggest us to do.

    We believe that we are better off with that decision. More importantly, we believe that the candidate will be better off too. As long as they find a company where there’s a better overlap in shared values not will they contribute more but will also be appreciated better.