Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Category: software business

  • Scaling Up Is Not the Only Option

    There is one thing that seems to be present in pretty much every company strategy these days. Given the opportunity, they want to grow. Obviously not every organization is successful at that but scaling up is treated as a default option and a universally desired goal.

    In fact, it is sometimes assumed so obvious that it doesn’t even gets discussed. One example was a recent discussion on preserving culture (see comments too). The post that initiated the whole thing seems to assume that the growth is a fixed part of the equation.

    An interesting thing happens when I mention scaling up strategy that we have at Lunar Logic, which is: don’t. All those blank stares and questions like “why would you pass an opportunity to grow?” Interestingly enough ceasing to grow means that we have to pass on some potential projects. This makes the whole discussion even more interesting.

    An issue we forget is that scaling up doesn’t come for free and the biggest cost of growth is how it affects organizational culture. Given that the current culture is something one values, preserving the important parts of it during growth is extremely difficult. If we are talking about rapid growth it’s basically impossible.

    If you happen to be in a place where the culture is a cornerstone of your success, which is exactly our case at Lunar, you may want to rethink whether scaling up is an obvious, or even desired, choice.

    Nevertheless a story I keep hearing over and over again about different organizations is “we’ve been doing so great so far that we decided that we want to grow by 100% in a year.” The trick is that when they succeed they will likely be a very different organization. Different values will be shared across the group. Different behaviors will be treated as a norm. Different way of work will be considered a standard. It will be a different culture altogether.

    It is likely that the very things that made them successful in the first place will be gone by then lost in rush to get bigger.

    Obviously there’s only that many things one can do with couple dozen people but then decision about growth is typically made without considering all side effects.

    And by the way, while I keep focusing on culture, as it is most vulnerable, there’s much more than that. One of the catchy themes these days is scaling Agile. Obviously part of the story is rolling out Agile in the context of big organizations. Another part though is maintaining all the value that we get thanks to using agile approach once we grow. While this is doable it adds to complexity of all the processes and the whole system.

    It’s not without a reason that smallest organizations tend to be the most efficient and as they grow they tend to spend more and more effort trying to comply with their internal and artificial processes.

    So why not dodge the bullet and keep an organization small? While I don’t say it has to be a default option it’s definitely an option to consider.

    It changes the whole equation as suddenly you are incentivized to say no. No, we won’t take this project as we are fully booked. No, we won’t jump on that candidate even though she seems to be pretty good. Suddenly, we have higher standards for work we do and people we hire.

    The focus is not on “more and more” but on “better and better.” Wouldn’t that be a nice option to consider?

  • Recipes Are (Almost) Useless

    One of the least useful pieces of advice you may ever get on management would go along the lines: “we’ve done such and such and it worked freaking miracles for us, thus you should do the same.” In fact, all the ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ are sort of a warning signal for me, whenever I learn about someone doing something right.

    This is by the way something that is surprisingly prevalent in many management books. A story of someone wildly successful who shares how they believe they achieved it. While I do appreciate a story and all the insider’s insight that help to understand a little bit more it is only a story.

    Was it backed up by credible research? Was it successfully adapted in a number of other organizations? What might be critical assumptions that we base on and how would the story be different in another context?

    It’s not that I would call each of these stories bullshit. Pretty much the opposite. I often find that many of the ideas shared are aligned with my experience. The issue is that on occasions I can track down some of the underlying prerequisites that aren’t even mentioned in the source. Does it mean lack of good will? I don’t think so. I’d rather go with fairly shallow knowledge.

    Unfortunately this has a lot to do with what we, as consumers of books, articles or conference presentations, expect. It is oh so common when the basic expectation is to get a recipe. Tell me how to build my startup. Tell me how to fix my effectiveness problem. Tell me how to grow an awesome team. Tell me how to change my organizational culture. Tell me how to scale up a method we are using.

    Yes, recipes sell well. They are sometimes dubbed “actionable content” as an opposition to theories that are non-actionable. That is unless someone undertakes effort to understand them and adjust to their own context.

    Over years I’ve been enthusiastic about some methods and practices I discovered. I’ve been skeptical about many more. I’ve changed my mind about quite a bunch of them too. An interesting realization is that the further from a plain recipe a method is the more I tend to consider it useful in the long run. I guess one of the reasons for me to stick with Kanban for all these years is that I quickly realized how adaptive the method is and how much liberty I could take using it.

    This is also a reason why I never become a fanboy of Scrum. While obviously there’s much value in specific practices it offers in specific contexts I got discouraged by early “do it by the book or you aren’t doing Scrum” attitude promoted by the community.

    I digress though. The point I want to make is pretty simple.

    Recipes are useless.

    OK, OK. Almost useless.

    It doesn’t really matter whether we discuss a project management techniques, software development practices or general management methods.

    It’s not without a reason that pretty much any approach, once it becomes popular, ends up being not nearly as useful as it was reported in early success stories. There are just too many possible contexts to have any universally sound solution.

    What’s more, during its early days, a method is typically handled by people who invest much time to understanding how and why it works. After all, there are no success stories yet, or very few of them, so a sane person handles such a thing cautiously. Then, eventually it goes downhill. Some would treat a method as universal cure for all the pains of any organization, others would sense a good certification business opportunity and suddenly any understanding of ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ is gone.

    One thing is what I believe in and how I approach the tools I adopt to my toolbox. Another one is that I frequently get asked about an advice. I guess this is inevitable when you do at least a bit of coaching and training. Anyway, in every such situation the challenge is to dodge a bullet and avoid giving a recipe as an answer. This by the way means that if I am answering your question with ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ you should kick me in the butt and ignore the answer altogether.

    A much better answer would be sharing a handful of alternatives along with all the assumptions I know that made them work in the first place. Additional points are for supporting that with relevant research or models.

    In either case the goal should be the ultimate understanding why this or that thing would work in a specific context.

    Without that a success story is just that – a story.

    Don’t get me wrong. I like stories. We are storytellers after all. It’s just that a story itself bears only that much value.

    The next time you hear a story, treat it for what it is. The next time someone offers you a recipe, treat it for what it is.

  • A Fool With a Tool Is Still a Fool

    When I first discovered how Kanban in general, and Work In Progress limits specifically, worked as a catalyst for deep systemic improvements it was like an epiphany. Kanban, which at the beginning seemed like a neat and light-weight process management tool, proved to be far more than that. Not only was it helping to clean up the mess short term but also steered sustainable changes in the long run.

    When Tools Fail

    These were my early days with Kanban. Since then I’ve seen a lot of teams applying Kanban in all sort of ways. A thing that surprised me was that, even among the teams that achieved a certain level of maturity of the adoption, the results were mixed at best.

    Some of these teams are doing great and the early results I’ve seen no longer stand as exceptional. Most of them though weren’t even close. Clearly the magic of WIP limits that induce slack time, which in turn results in a steady stream of sustainable improvements, is neither obvious nor granted. There has to be something else.

    No curious person, and I tend to consider myself one, would pass on this observation without a second thought. No reasonable person, and I tend to consider myself one, would keep sharing the success stories ignoring all the counterexamples.

    Of course, one obvious reaction would be that the teams that failed to achieve exceptional results got it wrong. In fact, if you want to look for such attitudes among our thought-leaders it is pretty common. The method works, only those unskilled folks mishandled it, they’d say. No wonder these teams still crawl in the misery, they’d add. Actually, they sort of deserved it by not doing the thing the way we preached, the thought-leaders would sum up.

    Fortunately I’m not a consultant or an owner of a business that depends on popularity of a specific approach. I consciously chose to stay in practitioners’ camp. This leaves me with no neat and simple (and wrong) answer to the puzzle.

    A nice thing is that, given enough experience, we will stumble upon such puzzles on and on. Gemba walk which seems to be mentioned in every other important management book from The Goal to Lean Startup was another such realization for me. Failed stories of applying Kaizen boards and holding Kaizen evens was one more. Organizations struggling with Improvement Katas is probably the most recent one but the list goes on.

    Cargo Cult

    A cargo cult is, in short, defined as mechanically following practices or rituals without understanding why they worked in the first place and expecting the same results as achieved originally. In case you wondered it doesn’t really do miracles. In fact, the only known successes are creating prophets of cargo cults.

    A common observation, and a sad one, is that our efforts with applying different methods are surprisingly close to that definition. Even worse, such attitude is often encouraged. By the book applications of any tool means spreading the disease. It is like saying that we need to trust an enlightened prophet who guarantees two-, three- or fourfold productivity increase as long as we do exactly as they say.

    Don’t get me wrong the other end of spectrum, which is NIH syndrome, is equally bad. If NIH syndrome was a good guidance it would mean that entire management knowledge is useless because no one in the world was exactly in the context such as ours.

    In either case the missing bit is understanding the underlying principles behind the tools. One exercise I typically start my Kanban training with is asking a group about practices and principles. While they always know a few practices, sometimes most or even all of them, almost no one remembers any of the principles.

    By the way, the same thing is true when it comes to Agile Manifesto. Everyone knows “this over that” part but most of the time that’s pretty much it. It seems like we haven’t understood what we read. Alternatively, we never read that thing at all but heard about it somewhere where they used only the marketing part of the manifesto on a slide.

    It is kind of like knowing how but having no clue whatsoever why we’re doing something. And then we wonder why we fail so frequently.

    Understanding

    I know that belief in universal solutions has certain appeal. It doesn’t require us do to the hard work of trying to understand what is happening around. I don’t think there’s a shortcut here though. I mean one can get lucky, as I did during my early adventures with Kanban, but this experience can’t be easily translated to different contexts.

    Now, certain techniques give us a promise of help in facilitating the understanding how we work. Visualization and Gemba walks come as obvious examples. However, before we rush to apply them we may want to ask ourselves a question do we understand how and why these techniques work. Seriously. Even something seemingly so straightforward as visualization may be a waste unless a team understands that one of its biggest powers is reflecting current condition and current process and not projecting an expected state, or that too much burden on keeping it up to date will render it irrelevant, or that that too many objects on a board makes it incomprehensible and, as such, pretty much useless.

    I think the most common practice across all agile teams I know, no matter which method, if any, they follow, is a daily standup meeting. I believe I can safely assume that vast majority of agile teams have their daily standups. Now, how many of them asked themselves why they are doing that? Why are standups a part of a canon of Agile and Lean? Why were they introduced in the first place? And why, the hell, are they so prevalent?

    It doesn’t seem to bug many people. That’s interesting because they may be just following a cargo cult and maybe they could have been doing something much more useful in their context.

    Take pretty much any popular practice, technique or method. The same story again. We don’t understand why the tools we use work and simply blindly apply them. Doesn’t that fulfill a definition of a cargo cult?

    By the way, I think that one of significant contributors to the situation we have here is pretty common perception that Shu-Ha-Ri model universally applies in our context. A basic assumption that when being on Shu (apprentice) level we should do as a master say because we are incapable of understanding what we are learning doesn’t seem to be an extremely optimistic view of our teams.

    Call me lucky but most the time I worked with teams that are perfectly capable of better understanding how the work gets done and how specific tools contribute in that. The missing bit was either knowledge itself or curiosity to get that knowledge.

    A side note: the higher up we go through hierarchy the less of that curiosity I see, but that’s a bit different story. Most of time talking about tools we are in the context of teams, not VPs and execs.

    A Fool With a Tool is Still a Fool

    Any time a discussion goes toward tools, any tools really, it’s a good idea to challenge the understanding of a tool itself and principles behind its successes. Without that shared success stories bear little value in other contexts, thus end result of applying the same tools will frequently result in yet another case of a cargo cult. While it may be good for training and consulting businesses (aka prophets) it won’t help to improve our organizations.

    A fool with a tool will remain a fool, only more dangerous since now they’re armed.

    Not to mention that I don’t think orthodoxy is anyhow helpful in this discussion.

    By the way: as much as I didn’t want to engage the recent TDD versus anti-TDD discussion you may treat it as my take on it.

  • Hyperproductivity Myth

    If you are in broadly understood context of Agile you eventually has had to hear about being hyperproductive. Sources reporting a few hundred, or even as much as more than a thousand, percent productivity improvement aren’t unusual. In fact, 200% improvement seems to be “guaranteed” by some.

    That’s great! Good for them! They’re going to get hyperproductivity badge or something. Yay!

    What Hyperproductivity Is

    Let’s start with the basics though. What is this whole thing? When a team becomes hyperproductive? How much do they have to improve? Oh, and by the way, if a super-crappy team improves three times and guys that were already great only by 20% would that mean that hyperproductivity was reached by the former, the latter, or both?

    The most common metric I hear about in the context of hyperproductivity is velocity. Actually, I consider using velocity to measure productivity evil or dumb. How much should my team improve? By the factor of three? Nothing easier. Oh, and by the way, we don’t use our estimation poker card worth 1 that often anymore.

    Note: I don’t deny teams improve. I merely point that stating so purely on a basis of velocity improvement is naive at best. There are so many potential dysfunctions of such approach that I don’t even know where to start. How the scope of work is split into individual tasks? What is a distribution of point estimates? How has it changed over time? What do we understand as a task in the first place? How do we account for rework?

    In other words without understanding a specific context mentioning hyperproductivity is meaningless. Just a marketing fad, which it might have been in the first place.

    Efficiency As a Goal

    Even if we agreed on a reasonable proxy for measuring productivity there’s a bigger problem ahead. We are not in a business of writing most code, delivering most features or achieving best velocity. If you think you are, go talk to your clients, but this time try to actually listen to them.

    If you spend about 5 minutes looking for sources pointing how notorious software industry is in not building the right stuff you may change your mind. Is a half of the stuff we build utterly useless? How about two third? Oh, and by the way the rise of the methods that are literally aimed to avoid building things unless we know we’re going to need them tells a story as well.

    So yeah, focus purely on productivity and you’re going to achieve your goal:

    Processing waste more effectively is cheaper, neater, faster waste.

    Stephen Parry

    The most painful problem of software industry is not efficiency. If it was, we’d already be in haven, given how much easier it is to build a software app these days than it was a couple decades ago. The problem is we are building wrong stuff.

    We may as well be efficient, but unless we are effective in the first place, i.e. doing the right thing, there’s no glory waiting for us.

    How We Create Value

    This brings me to the utter failure of pursuing hyperproductivity. Let’s (safely) assume that our goal is to deliver value to our clients. We do that by building stuff. Except the value almost never is clearly defined. In almost every case software development is a knowledge discovery process.

    This has some serious consequences. If we go by this assumption we may take all the functional specifications with a tongue in a cheek. It’s just a sketch of a map and most of the time not even an accurate sketch. This also means that amount of artifacts, like code, features, etc., we produce is not nearly as important as figuring out where exactly the value is, which bits and pieces we should build and which should be ignored.

    This happens when we discuss the features, look for solutions, research options, prototype, A/B test, change stuff back and forth to see what works. This happens when we don’t score on velocity or any other productivity metric.

    But wait, to become hyperproductive we should rather avoid that…

    That’s exactly why I don’t give a damn about hyperproductivity.

    I use to say software development is a happiness industry. We thrive only as long as our clients are continuously happy. We don’t make them happy by delivering more stuff. We make them happy by delivering stuff that has value for them and their customers.

  • Unscaling Agile

    A theme of scaling Agile, or Lean for that matter, is all hot these days. You will hear it all sorts of contexts: as broad as Agile and as specific as one of the methods we use. No wonder. It sells.

    You can tell that looking at tracks at Agile or Lean conferences. You can tell that looking at a rise of approaches that specifically aim at the big scale as their main target (SAFe, anyone?)

    The interesting part of the whole dispute is how rarely we question scaling up strategy. I mean it seems to be some sort of unquestionable paradigm and when you decide to go against that everyone looks at you as you were an alien. I sometimes feel like rolling out a huge program to introduce Agile or Lean in the whole organization was the only thing there was for big companies.

    How does it work for us so far? Not so well. We don’t have lots of success stories and those few that are available seem to be share at pretty much every Agile or Lean event there is. This tells a story about our success rates with scaling agile too.

    Unscaling strategies are almost never mentioned in the dispute. It is so despite the fact that we actually know at least a couple of different approaches we can use there.

    One is skunk works. The basic idea is to create a group within a company that operates pretty independently on the rest of the organization. This creates an opportunity to try out a lot of stuff that would be hard to implement in a broader context. At the same it creates an environment of much smaller scale.

    Applying Lean Startup within a big organization goes along the same lines. On the top of a product development strategy we create a context of work that is autonomous and that operates in small scale.

    Quite a different approach is when an organization decides to find a partner to outsource some of their work to. With such a situation one thing that is easily done is scaling the context down. A difficult part is to find a partner that would live be the right values and employ the right practices. But then again, it may be used as a viable unscaling strategy too.

    Interestingly enough, such approaches are rare. One exception may be outsourcing. However, outsourcing done in a common way has nothing to do with scaling down and very frequently criteria used to choose an outsourcing partner only make the whole situation worse. Believe me, I’m actually in this business on a receiving end so I’ve heard all the motivations for sending the work near-shore or off-shore.

    If you wonder why unscaling is so unpopular you aren’t going to be surprised with the answers. Either of these scenarios means losing control and that is something that management is generally allergic to. Also to make it work you need trust as high autonomy is one of key parts of the setup. Finally, there’s a risk of doing something not exactly in a standardized way which may produce unpredictable outcomes.

    Have I just said between the lines that one of the main drivers of scaling up Agile and Lean is complacency? Oh well…

    Anyway, unscaling strategy not only makes it much easier to adopt Lean or Agile but at the same time it enables fresh ideas as many constraints are typically relieved. Not to mention that it goes along the lines of autonomy, mastery and purpose which drives individual motivation.

    So the next time you hear about scaling Agile why not consider unscaling it?

  • Why Your Change Program Will Fail

    Most change initiatives fail. How many of them? Well, let’s see.

    In 1995, John Kotter published research that revealed only 30 percent of change programs are successful. Fast forward to 2008. A recent McKinsey & Company survey of business executives indicates that the percent of change programs that are a success today is… still 30%

    This is from a McKinsey report. How about different sources?

    According to international management consultants Bain & Co, 70 to 90 per cent of organizational change initiatives fail.

    Now, obviously these statistics receive some criticism. After all, what is a change initiative? What is a success? My point is that what we see is that in different context we suck big time at improving how we work.

    What’s more we are not improving really. Over the course of past 15 years we’ve seen a huge rise of the methods and approaches that are specifically aimed toward driving the change management.

    Agile proposed a neat value container quickly filled with specific methods that should change and improve the way we work. Lean offered a thinking pattern focused on continuous improvements. Both are more and more frequently considered table stakes than game changers. Why nothing is changing then?

    First, let me make a bold observation: neither Agile nor Lean seem to be making a difference. In fact, that’s not only my observation. Daniel Mezick points that:

    If current approaches actually worked well, then by now, thousands of organizations would have reached a state of self-sustaining, “freestanding” agility.

    We have to be doing something wrong. Dave Nicolette offers some ideas what that might be. Anyway with such a wild popularity of Agile and Lean we should expect to do better than that. The problem is that most of the time we don’t even try to understand what made them work in the first place.

    That’s a sad observation, but most of the time when I hear an Agile or Lean experience report it simply covers methods, practices and tools. The problem is that neither of these is pivotal in any change initiative. Basically, adopting practices and tools is simply a cargo cult. That’s not going to work unless there’s something more, the same way as it didn’t work for the Pacific tribes after the World War II.

    In agile context we often mention values as the missing bit. I sort of agree with that. Sort of because the way Agile Manifesto is formulated it creates false dichotomies, yet it points us the right direction.

    There’s a problem with values though. You don’t introduce values simply stating that you have them. You don’t incept them through mission statements and stuff. By the way, do any of you know value statement of your org by heart? Values are derivative of everyone’s behaviors and attitudes, thus they are a result of organizational culture.

    There’s one more layer to that. Values can’t be inconsistent with the culture. Otherwise authenticity is gone and your claims about values have little to do with reality.

    In other words a company can’t adopt Agile Manifesto simply by stating so. Not a surprise that change initiatives around Agile so frequently boil down to methods and tools. Not a surprise they fail at a high rate.

    We see the same story with Lean as well. The bits that get traction are tools and techniques. It is so often when I see teams acting like limiting work in process, doing Gemba walks and having Kaizen boards was everything there was to improve continuously.

    It’s not going to fly, sorry. We are back to organizational culture and everyone’s everyday behaviors. What do people do when they see an issue? Do they feel empowered to do whatever the hell they believe is the right thing to do to fix that issue? Do they even know what is the ultimate value they produce so they get good guidance on what is an issue in the first place?

    These behaviors tell a lot about the culture. Unfortunately most of the time answers for the questions above suggest that there’s no freaking chance to make the tools work the way we intend them to. Typically we see over-constrained, siloed organizations where one neither knows what is the right thing to do nor has courage to go beyond the constraints.

    I keep getting flak for bringing this up over and over again but I will do it once more.

    It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

    Grace Hopper

    Grace Hopper’s famous words are, in my opinion, the essence of the bit we are missing when introducing Lean or Agile to our organizations. That very bit is responsible for the appalling rate of success of change initiatives.

    You can have all the hot tools and practices in place but when your people are driven by fear of consequences of their actions nothing will change. “Fear” may sound harsh but that’s what it is. It doesn’t mean that changing status quo by a tiny bit scares the crap out of me. It’s enough that I start thinking about potential consequences, what my bosses would think about that and whether they would even be happy. This is fear too.

    When I think about the situation from a perspective of my experience as a manager I’m not surprised. I mean, really, promoting this whole “don’t ask permission” attitude is going to backfire on you on occasions. What’s more it means giving up control. Even worse, it assumes trust. It assumes trust to everyone, not only to few trusted people. Now, this is a huge leap of faith management has to take.

    If you are thinking about continuous improvement or making your change initiatives work start with this leap of faith. If you can’t make it work don’t bother with all the tools, methods, practices and stuff. It’ll be just a waste of time. And the best part is that to make this work leaders have to start with themselves.

    Only then you can dream of influencing culture so that it supports the everyday acts of leadership on all levels. If you got it right you may actually start thinking about all the helpful stuff you can introduce to keep the changes running. In fact, it’s pretty likely that you won’t need so much guidance as lots of them will emerge.

    Oh, and if you wonder whether that change among leaders and managers is easy, well, it involves lots of pain and suffering. It is against of what we’ve been (wrongfully) taught for years. Sorry.

  • Why Kaizen Boards (Typically) Don’t Work

    A Kaizen board is a neat concept. It’s a visual tool that keeps track of all the ideas for improvements gathered across a team and then helps to analyze the status of ongoing improvement experiments. What we get from using a Kaizen board is we encourage everyone to participate in improvement process, visualize ongoing and planned improvements and give ourselves some sort of a tracking mechanism.

    That’s the theory.

    In practice I haven’t seen such a board that would work well.

    I don’t say it isn’t possible to make it work. I just say it’s unlikely.

    To answer why I think so, I have to bring the old story repeated multiple times in the context of Lean. When Japanese started kicking Americans’ butts in automotive industry in the second part of twentieth century Americans sent their managers to see what’s so different in factories in Japan. Surprisingly enough Japanese were super-open and transparent with all the tools and practices they had in place. Americans meticulously noted all the novel stuff they learned and implemented the same tools and methods back home. Guess what. It didn’t work.

    It didn’t work because all these practices weren’t really game changers. The real game changer was underlying mindset that actually made these tools and methods work. By the way, this was also a reason why sharing all the secrets about practices wasn’t a problem. They weren’t nearly enough to make a difference.

    We pretty much recreate the same story when we try tools like Kaizen boards or when we create Kaizen teams. We introduce a tool and believe it will change the game. It won’t.

    The magic behind thousands and thousands of improvements implemented in Toyota every year is not any of the tools. It is a culture that supports trying stuff out. It is mindset that enables that. All that continuous improvement is happening not because people submit improvement ideas to Kaizen boards but because people are actively experimenting. They do stuff.

    If you tried using a Kaizen board this picture may be familiar. There was lots of stuff submitted to the board but very few, if any, real changes were observable in your working environment. Now ask yourself: what would it take for any team member to try something out. Would people need to get permission and a blessing before they changed the way they worked? And then, when the thing failed, would they need to explain or ask forgiveness? Would they feel that they were co-creating the system they were a part of?

    In most organizations I know these answers would tell you why your Kaizen board or Kaizen team or Kaizen whatever doesn’t have a slightest chance to work. In fact, in such a situation a Kaizen board would just be a nice excuse. I’d had that awesome idea but it wasn’t accepted. I’d come up with that great improvement but there wasn’t time to implement it.

    Except then you shouldn’t call it a Kaizen board but an excuse board.

    And the best part is: if you have right mindset and the right culture in place a Kaizen board isn’t needed at all. People just run their improvement experiments. Of course some of them last and some of them don’t. Then you obviously can use a Kaizen board as a tracking and visualization tool. Unless you get there though – don’t bother.

  • No Management Mindset

    All sort of no management approaches are hot these days. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Self-organization, empowerment and autonomy are inherent parts of Agile and Lean approaches. If you distill the essence of these and bring them up in the hierarchy it means quite a challenge for traditional ways of managing teams.

    Of course, few organizations are that far with their evolution and only handful, like Semco, Valve or (recently) Zappos, are really radical with no management. I’m not an orthodox though. I’m not going to draw a line that separates no management organizations from regular ones. I don’t see a point and I don’t care about labels anyway.

    The important part here is mindset – understanding why you are changing the approach to management and what expect to achieve with that.

    And honestly, I don’t expect us to see no management approach becoming a new trend in organizing companies, no matter how vocal its proponents are. There are a few reasons for that.

    We are so strongly rooted in traditional approach to management that I don’t expect many would find it easy to change their mindset. And they don’t need to. We may take pretty much whatever reasonable organization’s success criteria you want. Then, basing on the criteria we’ll find the most successful companies in the world. I’m almost sure that the top ones would be those with pretty traditional management approach.

    Of course statistics are against no management organization. I mean, there are only that many of them. However, if no management was so superior we should have loads of wildly successful followers. Sorry, that’s not what I see.

    The reason why I don’t see a rapid adoption of no management is that it is damn hard to make it work. And it’s way harder to make it work at scale. I would say that fixing dysfunctional management of an organization without changing the whole approach to management as a whole is a task that is an order of magnitude easier than a transition to no management.

    By the way, when we cease to have formalized management we flip one of systems thinking paradigms. In fact, no management means magnifying the fallacy of people versus system dichotomy. Suddenly we can’t just blame the system as everyone explicitly co-creates that system.

    A simple example. It happens so often that people delegate decisions and responsibility at a workplace asking “can I…?” Obviously, each “yes” or “no” answer, besides addressing a question, sets a constraint. This is allowed here and that isn’t. By the way, that’s how we define system at our organizations.

    What if there’s no definite answer? Or the only answer is that here are our high-level goals and everyone makes their own decisions so we get closer to achieving these goals? Everyone makes their own yes / no decisions and thus get involved in setting constraints. Everyone is, in fact, involved in defining and designing the system.

    The interesting part is that all it takes to get there is management distributing their power across the whole team instead of executing it.

    You don’t have to get rid of the management. You don’t have to become one of those hot no management organizations. It’s just a mindset change.

    This is also a reason for a very limited adoption of no management approaches. A mindset change only sounds simple. It goes against almost everything that we’ve learned about leading teams. Usually it goes against team’s expectations too. Even more so when people visualize scenarios taken from Zappos or Valve or W.L. Gore.

    There’s a good part too. If we are talking about mindset it means that it is applicable in all sorts of environments. You don’t have to be a full-blown no management organization to do this. You can push the limits pretty far with your team, even if you are a part of an organization that adopts more traditional way of managing teams.

    All it takes is to give up on power while still taking responsibility. Would you dare?

  • Closing Leadership Gap

    A theme that pops up every now and then is a leadership gap. An organization or its part finds itself in a situation where they need more leaders that there potentially are available. They might outgrow the old model and the existing leaders just don’t scale up. They might be facing challenges when someone had left the organization. It might be a simple consequence of evolving how the organization works. A list of potential reasons is long.

    A list of potential solutions is surprisingly short though. Typically it’s either hiring some people or promoting a bunch of folks to leadership positions. The former often means a lot of uncertainty. We don’t know whether a candidate would fit existing culture and pretty frequently we don’t even know how to verify that they have the right traits and skills.

    The latter, while it seems safer, is commonly a root cause of having the wrong people in leadership or management positions.

    What is a leader anyway?

    The problem of a leadership gap is actually deeper than we think. A part of it is how we constrain our understanding of leadership. In vast majority of situations when I hear about leadership debt a story is about leadership positions.

    You know, it’s about a position of a technical leader, line manager or something along these lines. This will never scale well.

    Even if scaling wasn’t an issue a situation when a team relies on a single leader is a huge risk itself. I would simply question that any single person is competent to make all the leadership calls you can think of. For example, on any given team I’m likely one of the last folks you want to enlist to lead with a technical issue.

    My answer to leadership gap starts with defining leadership as a contextual role and not position. This means that depending on circumstances anyone can act as a leader. It doesn’t matter what position they are in, what their tenure is or how much formal power they have. The only thing that matters is that within a given context they are the right ones to lead a team.

    Suddenly leadership gap doesn’t exist anymore as basically everyone is a leader and acts as one in appropriate moments.

    Where Leaders Thrive

    Obviously it’s not that easy. The magic won’t happen without a right environment. There are two critical bits to make it happen.

    The first is empowerment. Everyone has to know that they are supposed to be leaders whenever they feel like it. It starts with formal leaders, people in leadership positions, ceasing to execute their power. It’s not dodging the responsibility. Pretty much the opposite. It’s taking responsibility for decisions made by someone else. That’s quite a challenge for most of us.

    The best summary of such attitude are Grace Hopper’s famous words:

    “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

    If your people believe in that and act accordingly, they truly are empowered. It also means that from time to time they will make you willing to yell at them: “Why the hell hadn’t you asked before you did something so utterly dumb?” What you should do instead is shut up. Don’t ruin that.

    The second bit is trust. If you don’t trust your team you will always be struggling with a leadership gap. Without trust the empowerment part would be meaningless empty words. No one would attempt to play a role of a leader and even if they do it once there wouldn’t be a second attempt.

    This is difficult because it means giving up control. But wait, we want more leaders so we are talking exactly about this – giving up control. How is anyone supposed to lead if their every action is double-checked by someone else?

    Closing Leadership Gap

    I have an idea for you. Instead of asking how to close a leadership gap think whether your people feel empowered or rather carefully managed. Ask yourself how you react when they screw something up and how it affects their future actions. Finally, be brutally honest with yourself: do you trust your people?

    The leadership gap problem is never solved by getting more leaders. The solution is creating an environment where leadership thrives.

    In other words the key to this puzzle is not outside the system but within it – in a way existing leaders act. And obviously the more senior the leaders the more they influence the situation. If you are complaining that you lack leaders in your team it’s likely your fault.

  • What Value Is Exactly

    One of arguments that I repeat in different contexts is that our ultimate goal should be delivering value to our customers. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many lines of code or features we’ve built. What matters is how much value has been delivered.

    The concept seems to be pretty challenging in software development communities. In Lean or Agile communities it gets closer to stating the obvious. Nevertheless we don’t do that much with the obviousness. Product development, portfolio management or work organization on a team level are oh so often all about efficiency and not much more.

    After all it is way more difficult to assess value we deliver than simply count features. The interesting thing happens when we try to define what value is exactly.

    The question we should hear over and over again but don’t is: value for whom?

    A common setup is: a vendor a.k.a. a software development company, a client paying to have a product built and its users. There are obviously more complicated scenarios as well as simpler, e.g. a company developing their own product. I’ll focus on the scenario with three key groups of interest though.

    Let me give you a few examples.

    The software development company built a product for the client. It is high quality, it does the job and paying users seem to be signing up in big numbers. The only problem is that the client was toxic thus big chunk of people working on the app left the vendor. Despite the fact that value is there for the client and users the balance of value on the software development company is negative.

    If I saw such a project at Lunar Logic I would find our way out of the arrangement. By the way, it basically means that I don’t consider value for a client / users as the ultimate goal we should strive for. There has to be alignment with value on the other end as well.

    There is another product for another client. Again it was delivered with high quality, users really like it except they’re not willing to pay for the service. This time collaboration went exceptionally well. On the top of that the product was fun to build for the team. It seems that the software development company got value on their end. Users, to some point, too. But the client? Not really. This business doesn’t scale.

    Should I as the vendor’s representative reject to build such a project? I mean, a product idea is always a bet so you never quite know how it’s going to play out.

    The value equation is again imbalanced though.

    Yet another product was built in a very collaborative manner with a high quality and both the software development company and the client were happy. Except the users wouldn’t come. Why was the client happy then? They treated the product as an experiment that should verify a hypothesis. Even though the product wasn’t a success the main goal was knowledge discovery and from this perspective value was there.

    Once again one of the parties – users – didn’t get value, yet it doesn’t render the whole endeavor senseless.

    Of course, an ideal case is when not only is it a win-win-win kind of situation but also each win is roughly equally valued by each party. My experience is that it doesn’t happen very often.

    In fact, value for money metric would differ depending on how much one values money. If a few hundred dollars for a day of work of a developer seems to me like a fortune I would expect miracles for my money. If it seems like a decent or even affordable rate my expectations of value I’m going to get are different.

    When you talk about value, make it clear what value you are talking about exactly.

    To make such a clarification you first need to understand that there are different sorts of value and they are driven by different factors. Then a natural next step is to ask what these factors are. Once again it will differ much. It may be profits, employee retention, number of users, knowledge discovery, solving a problem that people have, or hundreds of different things. Only if you are able to tell which factors are important in a given context you can come up with reasonable measures of value.

    Without that value will be an ephemeral concept that we can’t assess in any meaningful way.

    This also means that we can have a discussion on how value differs for all the parties involved and which bits are the most important for us. Because most of the time we have to choose.