Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: autonomy

  • Organizational Culture and Hand Cream

    The other day we had a brief discussion at Lunar Logic on an idea that the company should provide hand cream for us. While normally we don’t really discuss such petty expenses, this time quite a few people got involved.

    One could say that the discussion itself cost the company more than a stash of hand cream that would suffice for several years. And they would be right.

    Why was I involved then? And why would I write about it afterwards?

    The thing is we don’t make decisions in isolation. Of course we can look at any decision in individual context. It’s all about hand cream and several dollars, right?

    Not really. Or at least not only. The meta-decision that was being made was about what is the extent to which the company provides its employees with stuff. It was about setting, or rather resetting, what benefits are available.

    Of course, at any company there are things that almost everyone would use, like coffee and tea, paper towels etc. These are no-brainers.

    But then, very quickly we enter the land of less obvious options. Like a hand cream. Ultimately not everyone would be using it. I’m betting around half of people maybe. So we’re making a small nice gesture to some.

    The question is: should we be making such small nice gestures to other groups?

    We have quite a bunch of people who are cooking lunches at the office. Should we buy cooking oil for them? Or spices? These would all be small expenses after all.

    So how about free food available at the office? Well, given that we have a couple vegans, healthy load of vegetarians, some burger lovers, a diabetic, a couple people on gluten-free diet and a couple more trying to lose a few pounds there would always be someone left out. These aren’t obvious decisions anymore.

    These kind of calls are really about deciding about where we set the limits. What is acceptable. It’s not about hand cream. It’s about what rationale would be enough to justify an expense on the account of the company. We are talking about norms.

    Have I just said “norms”? Oh well, it seems we are talking about organizational culture now.

    organizational culture

    the behavior of humans who are part of an organization and the meanings that the people react to their actions

    includes the organization values, visions, norms, working language, systems, symbols, beliefs, and habits

    Wikipedia

    Simply put organizational culture is a sum of behaviors of everyone in an organization. Not only behaviors themselves, though, but also what drives these behaviors: shared values, common principles, rules and norms.

    This is why I got involved in the discussion about hand cream. The trigger was realization that we are just about to change a norm and I’d rather have an explicit discussion about that beforehand. Such a change may affect the common attitude from “we’re not doing such things here” to “yeah, we’ve seen that happening before so it’s OK.”

    What’s more, giving all sorts of benefits away is not something that can be taken back seamlessly. As Daniel Kahneman in his profound book Thinking Fast and Slow points we think differently about something that we gain than about something that we lose.

    In other words getting hand cream is all fine and nice but almost instantly it becomes a new norm that hand cream is there. We’ve just set new expectation level. Once we stop supplying cream we would perceive that as a loss. The cost of removing a benefit would be bigger than a gain we got from introducing it.

    That’s why we can’t label changes that affect organizational culture as safe to fail. Like in: let’s try the hand cream thing and if people don’t care we’ll just stop buying it. When we are touching organizational culture there’s no rollback button. Even when we technically bring the situation back to the square one, culturally it’s different because we have a new experience so we look at things differently.

    That’s why I will get involved occasionally in discussions like the one about hand cream. And that’s why it was worth a blog post.

  • Portfolio Management: Role of Autonomy

    I’m a huge fan of Real Options. Along with Cynefin, it is one of the models that can be very universally applied in different domains. No wonder that some time ago I proposed application of Real Options as a sense making mechanism that connects different levels of work being done in an organization.

    Simply put, potential work, be it projects or products, are options. We rarely, if ever, can effectively work on all the potential initiatives we have on our plates. That’s why we end up picking, a.k.a. committing to, only a subset of options we have.

    Each commitment to start an initiative instantly generates a set of options on a lower level of work. Once we commit to run a project there are so many ways we can structure the work and so many possible feature sets that we can end up building. We again have a set of options available and again eventually commit to execute some of them. That in turn generates the options on a layer or finer granularity work items, say individual features. It goes all the way down to the most atomic work items we have.

    Portfolio Management Real Options

    We need an accompanying mechanism to close a full feedback loop between the layers of work. We simply need to provide information back to the higher level of work. Think of situations like a project taking longer than expected. We obviously want that information to be taken into account when we are making commitments on a portfolio level. Ultimately, it means that available capabilities have changed and thus it influences the set of options we have on a portfolio level.

    Again, the similar dynamics will be seen between any of the two neighboring layers of work. Specific technical choices for features will influence how other features are built or how much time we’d need to make changes in a product.

    Portfolio Management Real Options

    The model can be easily scaled up to reflect all the layers of work that are present in an organization. In big companies there will be multiple layers of work even in the area of portfolio management only.

    The underlying observation is that we very, very rarely need information to be escalated farther than between neighboring levels of work. In other words a single feature that is late will not affect decision-making process on portfolio level. By the same token commitment to start a new project, as long as it takes into account available capabilities, will be of little interest to a feature team involved in an ongoing initiative.

    There is, however, one basic assumption that I subconsciously made when proposing this model. The assumption is about autonomy.

    Work flows down to the finer-granularity level is through a commitment at a coarser-granularity level. The commitment, however, is not only expressing good will that we want to build something. If we make a commitment to run a project we need to fund and staff it. The part of the commitment is providing people, skills and resources required to accomplish that project within expected constraints, be it time, budget, scope, etc.

    If there are other constraints that are important they need to be explicitly described once the commitment is being made. One example that comes to my mind would be around the ultimate goals for a product or a project. It can be about technical constraints – for whatever reasons technologies that a product will be built in may be fixed. Another common case would be about high level dependencies, e.g. between two interconnected systems.

    Such constraints need to be explicit and need to be expressed when the commitment is being made simply because they influence what options we will have in the lower level of work.

    There’s also another important reason why we want explicit constraints. When we move our perspective to a different level of work we also change the team that is involved in work. In the most common scenario the team context will change from PMO, through a project team to a feature team as we go down through the picture.

    And that’s exactly when autonomy kicks in. Commitment on a higher level of work generates options on a lower level. What kind of options we get depends on the constraints we set. These are all prerogatives of a team making decisions on a higher level.

    The specific choice among the available options, on the other hand, is responsibility of a team that operates on a lower level.

    Obviously, we don’t want PMO leader to tell developers how to write unit tests. That’s the extreme example though and I see violation of autonomy all over the place.

    Let’s start from the top. The role of PMO in such a scenario would be to pick initiatives that we want to run, a.k.a. make project- or product-level commitments. The part of the process would be defining relevant constraints for each commitment. These would be things like manning and funding the new initiative, sharing expectations deadlines, etc. This is supposed to provide fair amount of predictability and safety to the team that will be doing the actual work.

    One crucial part of defining constraints is making the goals of the initiative explicit. What we are trying to achieve with this product or project. In other words why we decided to invest time of that many people and that much money and we believe it was a good idea.

    And now the final part. Then PMO should get out of the way. Options are there in a product team or a project team. That team should have autonomy to pick the ones they believe are the best. Interference from the top will disable autonomy and as such will be a source of demotivation and disengagement. It is very likely that such interference would yield suboptimal choice of options too.

    The pattern remains the same when we look at any two neighboring layers of work. For example, we will see similar dynamics between a product team and a feature team.

    Portfolio Management Real Options Autonomy

    The influence on which options get executed happens through definition of constraints and not by enforcing a specific choice of options. Those different levels of work are, in a way, isolated between each other by the mechanism of commitment that yields options on a lower level, feedback loops going up and finally by distributing authority and maintaining autonomy to make decisions within own sphere of influence.

    Unsurprisingly the latter gets abused fairly commonly, which is exactly why we need to be more aware and mindful about the issue.

  • Hierarchy Is Bad For Motivation

    Whenever a topic of motivation at work pops up I always bring up Dan Pink’s point. In the context of knowledge work, in order to create an environment where people are motivated we need autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

    The story is nice and compelling. However, what we don’t realize instantly is how high Dan Pink sets the bar. Let me leave the purpose part aside for now. It is worth the post on its own. Let’s focus on autonomy and mastery.

    First of all, especially in the context of software development, there’s a strong correlation between the two. Given that I have enough autonomy in how I organize my work and how the work gets done, I most likely can pursue mastery as well. There are edge cases of course, but most frequently autonomy translates to mastery (not necessarily so the other way around though).

    The problem is that the way organizations are managed does not support autonomy across the board. Vast majority of organization employs hierarchy-driven structures. A line worker has a manager, that manager has their own manager, and so on and so forth up to a CEO.

    The hierarchy itself isn’t that much of an issue though. What is an issue is how power is distributed within the hierarchy. Typically specific powers are assigned to specific levels of management. A line manager can do that much. A middle manager that much. A senior manager even more. Each manager is a ruler of their own kingdom.

    Why is power distribution so important? Well, ultimately in knowledge organizations power is used for one purpose: making decisions. And decision-making is a perfect proxy if we are interested in assessing autonomy.

    Of course each ruler has a fair level of flexibility when it comes to decide how the decision-making happens in their teams. There are, however, mechanisms that discourage them to change the common pattern, i.e. a dictatorship model.

    The hierarchical, a.k.a. dictatorship, model has its advantages. Namely it addresses the risks of indecisiveness and accountability. Given that power is clearly distributed across the hierarchy we always know who is supposed to make a decision and thus who should be kept accountable for it.

    That’s great. Unfortunately, at the same time it discourages attempts to distribute decision-making. As a manager I’m still kept accountable for all the relevant decisions made so I better make them myself or double-check whether I agree with those made by a team.

    This in turn means that normally there’s very little autonomy in hierarchical organizations.

    It brings us to a sad realization. The most common organizational structures actively discourage autonomy and authority distribution.

    If we come back to where we started – what are the drivers for motivation – we would derive that we should see really low levels of motivation out there. I mean, vast majority of companies adopt the hierarchical model as it was the only thing there is. Not only that though. Even within hierarchical model we may introduce a culture that encourages autonomy, yet very, very few companies are doing so.

    We could conclude that if the above argument is true we would expect really low levels of motivation globally in the workforce. It is a safe assumption that high motivation would result in engagement and vice versa.

    Interestingly enough Gallup run a global survey on employee engagement. The bottom line is that only 13% of employees are engaged in work. Thirteen. It would have been a shock if not the fact that we just proposed that one of the current management paradigms – a prevalent organizational structure – is unsuitable to introduce autonomy across the board and thus high levels of motivation.

    In fact, active disengagement, which would translate to being openly disgruntled, is universally more common that engagement. Now, that tells a story, doesn’t it?

    What we look at here is that modern workplace is not well-suited for achieving high motivation and high engagement of employees. There are certain things that can change the situation within structural constraints. There are good stories on how to encourage the right behaviors without tearing down the whole hierarchy.

    It is also a challenge for a dominant management paradigm that makes a rigid hierarchy a prevalent and by far the most popular organizational structure out there. While such hierarchy addresses specific risks it isn’t the only way of dealing with them. The price we pay for following that path is extremely high.

    I for once consider that price too high.

  • Two Rules of Autonomy

    One thing that we are doing at Lunar Logic is we evolve toward no management model of leadership. This means a lot of small changes that all happen with the same attitude at heart: to distribute more and more decision-making power across the whole company. This by the way also means systematically stripping down the management from that power.

    The latter is easy in our case as the management is limited to me and I kind of launched the whole process. I would have to be either a hypocrite or a schizophrenic to resist the changes. Luckily enough I believe I’m neither. (Unless that other me has something else to say, that is.)

    I don’t say it’s easy. One challenge in each step toward participatory leadership is that we, humans, don’t like to give up on power. I’m no different. I like that warm feeling that I can make a call and it shall be as I say. It’s not only that. Sometimes I simply know which option is good and the temptation to intervene and tell people what’s the best choice is strong. It would mean, however, taking a step back on a path toward democratizing leadership. So I keep my mouth shut.

    On other occasions I just feel like we are going too far from my comfort zone and I slow down the process.

    Giving up on power is a prerequisite to go further. While I don’t say it will go as easy in every case it isn’t enough to get that part working. In fact, despite being vocal how much I don’t want to make all sorts of decisions and how much I appreciate autonomy I still get loads of the questions that start with “Can I…”

    If I’m lucky enough to suppress my System 1 reaction that would be either of: yes, yes but, no, no but answers I’d reply with “Can you?” The ball is back in your court and as long as you take responsibility for the call you make I’m OK with that.

    The interesting thing is why these questions are popping up over and over again though. Despite the fact that on a conscious level we promote autonomy our natural behaviors means retreating back to the old pattern of asking for permission.

    We simply don’t claim autonomy even if it slaps us in the face.

    Besides years of programming our brains by education and work system that make it hard to act differently there’s another reason for that. Most of us want to be good citizens and we don’t want to use our autonomy to do stuff other wouldn’t like or even would be against. So we back up to the ultimate decision-making authority who is supposed to know what everyone in an organization likes or approves or more likely who doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks – a manager.

    The interesting thing is that the fear sometimes is well-grounded. We have different sensitivity toward different things. Behaviors that we consider positive or neutral may have negative connotation for others. If I’m a manager and I use my ultimate decision-making power and I don’t give a damn then, well, I don’t give a damn. But what if I’m just a team member who cares?

    The idea we came up with is a set of two very simple rules.

    1. The Nike Way
    If you want to do something just do it.

    2. Speak Up
    If you don’t like what someone else is doing speak up.

    Yes, that’s it. There’s one underlying principle, which is mutual respect. We don’t need to love each other. We need to respect our autonomy and our right to have different views on stuff.

    The nice thing about this setup is that it is a self-balancing mechanism. It takes only one person try something new. It doesn’t require permission or even extensive up-front discussion. Pretty much the opposite, as a default we assume that every initiative would be awesome and everyone would love it or at least have nothing against.

    The Nike Way is verbalizing the attitude described by famous Grace Hopper’s words: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

    What we do know is that despite best intentions it won’t be true all the time. Occasionally, OK more often than occasionally, someone would do something that somebody else is not OK with. Then we have Speak Up rule that triggers a conscious and meaningful discussion (sometimes dubbed a shit storm) that provides additional insight for both sides and most likely some sort of consensus.

    Speak Up rule was designed with a positive scenario in mind, i.e. someone unintentionally stepped on someone else’s toe. It works however in malicious cases as well. When someone intentionally crosses the line or pulls an organization in an unwanted direction someone else will speak up too.

    The best part is that the same way it takes only one person to just do it, you need only one person to speak up.

    One might point that there’s a risk that it would end up in indecisiveness. So far I don’t see that happening. First, speaking up doesn’t mean the ultimate veto power. It simply triggers a discussion. Second, the respect bit that is a hard prerequisite keeps the discussion civilized.

    There’s a little more sophistication to balance that. Naturally extroverts would have an upper hand in unstructured discussion. That’s where empathy plays its role as helps to facilitate these weaker signals. On a basic level there are just these two simple rules: The Nike Way and Speak Up rule.