Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: 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.

  • 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.

  • Don’t Mess with Culture

    When I’m writing these words I’m on my way home from Lean Agile Scotland. While summarizing the event Chris McDermott mentioned a few themes, two of them being organizational culture and experimentation.

    Experimentation is definitely my thing. I am into organizational culture too. I should be happy when Chris righteously pointed both as the themes of the event. At the same at that very moment time alarm lights went off in my head.

    We refer a lot to safe to fail experiments. We talk about antifragile or resilient environments. And then we quickly turn into organizational culture.

    The term culture hacking pops up frequently.

    And I’m scared.

    The reason is that in most cases there is no safe to fail experiment when we talk about an organizational culture. The culture is an outcome of everyone’s behaviors. It is ultimately about people. In other words an experiment on the culture, or a culture hack if you will, means changing people behaviors.

    If you mess it up, more often than not, there’s no coming back. We may introduce a new factor that would influence how people behave. However, removing that factor does not bring the old behaviors back. Not only that though. Often there’s no simple way to introduce another factor that would bring back the old status quo.

    There’s a study which showed that introducing a fine for popping up late at a daycare to pick up a child resulted in in more parents being late, as they felt excused for their behavior. This was quite an unexpected outcome of the experiment. However, even more interesting part is that removing the fine did not affect parents’ behaviors at all – they kept popping up late more frequently than before the experiment.

    It’s natural. Our behaviors are outcome of the constraints of the environment and our experience, knowledge and wisdom.

    We will affect behaviors by changing the constraints. The change is not mechanistic though. We can’t exactly predict what’s going to happen. At the same time the change affects our experience, knowledge and wisdom and thus irreversibly changes the bottom line.

    I can give you a simple example. When we decided to go transparent with salaries at Lunar Logic it was a huge cultural experiment. What I knew from the very beginning though was there was no coming back. Ultimately, we can make salaries “non-transparent” again. Would that change what people learned about everyone’s salary? No. Would that change that they do look at each other through the perspective of that knowledge?

    It might have affect the way they look at the company in a negative way, as suddenly some of the authority that they’d had was taken away. In other words, even from that perspective they’d have been better if such an experiment hadn’t been run at all than if it was tried and rolled back.

    I’m all for experimentation. I definitely do prefer safe to fail experiments. I am however aware that there are whole areas where such experiments are impossible most of the time, if not all of the time.

    The culture is one such area. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be experimenting with the culture. It’s just that we should be aware of the stakes. If you’re just flailing around with your culture hacks there will be casualties. Having experimentation mindset is a lousy excuse.

    I guess the part of my pet peeve with understanding the tools and the methods is exactly this. When we introduce a new constraint, and a method or a tool is a constraint, we invariably change the environment and thus influence the culture. Sometimes irreversibly.

    It get even trickier when the direct goal of the experiment is to change the culture. Without understanding what we’re doing it’s highly likely that such a culture hack will backfire. Each time I run an experiment on a culture I like to think that the change will be irreversible and then I ask myself once again: do I really want to run it?

    If not I simply don’t mess with the culture.