Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: organizational culture

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Culture Pockets

    Organizational culture is one of these areas that I pay a lot of attention to. Over years I started valuing the role of the culture increasingly more and more. The biggest difficulty though is that organizational culture is a challenging beast to control.

    Organizational Culture

    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

    If we look at how organizational culture is defined there are two things that are crucial. One thing is that is a culture is formed of behaviors of all people in an organization. The other is that it’s not only about behaviors but also about what drives these behaviors.

    When we look at it we realize that there’s no easy way to mandate a culture change. We can’t simply say: from now on we are a learning organization or that we will value collaboration starting on June the 1st.

    If we want to see a change of a culture we need to see change in behaviors. Bad news though is that change of behaviors can’t really be mandated either. I mean we can install a policeman who will make sure that everyone behaves according to the new policy we issued. What would happen when a policeman is gone? We can safely assume that over time more and more people would retreat back to the old status quo – behaviors they knew and were comfortable with. The change would be temporary and ephemeral.

    Identifying Culture

    If we want to approach a cultural change we first need to understand the existing culture. What is valued? What principles the organization lives by? How is it reflected in everyday behaviors? Without understanding the starting point changes would be rather random and doomed to fail.

    How to identify the culture then? Look at behaviors. Ultimately the culture is a sum of behaviors of people who are a part of the organization.

    There is a serious challenge that we’re facing on that front. Not everyone has equal influence over organizational culture. In fact, the higher in the hierarchy someone is the more influence they typically have.

    The mechanism is simple. Higher up in the hierarchy I have more positional power and my decisions affect more people. One specific type of decision I make, or at least strongly influence, is who gets promoted in my team. Given all my biases, I will likely promote people who are similar to me, share similar values, and behave in similar way. I perpetuate and strengthen the existing culture.

    That’s by the way the rationale behind an advice I frequently share: if you want to figure out what the organizational culture of a company is look at its CEO. The CEO typically has the most positional power and thus their influence over the company is the biggest one. The way they behave will be copied and mimicked across the board.

    Of course we need to pay attention to everyday behaviors and not to what is the official claim of the CEO. Very frequently there would be a gap between the two. That’s something I call authenticity gap. An organization claims one thing but everyday behaviors show another. For example they claim to care about customer satisfaction and then they bullshit their customers when it comes to share the project status.

    This alone says something about culture too (and not a good thing if you need to ask).

    Culture Change

    How do we influence the cultural change then? If we can influence the factors that drive behaviors, and thus the culture, resulting changes would influence the culture. It’s even better. When we’re changing organizational constraints we potentially influence change of behaviors across the board and not only in an individual case.

    We already established though that not everyone has equal influence on the culture. People at the top, in the long run, will have an upper hand. First, they control who gets promoted and as a consequence who has positional power. Second, that power is needed to change organizational constraints: introduce new rules, change the existing ones, and establish what acceptable and what’s not.

    A simple answer how to change organizational culture would be to get top management on board, and help them understand what it takes to influence the culture.

    Unfortunately, few have comfort of doing that.

    Does it mean that we are doomed? Does it mean that without enlisting top ranks any attempt to change organizational culture will fail? Not necessarily so.

    Culture Pockets

    I believe I learned about the concept of culture pockets from Dave Snowden in one of his presentations. The basic idea is that within a bigger, overarching culture we can develop and sustain a different culture.

    Another label that is used to describe this concept is a culture bubble.

    When we think about this frame, from the top of our heads we can come up with some examples. One would be multinational organizations that have offices all around the world. Because of geography and cultural differences each of the local offices will have at least slightly different organizational culture. You would expect to see a different vibe in an office in India, in Poland, and in USA, even if they are the parts of the same company. Even if that company has pretty uniform culture.

    There are examples of introducing culture pockets or culture bubbles when everyone works in the same building too.

    One such idea is Lean Startup. One obvious context of applying Lean Startup ideas are startups. Another, and quite a common one, is when big organizations decide to build their product according to Lean Startup principles.

    Such a team would operate very differently and very independently from the rest of the organization. Constraints would be different and so would be everyday behaviors. We’d have a culture pocket.

    Another similar example is Skunkworks. It’s an idea developed by Lockheed Martin and it boils down to a similar pattern. Lockheed Martin would occasionally run a project in Skunkworks – a very independent team that has a lot of freedom and autonomy. Clearly without all the typical constraints enforced by the company their culture is different than one seen in majority of the company. By the way, a project in this case means designing and building a whole new fighter aircraft or something of similar complexity.

    If we go by that analogy, every team can be a culture bubble. It is enough that the constraints within which that team operates are different from those that are standard for the whole organization. This type of culture pocket can go only as far as the team has positional power to redesign their constraints of course. The more positional power there is the bigger the difference of what is happening within and outside of a culture bubble.

    Creating a Culture Bubble

    Creating and maintaining a culture pocket is a balancing act. One thing is kicking off the change. That would typically mean someone defining different rules for a part of an organization. It can simply be a team of a few people.

    Normally any positional power would be an attribute of a manager. This means that such a change needs to involve that manager. They need to change rules, norms, and expected behaviors. Alternatively they need to let others decide about such stuff, i.e. give up on the power they’ve been assigned.

    There is another role for mangers in a setup too. They main responsibility is to sustain the culture bubble. When a culture pocket is established there’s effort needed to keep it going within broader, sometimes even unfriendly, culture of the whole organization.

    To give you an example, from a perspective of the whole organization it doesn’t matter at all how decisions are made in a team. What matters that there is no problem with indecisiveness and accountability. The way most organizations understand these concepts would mean that a manger has to be decisive and can be kept accountable. It may still be true even if decisions are made by the whole team using e.g. a decision making process.

    Fragility of Culture Pockets

    The biggest risk related to culture pockets is that they are fragile. Typically they base on the fact that some people, who were in power, distributed that power for a better good. It doesn’t mean, however, that when they are replaced with someone else a new person will keep a similar attitude.

    A safe thing in such a situation is to adjust to whatever is the overarching culture of the whole organization. It means that a culture bubble is gone as there’s no longer anyone who take cares of translating the two cultures back and forth.

    The message I have is twofold. On one hand if we want to see a fundamental and sustainable cultural change we need to get top ranks involved eventually. Without that we won’t address the risk of fragility of culture pockets. On the other hand, a simple fact that in a big organization we can’t simply change the culture of the whole company doesn’t mean that we have no options whatsoever.

    From my experience culture pockets, even if fragile and to some point ephemeral, are a perfect vehicle for self-realization of people inside. For people in leadership and management positions they are sometimes the only way to maintain internal integrity.

    Finally, sometimes it is the only option if we want to influence the cultural change.

  • On Feedback (Again)

    I’ve heard that question quite a few times after I shared my feedback with somebody: “What am I supposed to do with such feedback?”

    The question may imply that feedback e.g. wasn’t “actionable” or something. Anyway, I have an answer for that. It goes:

    “Whatever the hell you want.”

    Yup. Exactly that. In fact this is precisely what I’d love you to do.

    As the opposite to: getting defensive, explaining yourself, finding excuses, bringing other interpretations, and so on and so forth.

    Feedback is not an attack. You don’t need to defend yourself. It isn’t an interrogation either. You don’t need to explain yourself. And most of all it isn’t a goddamn appraisal. You don’t need to maximize the score.

    It is feedback. I’m sharing some observations and opinions that somehow relate to your work, actions, behaviors, attitude, etc.

    I don’t intend to change you. I want to provide you with more information so that your decisions about your further course of action are informed better. You can disagree with the part or the whole of the message you get. You can interpret it in a vastly different way. You can confront that with other feedback that is contrary to mine. That is all just perfect. You can ignore it altogether and I’m still fine with that.

    Remember? Whatever the hell you want.

    The reason is I know it is subjective. No matter how much I try to make it factual it is always about interpreting facts. And I don’t try to make it purely factual. In fact, the system in knowledge work is built of people and interactions between these people. How objective can “facts” about interpersonal relationships be? Is there even an objective truth there? Or is it rather a combination of interpretations that can be more or less aligned one with the other?

    So no, I’m not trying to convince you that my point is even valid. It’s how I perceive specific situation and how I feel. Oh, it isn’t factual, someone would say. Well, the fact is that I perceive and I feel so and so. Do you want to discuss with such a fact? Didn’t think so.

    I am well aware that my perceptions and my feelings aren’t universal truths. That’s why it is you who decide what to do with the feedback or whether to do anything at all.

    There is the other part of the story. I sometimes receive feedback and I’m like “Thank you. I’m not going to change that.” What I see as a reaction is that someone is either discouraged or even pissed off with my reaction.

    I mean, they did expect me to comply with what they shared with me. I don’t differentiate here feedback on work I do from feedback on my behaviors. It’s just, for whatever reasons, I decide that I don’t want to change that specific thing.

    That doesn’t make me any less grateful for feedback I got by the way.

    It’s just that now we turned the tables. Now it’s: Whatever the hell I want.

    If you want to make me compliant with whatever just make it explicit. At least we’ll have common understanding.

    Feedback’s role, the way I perceive it, is not compliance. It is providing information about one’s behaviors, actions and attitudes and their impact. It is, as its name suggests, about feeding one back with information, not about changing one or making them doing what somebody else want them to do.

    If you give me feedback with a clear intention to change me or even worse to make me do what you want you are likely to end up being disappointed.

    It will happen despite the fact that I treat that feedback as factual and fair. It is factual since fact is that you think and feel whatever you think and feel. It is fair for the very same reason.

    At the same time it is subjective. Objective feedback, as long as it touches interactions between people, is a mirage. Or an oxymoron. Stop pursuing objectivity. To make it clear: it doesn’t make such feedback any less valuable.

    Once we understand that it enables the whole new level of discussing feedback both ways.

    Ultimately it’s: “I share that with you. Do whatever the hell you want with this.”

    And: “Thank you for sharing. I will do whatever the hell I want with this, indeed.”

    Only then it truly is valuable feedback.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Kanban: The Culture Challenge

    My focus for past months drifted a bit away from the core of Kanban. I either focused on more enterprisey applications of Kanban in the context of portfolio management or on what’s blood of every company, which is organizational culture. Every year though I use Kanban Leadership Retreat as a perfect occasion to reset my focus a bit. It wasn’t different this year.

    Those of you familiar with the method please forgive some of the basics in the post.

    The classic definition of Kanban Method is as follows.

    Principles

    • Start with what you do now
    • Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
    • Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities and job titles
    • Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

    Practices

    • Visualize
    • Limit Work in Progress
    • Manage flow
    • Make policies explicit
    • Implement feedback loops
    • Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

    A side note: a super-common observation is that teams would understand and know the practices but would be almost completely ignorant of the principles. This is a pattern that leads to very shallow implementations that don’t yield sustainable improvements and typically stop at just better work management.

    Another perspective we may use to define Kanban is through its values. The approach was proposed by Mike Burrows. What Mike achieved was translating the original principles and practices to more generic values.

    The end result is a following list.

    Kanban Values

    • Understanding
    • Agreement
    • Respect
    • Leadership
    • Flow
    • Customer Focus
    • Transparency
    • Balance
    • Collaboration

    Since the values originated in the principles and practices there’s also an interesting exercise you can do to map one to the other.

    The important part of this perspective of looking at Kanban is that it describes what values should be embraced by an organization so that Kanban implementation will have deep and lasting impact. In other words if an organization doesn’t embrace for example transparency or respect I would expect resistance during the implementation, rather ephemeral improvements and very limited sustainability.

    Now, let me share yet another perspective of describing Kanban, which is Kanban agendas. Just to tease you there are three agendas: sustainability, service orientation and survivability. One nice thing is that the agendas nicely fit the values. Each of the agendas covers a few values.

    Sustainability

    • Transparency
    • Balance
    • Collaboration

    Service orientation

    • Customer focus
    • Flow
    • Leadership

    Survivability

    • Understanding
    • Agreement
    • Respect

    Now we have a frame for further discussion (and some of Kanban 101 in a pill too).

    Why I would bring this up, you may ask. One session that I attended at Kanban Leadership Retreat was about reintroducing an idea of maturity of Kanban implementations in the context of values. The workshop and the exercise we run there is a topic for another story. The important bit in this context is that Mike, who unsurprisingly run the session, decided to put Understanding, Agreement and Respect aside for the purpose of the exercise.

    We may look at it from at least a couple angles. We may say that Understanding, Agreement and Respect, since they all were derived from principles and not practices are much more difficult to assess than the rest.

    We may point that they are some sort of prerequisites for starting with the whole rest and thus we base on an assumption that these values are already in place.

    Both of these points of view are, in fact, valid. I see a big problem here though.

    First, this is a bit like saying that Understanding, Agreement and Respect are second-class citizens in this picture. The whole focus goes to the other six values. Now, let me remind one thing. The second-class values are derived from principles not practices. In other words it means petrifying the situation we have, where we discuss practices all the time and principles are relatively ignored.

    Second, Understanding, Agreement and Respect all belong to survivability agenda, which puts that very agenda at risk. What does it mean?

    If we get service orientation right this translates to doing things right and doing the right thing (at least as far as Kanban covers that part). If we get sustainability right it means that the evolutionary change is feasible. The problem is that without survivability it simply won’t last. We’ll see a pattern that is pretty common across Agile and Lean adoptions. Promising results and early success that is followed by systematic reversal of the change.

    Third, there’s one of my recent pet peeves, which is organizational culture. Obviously the culture relates to all the values by definition. However, Understanding, Agreement and Respect summarize the most common missing bits of culture. Also, these bits are least related to specific solutions we have in our toolboxes which means it is much more difficult to influence the change in these areas than it is in the rest.

    Finally, the assumption that we have Understanding, Agreement and Respect in place before we start with Kanban is simply not true in my experience. We wish it was, but that’s not what I see. Sorry. It is a common case with pretty much any method that reaches a specific level of maturity by the way.

    It all boils down to the challenge I teased in the title of the post. The challenge is to think about methods that aim to change or improve how we work from a perspective of organizational culture. A starting point would be answering a few questions.

    • Do we understand the existing culture of an organization?
    • Is the existing organizational culture well-suited to support the change we want to introduce?
    • Which elements (behaviors, values, beliefs) of the culture are missing?
    • How can we influence the culture so that it evolves toward the expected state?

    Before we can answer these questions in a meaningful way introducing a major change is simply gambling. And the odds are against us. Bad news is that in majority of cases the answer for the very first question would be negative and the further we get the sadder the answers would be.

    A good thing is that, at least as long as it comes to Kanban, we advance our thinking toward better understanding of what it takes to make the change survive. It should help to shift the perception of Kanban from a simple, light-weight tool that can help you with organizing work in one’s team toward deep and sophisticated model that requires understanding of quite a lot of related concepts.

    A word of warning: don’t expect the end results of the latter if you treat Kanban as a former.

  • 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.

  • Gemba Walk Is Not Enough

    I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Gemba walk. On one hand I just love the idea to go and see. In fact, whenever I have an issue to solve or a question to ask I prefer to move my butt and go meet someone instead of writing an email, chatting on IM or calling. I just use any pretext I have to meet people face to face.

    On the other hand, the idea of the Gemba walk, in its roots, goes way beyond simply solving issues. Just think about all those stories where leaders had their epiphanies when they randomly walked through a factory floor. Gemba walk isn’t just supposed to be an issue solving tool. Its main function is issue discovery, whatever an issue might mean.

    And this is where the hate part of my love-hate relationship starts. My previous professional life was leading 150 people. It meant that most of the time I was alienated. In a situation like that, you just don’t go into a team’s room as if nothing happened as almost certainly the observer effect kicks in and you experience something more like a play than reality.

    Not to mention that if you happen to be an introvert the whole activity can be insanely difficult for you.

    Obviously, it may be a very different experience if the organizational culture of a company is open and people generally trust each other. One, it isn’t that painful. Two, there is less acting and more honest and open discussions.

    It is still only halfway through though. As long as someone is willing to become vulnerable and open themselves you will learn something new. There is, however, the whole black mass of issues no one is really aware of so chances that you learn about them during a discussion are non-existent.

    In a plant you might spot something just by watching how stuff is arranged on a factory floor. In software development you don’t get even that. And, by the way, even if you brought your Gemba to the level of looking at things, e.g. code review, you still miss the point.

    No matter what the problem is, it’s always a people problem.

    ~Gerald M. Weinberg

    Following this advice, you shouldn’t look at things; you should look at people, their characters, behaviors and interactions. That’s where Gemba walk fails.

    You can’t make meaningful observations in the meantime, while you walk around and ask about everyone’s wellbeing spending just a while here before going there and then coming back to your own stuff. You can’t make meaningful observations of team dynamics during a chat with everyone.

    You have to be there. You have to breath the same air, share the same stories and see the same everyday routine. You have to become familiar and friendly enough that they stop playing. Or be there long enough so they get tired playing and become real.

    It doesn’t happen in fifteen minutes. It takes days. Weeks maybe. On the other hand you may expect a few low hanging fruits, which you spot pretty quickly, e.g. the way people address themselves in a discussion. Either way it doesn’t happen when Mr. Leader enters a room for his whatever-he-calls-it thing. It happens when a leader becomes almost invisible, sitting there in a corner, minding their own business and using those occasional bursts of action to learn something about their team.

    And this is why Gemba walk isn’t enough. It’s just scratching the surface hoping for luck.