Tag: psychology

Democracy in America

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The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high- minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

– Alexis de Tocqueville

Death

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“Someone who has given up the idea of living life will surely never be able to embrace death.”

– Guy Dubord, Society of the Spectacle

Sublime Simplicity

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O sancta simplicitiatas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!–how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety–in order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granitelike foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but–as its refinement! – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

What you need: Complexity Mindset

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Organizations that are too rigid cannot adapt to changing economic conditions, demand, prices, interests, shocks, and crises. Problematically, an enterprise can grow quite large while preserving its rigidity in the medium-run, delaying the need to adapt until the industry as a whole has a crisis (airlines, automobiles, etc).

Thus, my first book focused heavily on the need to build and cultivate tension within an organization to ensure that continuous experimentation preserves adaptive complexity.

One example that humanity has struggled to grasp, is the adaptive complexity of a system that relies on individuals who need to be a mix of selfishness and altruism. Standard economics is largely built on the axiom of rational self-interest, that individuals have static preferences and will optimize marginal returns on margin investment. For instance, when I have $10 to spend, I will maximize the utility or value of my spending, based on information, rational self-interest, and prices.

Behavioral Economics, however, has shown us that the choices we make are often quasi-rational at best. Any parent who has gone grocery shopping with a young child knows that gut-feel, intuition, snap decisions, and a desire to get the complex decisions of a stressful shopping trip over with, leads to less-than-perfect spending decisions. Anecdotes aside, research has proven a growing list of fallacies and biases that are consistent across gender, race, culture, and intelligence–from anchoring our conclusions based on whatever information we receive first, to an optimism bias that our success is more likely than the average success rate.

As Hoff and Stiglitz review, there is strong evidence for treating individual actors within a system as encultured actors, partly depending on social context and expectations to determine the best decision.

We can each fit the standard model of classic economics during “slow-thinking”. Under observation, we act rationally self-interested as long as we have perfect information and sufficient time for deliberation. The rest of the time, we are swept up in our action-packed schedules, engaged in thousands of quasi-rational decisions. We copy what has been successful for others, act agreeable when the impact of a decision is unclear, and rely on our past experiences to maintain the habits that have worked so far. This “fast-thinking” is not static, however. The research is very clear that we can be manipulated in very subtle ways, toward selfishness, mistrust, polarity, and dishonesty. Likewise, with enough changes to social context, education, and time, the weak can be strong, the forgotten can be outspoken, the rigid can grow again.

So, who would you like to be?

While I will present the science behind complexity thinking in lean-agile organization development in future posts, the real question that I am left with is, “Who would I like to be; who should I hope to become?” Naturally, there is no perfect answer to this. Personal identity is a question of strategy, in its own way; you can only choose so many vocations, specialties, social contexts, and roles. To be enormously successful in one arena is a trade-off against other opportunities.

One thing, however, is entirely clear. To the extent that our quasi-rational behavior allows us to rely on several “identities” based on mental schema, role models, behavioral narrative, and social norms, isolation within any one institution and ideology is a dangerous prison. We are only free to determine our own path to the extent we know those paths exist. We can only adopt the best mental schema for an unknown decision by having as many modes of thinking as possible at our disposal. We can only carve out the best self-identity as the exposure to new options, cultures, and role models permit.

Frankly, if we are all very honest, we find it easiest – because is simple, familiar, and less scary – to remain stuck in the simplistic modes of thinking we developed as children. Good-baby/Bad-baby, Good-mommy/Bad-mommy, Good-worker/Bad-worker… and yet, when we view the world as a complex adaptive system, it is true of humanity that the health of the forest is so much more complex than can be observed tree by tree. Sometimes we need mother-soldiers, brother-florists, teacher-friends and so on. So my call to action is not to choose a single destiny and blindly pursue it; my imperative to you is see all the paths, invent a hundred identities, meet every kind of person, think through the lens of your worst enemies. Only by expanding your vocabulary, experience, and exposure to the full complexity of the world can you hope to say, in the end, “I chose who I have become.”

Cited:

Hoff K, Stiglitz J. “Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol: 126 pp: 25-57

 

Millennial Relativism vs Straight-Up Haters

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I’m a philosopher. Feel free to stop reading.

As a Millennial philosopher, I find myself rejected for the words I use – almost anywhere I go. This is not a lack of professionalism or knowledge. I have grown an incredibly strong professional filter and dampener, and the ability to show immense respect.  My words are precisely selected as I consult to Boomers who may never understand the depth or breadth my soul has – and will – reach.

And I, despite genius, despite my creative demon, find another scenario all-to-often.  My intricate ideas, in a moment of enthusiasm, come out in a moment of conversation with a complete hater.  They take a whiz on my cheerios, frankly.  But the joke is on them.  I’m invincible to being misunderstood in the complexity of my ideas, I practically opted in!

To be great, is to be misunderstood.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

So really, I am completely at peace with the straight-up haters; and you should be too.

Because, cultural, there is a big difference between my philosophical relativisim and whatever it is that makes people commit to one view and reject every word that fails to serve their affirmation bias.

I probably lost another 3% of readers at “affirmation bias” – have a good day though, really.

Blessed are the shallow, for the depths they’ll never find.

Now I don’t mean a blanket moral approval of everything I see, especially misconduct that is counter to established social contracts (and don’t challenge needed half-truths). I’m not talking about The Purge in real life, gone wild.

I’m talking about the kind of cultural relativism that has to take place when someone from one generation and industry and function and corporate culture meets someone from a vastly different generation and industry and function and corporate culture. I’m talking about the conversations a Boomer manufacturing operations manager has with a Millennial lean-agile mobile architect.

It is so much easier to give up, and I admit that I’m not always sure, when I’m already a disruptive influence, what to do in that grey area between psychological safety and a meaningful challenge. That’s the nature of telling people 30 years older than me how they should change the way they do their job in order to stay relevant in the information age.

The haters, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed to all relativism.

It really isn’t about morality or politics if you really watch them (and I, as a philosopher, dutifully watch them no matter what ludicrous things they dish out) – if you really watch them, there is no “stance” they are taking. No ability to excuse them for what they believe in with total nobility.

The hater engages you in deconstructionism by default. They undermine your understanding of your own words, they play stump-the-chump, they make sure – however more intelligent, educated, or experienced on a topic – that they can make you feel like shit.

These haters don’t really believe in something and offend your beliefs because the two belief systems disagree. These are the people who start with saying they don’t share your beliefs, then tell you that you’re actually terrible at your beliefs, or education, or profession.

These haters are the people who will mess with you just to see if they can, who are incapable of understanding anyone above their level. You could feel a great deal of pity for them, in fact. They are pathetic, constantly happy people. But don’t do that. Hilariously enough, if you stick around a few weeks, with the strength to show them patience they’ll never accomplish – they’ll start spouting off your words! and not even now they ought thank you. What sad state of continuous dependency to be in. But – As Nietzsche said, “There’s enough pity in the world to choke anyone that feels it all.” Shake it off. Cuz haters gonna hate. They’re absolutely jealous – and terrified – of us.

Frankly, my mother was right.

You have to just ignore them.

On the other hand, empathy, dialogue, and an open mind will get you a long way – despite the culture shock – when you’re grappling ideas with people who care deeply about their craft and simply don’t understand the nuances of your craft. If you are like me, whether it’s just a postmodern millennial trait, or part of the tech industry in the digital age, you’ll see this quite a bit for the next few decade. Retirement age is going up, and most people aren’t keeping up.

They built their careers – their lives – around being taken seriously about just one thing. For them, a challenge to that one thing will be a disaster. They feel terrified they’ll never be taken seriously again.

Unfortunately, they’re right.

You don’t need to carry them as a free rider, but if you’re like me you probably weren’t sticking around long enough to let them do it anyway. Most companies, from my experience, aren’t changing much of anything – certainly not enough to hurt those out of touch Boomers, but – sadly – definitely not enough to make work meaningful for Millennials like us, who just want to leave the world better than it the way it is getting handed to us.

So you and I, as the vibrant, multifaceted, postmodern, global and digital millennial innovators – we must give them our care and patience, and truly listen. They may benefit while we gain nothing in the short term (at times), but we gain enormous insight in the process of we will do differently with the future.

Do Project Tasks go in a Scrum Product Backlog?

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I get this question frequently when training agile and scrum teams:

Do Project Tasks Belong in a Scrum Product Backlog?

YES.

Since answers to this question I have seen in chatrooms are typically insufficiently argued as part of a crazed political debate full of comments taken out of context, this very pragmatic question deserves a bigger picture answer – because the need to ask the question is a symptom of a stagnating transformation.

A successful shift from stage-gate or waterfall development processes to agile, Scrum, or Kanban requires a fundamental change organization-wide: from maximizing ROI and shareholder value to maximizing Economic Value Creation and sustainable competitive advantage. If this shift does not occur, the improvements gained from agile practices will inevitably stagnate.

Jez Humble refers to this state as Water-Scrum-Fall, that unfortunate state where most agile and DevOps initiatives plateau.

Most often when I talk to development teams, Product Owners, and ScrumMasters, this is often blamed on a lack of executive buy-in.

I completely disagree.  

I have also blamed a manager or two for the imperfections in the agility of a company, so I can relate to this view. To show you why you might not even want executive sponsorship, let’s revisit the view of a corporation as a minimum viable superorganism.

Complex Adaptive Systems Leadership

A corporation is not a machine with various parts to replace or maintain in isolation, it is a superorganism. It is a biological phenomenon that is not sufficiently explained by social contract theory or through monetary theories of motivation. Judgments about this reality are very easily clouded. Unfortunately, once measurement and monetary incentives change the natural behavior of the superorganism, it is difficult to change back – making it easy to fallaciously claim this as proof of their effectiveness.

Quantum physicists have suggested that undisturbed systems in the universe naturally stay in multiple states simultaneously, unless someone intervenes with a measurement device. Then all states collapse, except the one being measured. Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost.  – H. T. Johnson, “Lean Dilemma”

So when you hear “We need more buy-in from management” this is absolutely incorrect.  It is even counter-productive!  Adaptations by a complex system, that disruptive creativity and innovation agile champions desire, can only occur through organic, emergent leadership – a tribal, heretical rebellion. Adaption to a new stimulus may have a focal point, a “leader” who organically builds up energy in a new direction – but this leadership is an emergent property the complex system. In contrast, formal leadership (“management”) is a crystallization of a complex system, an attempt to reinforce a desired “normal state” – a force that exists counter to emergent leadership and adaptation. By default, formal leaders at all levels of an organism are incented (through power, money, and Agency Dilemma) to maintain homeostasis – i.e. the status quo. Even if a formal leader becomes the emergent leader of adaptation, this will be odds with her formal leadership. Unless she is willing to risk the loss of formal leadership, she will dissolve her capacity for emergent leadership and resume promotion of homeostasis – no matter how much it dampens creativity, innovation, and sustainable competitive advantage.

Evolution of a superorganism through disruption – whether a lean or digital or agile “transformation” – cannot occur if any one piece of the system is optimized in isolation from the whole because any superorganism, as a complex adaptive system, will exert tremendous energy to maintain homeostasis. The larger the superorganism, the more likely that optimization of one function or team will result in a net loss of desired adaptation (whether the desirable “adaptation” is called innovation, process improvement, or “growth”).

So, when a formal leader blesses a piloting of lean and agile practices by a completely isolated team, this is the superorganism equivalent of a mother’s amniotic sac – the team can establish itself as a unique complex adaptive system while in isolation, fed by the resources of the maternal superorganism but shielded from the homeostatic processes of the parent system. The moment this new team is re-integrated into the larger system, continued adaptation is unlikely. The company attempts to spread the innovation and creativity culture they achieved but instead can only formalize a shift in a subset of practices.  These practice, outside the context of psychological safety, a well-formed collaborative team, flop. No single activity of the pilot team will have the same value implemented outside the context of the pilot team’s “bubble” that safeguarded it against the homeostatic forces of the superorganism!

But wait – what about that “net loss” in innovation, creativity, and efficiency I claimed?

In practice, a company that adopts an agile process (let’s say Scrum) as a change in behaviors isolated to the teams developing software causes the rest of the system to expend energy maintaining homeostasis, and even more energy wasted by agents accommodating these homeostatic forces so that the development teams can preserve their no-longer organic place in the system.

I think you know exactly what that looks like:

  1. Updating documentation processes without seeing them as “artifacts” that emerge from an adaptive process rather than social contracts that require formal sign-off.
  2. Replacing one tool with another, causing a new set of employee workarounds to occur.
  3. Increasing frequency of software releases without changing the size of organization commitments.
  4. New meeting names that don’t change communication patterns or the homeostatic, status quo, “normal” flow of information.
  5. Continuous backlog decomposition as a manual transfer of a large-batch investment into small-batch development items.
  6. Oops! Another manual transfer at the end –  of small batch engineering back into large-batch approval processes.
  7. Changing job titles without addressing diffusion of responsibility and the lack of psychological safety inherent in the culture of the system.
  8. More overhead and forced “transparency” than if nothing had changed, through extra meetings, reports, metrics, and analysis, due to the natural distrust between formal leadership and emergent leadership, and the lack of trust in information flow between the homeostatic processes and the aberrant nomenclature of the development teams.

In the middle of all this, a large organization grabs their Project Managers and their Business Analysts, or anyone cheap who is around and doesn’t have the “status” a Product Manager, Director, or VP, and switches around their responsibilities to call them “Product Owners” and “Scrum Masters”.

What a debacle.

The newly-minted Product Owner receives Project Plans full of important tasks and milestones and big nasty Use Case document and an even bigger, unapproachable set of Technical Specifications – and is told to manage what the team delivers with User Stories.

Now in the midst of all this, should the Product Owner include Project Tasks in the Product Backlog?  Or to get down to brass tacks, could a task ever be a Product Backlog Items?

Absolutely!

But not all of them.

Some “Technical” Tasks (specifically not User Stories) are still Product Backlog Items

Technical tasks that create demonstrable economic value that the organization can capture, a known cost of delay, but are completely invisible to the user STILL NEED TO BE PRIORITIZED relative to other potential Product Backlog Items.

This, of course, is why the question of if these belong in the backlog is sign that a systemic shift in thinking has not occurred. If you are optimizing for project ROI, then these tasks just don’t have the marketable, monetizable potential of each Use Case. If you have a systems view of optimizing the flow of economic value creation, these tasks are judged relative to any other potential investment. Economic investment is continuous, the economic value created can be judged continuously, delivery and value capture is continuous, and you can prioritize based Weighted Shortest Job First or another collaborative decision making process about the of Cost of Delay.

“Artifact” Tasks are an Agile Anti-Pattern

There is, however, another kind of project task in Water-Scrum-Fall that SHOULD NOT be in any development team’s backlog: artifact tasks. These are things like “Complete wireframe for new home page” and “Document Social Integration for PokemonGo”. No matter how you small-batch these tasks, these are not Product Backlog Items. These are not even artifacts. Artifacts are the tangible leftovers of the creativity and innovation of a strong agile software team. A documentation, design, or planning task is antithetical to economic value flow. It is a trap. A box you put your money in and bury. It takes all the value-add, throws it in a pile, and lets it sit there, unused, as it become gradually less valuable.

This mini-waterfall process – this outrageous, lean-agile anti-pattern – surfaces in three ways, all of which I whole-heartedly reject and will actively undermine the capacity of others to pursue it in hopes that my heretical tribal rebelliousness will gain emergent leadership support:

  1. Business Kanban and Program Increment Planning tasks that lock up all creativity and innovation prior to the development team passively receiving instructions (as you see in shoddy implementations of the Scaled Agile Framework)? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!
  2. Tasks for non-developer “members” of the development teams completed as Sprint Backlog Items separate from the User Stories, thereby formally dividing cross-functional collaboration and preserving us-them Guilds (whether in dual-track Scrum or within even the shortest sprint)? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!
  3. Sub-tasks that formally divide up User Stories into function-specific tasks to complete? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!

These are all agile anti-patterns that prioritize tools, social contracts, and “process” over collaboration, communication, relationships, and creativity. You will never disrupt your organization, and your organization will never disrupt your industry, sorry.

“Milestone” Tasks are a Continuous Delivery Anti-Pattern

Since we started this asking if the BA / PM as PO ought to put Project Plan tasks into the Scrum Product Backlog, I’d hate to leave out “milestones”. Now you may say, “Andrew, that’s ridiculous, no one would treat a dependency as Product Backlog Item!” Indeed, ridiculous. But that’s the ultimate sign of your Continuous Delivery anti-pattern. Truly optimizing the flow of economic value creation across the entire complex adaptive system would completely remove “milestones” and “dependencies”. If you can’t get rid of Project Plans completely, and continuously deliver and validate Finished Story Benefits for ALL work that the organization takes from identified pain to economic value capture, whatever you started pursuing in your agile, or digital, or lean, or devops transformation, you’ve plateaued as a company.

And this is the really the paradox that made the lengthy description of complex adaptive systems leadership necessary. This hurdle is NOT something that “Needs executive buy-in.” This is something that is accomplished through outright insurgency, tribal heresy, and fait accompli rebellion.

That’s because Continuous Delivery takes more than agile ceremonies and user stories. It takes developers who are proud of knowing business context. It takes refactoring that no one approved. It takes a team move to Git from Subversion without telling anyone. It takes a handful of people setting up a Continuous Integration server no matter how often the nay-sayers tell them it’s useless. Continuous Delivery is a change in engineering practices and development culture that tend to happen without formal leaders needing to approve anything.

It just takes the right people having enough pride in being BETTER that they draw a line in the sand and defiantly announce “THIS IS OUR CRAFT!”

A Heartfelt Epilogue: Real Creativity, Innovation, and Disruption is MESSY

Now listen, human-to-human, if all you know about “agile” comes from that one book you read, YouTube, or a two-day certification, I won’t be surprised you’re thinking, “Wait, Andrew, that’s nothing like agile! How do I report you! How do I get you stripped of all your certifications?” That’s great. That reaction means I hit a nerve. Fantastic! Contact me and let’s talk about taking agility to the next level.

Truth is, I don’t look to my four certifications, five training course, three conference, my blog, OR EVEN my five years of attending, speaking at, and hosting MeetUp’s on agile as the proof of my legitimacy on these topics. I measure my expertise in the number of experiments, including the major failures I have been through with my development teams. The reason is simple: complex adaptive system leadership is an emergent property that require deep entanglement and shared experiences in the trenches. And, as it turns out, I’ve been in the thick of every kind of good or bad lean or agile possibility, trained people in that context, debated ferociously about it in multiple companies, and I have compromised my values or experimented with teams to directly challenge every single principle your little YouTube summary glossed over.

If at this point you think some teacher let me down and it’s a real shame, I’ll be happy to give you a recommended reading list and YouTube list and introduce you personally to other thought leaders that dive, like I just did, into the MUD of how you actually achieve: creative innovation, strategic and operational agility, and lean, continuous delivery of disruptive economic value.

Either way, reach out so real dialogue can get started.

You do NOT want Transparency

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Disruption and Transparency

As a custom app dev consultant I constantly get inserted into the space between organization silos – between marketing and accounting, between sales and operations, between IT and product management.  The agency life makes you a fly on the wall in meetings where groups who avoid each other are forced to work together directly for the first time. Maybe it is the nature of disruption, whether it is a lean, agile, or digital “transformation” – but it creates immense hoopla about and demands for “transparency”.

Transparency is promised all around, named as a priority in meetings, and complained about when people feel like they’re out of the loop. As the old bard said, “Ay, there lies the rub.”

Transparency is not what anyone wants.

Requesting transparency, instead, represents the desire for visibility and proper prioritization of important information as it flows to the people who will be impacted by it.  If someone doesn’t have an understanding of what information they want prioritized, “transparency” is really just an expression of distrust.

Transparency is saying “I don’t know what information is important, I don’t trust you to prioritize it for me, so give me access to all of it.”

Now don’t get me wrong, this post is not about how to allow or restrict access to data. Instead, if you are part of a disruption-in-progress, keep an eye out for communication anti-patterns.  When a complex system is creating new cultural repertoire, adapting to disruption, new information flows must be created.  New decision patterns emerge.  Some people like the change and others are oblivious to it until the day it hurts them because they personally failed to adapt. 

Examples of Communication Anti-Patterns:

  • Email notifications that are really just internal company spam.
  • Managers who request to be added to meeting invites “just in case” they want to pop in.
  • Sending someone a raw (and sort of meaningless) export of data in spreadsheet form as an “answer” to their question.
  • Stakeholders who demand access to the agile tool (JIRA, Rally, Trello) but never look at it.
  • You get a casual question about status and answer by forwarding several email chains.
  • Making up new KPIs and performance metrics that don’t matter.
  • Virtually every version of reports on “utilization” that I’ve seen.
  • Anonymous complaints to executive leadership about secrecy around financial status.
  • Weekly meetings that review numbers that only change quarterly.

I’m sure you have another hundred examples, just like I do.

So whether you adopting a new tool, some kind of “enablement” software, in your aspirations for lean scalability, changing your agile or DevOps processes to encourage innovation, or embracing digital transformation as a path to new business models and potential revenue: be human.  When nonsensical requests for transparency happen, let it inspire a dialogue (or several) about what information is most important to each person and the best way to present it.  If you didn’t see the future and have all those conversations up-front, guess what?  No one does. Start driving human dialogue as soon as you notice there is a communication anti-pattern.

Visualize Your Work – and Show it off!

And, if these aren’t problems you’re having right now, you should still think about the best ways to visualize your work in progress. You will benefit psychologically, someday you’ll be able to answer new but important questions to a manager or colleague more appropriately, and you’ll discover what you can teach to other who are earlier in their professional journey.

How the Sausage is Made

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Conventional wisdom: “No one cares how the sausage is made.”  I’m sure you’ve heard this before as well. Maybe it gets followed up with more assumptions: “The consumer cares about the product.  They want the solution.” However, that’s not really true either. They care about their pain. The solution is irrelevant unless the pain is relieved. If you’re really great, you replace pain with pleasure, and build a lasting relationship that your customers are excited to tell others about.

The Sausage

So let’s talk about this proverbial sausage.  When you are hungry at a game and a sausage wrap stand is the only food or you’ll miss the entire game?  No. You probably don’t care about how the sausage gets made. You care about your hunger. You care about the solution. You care about the price. 

Luckily, we don’t live in the local monopoly conditions or restricted logistics of that example.  There are true artists of the craft, solving new pains everyday.

Have you seen how a master chef makes tantalizingly delicious and unique sausage from scratch?  If you love sausage, you do care how it’s made.  You would buy recipe books, watch reality shows, do factory tours, and attend sausage festivals. There is a huge difference between being an artist with a following versus a monolith with a secret. Which company are you building?  Naturally, I didn’t write this post to discuss sausage (though after talking about it so much I’d really love to fry up a batch now).  This is really about sharing your product backstory and software delivery methods. 

Think about a great chef. The kind that writes recipe books, heads up gourmet restaurant chains, blogs about food, hosts a show, and even gets invited as a guest to cook on other people’s shows.

Imagine Martha Stuart or Emeril Legasse teaching their audience about homemade sausage from scratch.  They smile and cook with their pre-measured bowls of colorful ingredients, hand-grinding the sausage.  The sight and sound of the fire, and sizzle of butter in the pan make you certain you’d want to eat not just any sausage – that sausage.  The great chefs care how the sausage was made whether you care or not. They make the best sausage they can and teach others to try their methods even if most people will never bother to make it the same way. 

So, even though what we are really discussing here is either 1) ”no one cares why your product was made” or 2) ”no one care how your software is developed” – I think that’s drastically incorrect. More importantly, when someone says “no one cares how the sausage is made” to me, I know it’s a symptom of something terrible in the prestige economy of the superorganism that could someday bring it to its knees, never to rise again. 

Now we can qualify that old saying…

“No one cares how a faceless factory makes boring sausage.”

Don’t let your factory remain faceless. No matter how boring the boots-the-ground element of your product delivery may seem, those are people who are representing you.  You can either take the Ice Road Truckers and brewery tour approach to your product delivery or you can hide it away. Even the most faceless factories have tour guides. They have a script, sure. This is a marketing opportunity for your customers who are most likely to give a referral. If they show up to see how the sausage is made, give them a taste of the experiments that you aren’t mass-publicizing yet. This let’s you find your early adopters.  That’s a special relationship that you should encourage, invest in, and keep personally engaged.

Go take a tour of a big beer factory and a small craft brewery, compare the two and imagine what a “brewery tour” of your software company would look like.  The big beer companies have a loyal fan base and brewery tours. The ingredients are well-known.  You can even try it at home.  Operational effectiveness, consistency and quality, and reliability are the big beer maker’s keys to success – not proprietary ingredients.

Don’t be afraid to demo upcoming features before they are finished.  Your opportunity to learn and from customer interviews during an alpha release cannot be understated – give them a tour before you make them work for you.  Don’t just make a website, make a fan page too.  Show people you care about what you build as much as they do. Make the digital delivery part of the human dialogue.  As it turns out, you can’t make people get interested in you by yelling “I’m interesting!”  Telling people your product is the best (today) doesn’t say much at all.  Showing them that real people are making sure the product will continue to get better, teaching them what you wish you knew 2 or 5 years ago about the pain you solved and how they can solve it too – then they might be interested. 

“No one cares what the ingredients in the sausage are if they can’t see and hear the artist who uses them, the special process for preparing and cooking it, and insights in why decisions were made.”

The individual lines of code you write aren’t proprietary. Maybe one or two shouldn’t be public knowledge for security reasons.  The rest are meaningless without the rest of the code base and all the people that create viable product-market fit.  Your accounting KPIs, eCommerce analytics, or SDLC aren’t that special on their own either. Your templates are common knowledge to anyone with experience. 

Your people – coming together to do something bigger than themselves -THAT’S special, and while you can lose that no one can steal that. I suspect there are some companies that would never approve a marketer posting a photo of coding-in-progress on Instagram for fear contents of the screen is proprietary. Yet, any developer would tell you that turning frameworks into a worthwhile platform people can reuse is incredibly challenging. No, nobody cares what your product planning meetings or your Scrum process is, unless the people who make it special are front-and-center.  You can make an official statement – like so many companies – that your people are your greatest asset; but when you hide your people and how they work from the public eye, the message is clear, not only to your people but to your customers as well: you don’t take any pride in the sausage-makers, so the sausage probably isn’t that special. 

This is the difference between posting on Twitter “My apple pie is made with 20 apples” versus a video explaining which apples to use and why, the process you use when you pick them out at the store, why you bought them where you did, etc. Teaching the generations coming up behind you makes you matter, not protecting a secret that isn’t even a secret worth stealing. 

“People don’t care how the sausage is made unless they trust you share their love of great sausage.”

The difference between having consumers and having an audience is sharing their pains, pleasures, fears, and passions. Don’t sell to people, mentor them. Don’t market to people, teach them. Is it possible that some people want to know how you make gumbo but not how the andouille sausage was made?  Absolutely.  That’s the line between retention and referral – if you say secret to great gumbo is making the sausage yourself, the real advocates who trust you as an artist and an expert will pay to learn your sausage-making methods.  The opposite is true too.  If you don’t share the passion or demonstrate your expertise, no one is going to listen.  They can spot you as a fake from a mile away.  They know sausage isn’t a priority for you and nothing you say about making sausage is worth sharing with their friends. 

“No one cares how you make the sausage if YOU don’t care how you make the sausage.”

This is probably the most on-point.  Teams who think no one cares how the software is made also don’t have much pride or faith that their process is worthwhile. Sometime the biggest challenge is just showing the engineers how great they are. As the leader, you have to be like a head chef: It’s not just that you love and take pride in the craft, it’s your time-in-the-fire and belief in the process itself that give people the confidence to follow you.  Sure, your customers may not want to sit and watch code being developed for hours on end, but throwing a montage, hosting meetups, YouTubing behind-the-scenes footage, and some exciting reality show commentary is something people love and look for as part of the complete package. That type of messaging let’s people know you care about the work it takes to solve their pain. By giving some visibility into how much diligence, care, and work is put into the next release, your customers can feel they were part of the experience and have a better appreciation why updates and new features can take awhile to release.

If you want the inspiration I had when I wrote this, go read these books:

Rework

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

Photo via The Digital Marketing Collaboration

5 Reasons I Would Fire You

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Originally posted April 2016. 

Disclaimer: I currently work solo on this blog and could only fire myself – so this isn’t veiled threat.  I have done my best to mentor individuals and lead teams aways from these dysfunctions; and disrupt processes that perpetuate them.  These are also part of my personal introspection process.  This is not an accusation of anyone  in particular.  Instead, these are traits we can all continuously work to improve.  On the other hand – “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”  

The Top 5 Reasons I Would Fire You

Tech professionals on teams trying to innovate:  Speaking on behalf of managers, your peers, and individual contributors everywhere, these are the top five reasons you aren’t just a poor performer, you’re bringing down the people around you as well.

Reason #1 – You Default to One-Way Communication

Collaborative problem solving cannot happen without meaningful and timely feedback.  There is a time for group chat and a time for well-argued prose (email).  To avoid death-by-chat and long CYA email chains, you need to set clear expectations about when you need to focus and when you can discuss issues – and respect that prerogative in others. 

Whining about documentation, instructions, or a process as document brings you no closer to a better workplace experience for yourself, improved team health, or a product you can feel a lasting pride, prestige, or sense of legacy about.  Bring a solution to the table, own your responsibility for following up, and escalate to a scheduled meeting if needed.  Folding your arms and leaving work unfinished is childish.  You know you can do better – do it.

Mantra – There are no documentation problems, only communication problems.

Reason #2 – You Repeat the Same Words When I Say I Don’t Understand 

Speaking of childish, self-advocacy is an important milestone.  It requires enough vocabulary, understanding of abstract concepts, and recognition of similarities and differences to allow a child to not only imagine a future state that is desirable, but also solve the most likely path to attain it, and make a rational statement to an adult who can permit, empower, or provide.  My three-year-old daughter, forgivably, needs an enormous amount of assistance, and patience, when she attempt this.  As an adult, you should not.

As a leader, I will do my best to bridge the gap between your words and my words.  I will cue you when I am unable to build that bridge, repeat back to you what I understood you to say, and ask you to demonstrate or show me where and what you mean so that I have the context I need for a deliberate and logical decision.  I will do all of this without patronizing you, even when it is mentally exhausting for me.

Not everyone has learned to lead this way, and I admit I can be imperfect at it as well, so you absolutely need to learn to self-advocate.

That said, I cannot heroically be an adult on your behalf.  The real dysfunction that brings down team performance through your own sub-par performance is the continued repetition of the same words when I (or others) explicitly ask you to re-word the request, argument, or question.  You are obstinately anti-try-something-else.  You refuse to paraphrase, assist my incorrect understanding, or demonstrate the meaning of your words.  It is only through my strong personality and insistence that I convince you to show me exactly what the problem is so that I solve it rather than answering a question that sounds like utter nonsense out of context.  Unfortunately, even that is not always effective.  I can carry my pre-school daughter to the cabinet and let her pick the exact afternoon snack she wants.  I cannot “carry” you as an engineer into a realm of creative solutions where emerging technology and emerging market segments meet.

Mantra – Communication is the responsibility of the communicator.

Reason #3 – You Feel No Pride of Ownership Over Your Work

Having coached, worked with, or heard the complaints of hundreds of tech-focused professionals in various, I have found this can often be more a symptom of the dysfunction of an organization than the root cause of poor performance.  The tech industry today is too mentally demanding and excitingly disruptive to attract genuinely lazy people, looking for a free ride.  So when you start giving into distraction, procrastination, or laziness, my leadership spidey-sense goes off.  I will tell you the secret to motivating innovation-based technical teams – empower them to know the impact a line of code will have on an end user. 

Karl Marx’ philosophy describes this exact phenomenon in its examination of the individual worker’s separation and alienation from the product.  Superficially, the question seems quite simple:  Which is more rewarding, a carpenter who makes custom-installed wooden shutters, getting to know the customer, their home, and tastes in the process, or working in a factory running a machine that produces millions of shutters for a big-box store’s generic one-size-fits-all product line?

If you have lost pride of ownership over your work as a software professional, though, shame on you.  You have no excuse for complacence, apathy, or becoming disengaged.  Your skills are a premium product in a seller’s market.  Companies of every size will fight to win you to their side. With one idea and a few colleagues, you could start a company of your own in a heartbeat.

Now, let’s be adults here.  We all have to collaborate and negotiate.  When the majority or a manager makes a call that goes against your individual dissenting opinion, don’t stomp away and pout.  Losing pride of ownership over work, and settling into a free-rider paradigm brings down the team, the product, the end user, and your career.  You better woman-up or man-up and either do a great job that you can be proud of, work to change the organization that is stifling you and your peers, or move on.

Change takes courage, but our virtue is the outcome of our habits.  When you accept and justify your childish, dysfunctional, lazy, sub-par effort and excusing yourself through an external locus of control hurts no one more than you.

Mantra – Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Reason #4 – You Hide Behind Uncertainty

Deconstructionism is a dangerous game, especially when you are part of a team that is teetering on the edge of a cliff overlooking the seas of chaos, moments from falling into market risk or technical risk that could engulf you.  Since I coach teams on how to become a room full of adults solving the pains of a real person through a collaborative, unified, inspired collective brilliance and sheer power of will, I have a radar for someone  who is hiding. 

You are playing a dangerous game.  You signed up for this, after all.  You wanted to be brilliant, in the thick of it, defining emergent market segments using emerging technologies – but the minute you lost faith in the cause, lost hope for your job security, or lost belief in yourself as a builder and creator of new tech that can change the user’s world… that was the moment the inherent uncertainty of our goals became apparent.  You shut down.  You got stuck.  You became intolerant of technical risk AND market risk and looked to your leaders to spoon-feed you.

At first, a good leader can give a big speech, host a team-building event, or roll up the proverbial sleeves to help.  When the team as a whole needs some slack but they still have their eye on the prize, I have a long list of tools and tricks to re-energize the whole team.  When an individual begins the process of deconstructionism, and moves every conversation into an infinite regress in which the certainty of any word or any intention or any risk is now more important than the product discovery process, that’s when a tough love heart-to-heart happens.  Agile demands small increments.  Innovation requires trial and error.  You must remain infinitely curious.  You must self-advocate for the size of the risks you take.  Escalate when time-to-feedback is hurting you.  Sturdy yourself and your tenacious attitude about the “failure” intrinsic to empirical discovery – otherwise you don’t belong in this work space.

Mantra – Fail fast to succeed sooner.

Reason #5 – You Give Up Before Attempting to Solve a Problem 

This issue if often comes hand-in-hand with insecurity toward uncertainty.  When it comes to coaching a product visionary in agile, this means whipping them with the importance of setting goals for the product, an end user to empathize with, and a pain to solve in the target user’s particular context.  Once that is in place, a team – as a whole – may need some encouragement that a 100% success rate is not the goal.  Innovative, defect-free software that fits the user’s needs is the goal.  As it turns out, some people fear failure too much to risk it.  If that’s you, make sure you are in the least innovative technical space possible.  Sink your teeth into a legacy system and never complain about the spaghetti code you manage again.  That slow-moving space is perfect if you prefer to play it safe.

Innovation may not be important to SOME people, but it is VERY important to the REST of US.  The courage to risk failure is essential to experimentation. 

The real issue, of course, is not the fear or the failure.  It is a lack of proper perspective that puts your short-term ego ahead of long-term viability.  It is a base rate logical fallacy in which you are ignoring the most important variables.  Pretend for a moment that we have a product for which any given User Story – which we’ll restrict to less than two weeks of effort to get from planning to production – has a 70% chance of success (completion in two weeks) due to technical uncertainty and 20% chance of success due to market uncertainty (i.e. “is it really what the end users need?”).  If you take the risk of a false-positive – succeeding in releasing a working product increment that the market doesn’t demand – as the only indication of your own failure, you are sure to be unhappy. 

Now, imagine a breathalyzer has a 5% probability of a false-positive.  A police officer pulls over drivers truly at random at a random time of day.  What is the probability that a driver who tests positive is actually drunk?  Guess what!  A dreadful 2% chance.  Luckily, officers are trained not to play the odds like that.  The time of day, the day of the week, the location selected, and driving behavior all weed out the risk of a truly random selection.  Then recognition of symptoms, through human interaction must give probably cause. 

When you stop trying to overcome technical risk or market uncertainty prior to even attempt to solve a problem, you’re like a cop who stops pulling over anyone due to the statistical uncertainty of a false positive.  If you attempt to solve 0% of the problems you face, you’ll come away with a 100% lack of solved problems. 

Tackle 100% of the tough challenges tenaciously, courageously, and look for an assist as needed.  Anything else makes success incredibly unlikely.  The market risk of success is hard enough.  Don’t ruin the odds further by quitting in the face of technical risk.

Mantra – You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Grow Up or Move On

If these sound like you, work to grow as an individual or you are likely already on your way out the door.  If you, your peers, and even your manager exhibit these traits and the organization seems unlikely to change despite a heroic group effort – it’s time to move on.  Complacence, apathy, and passive aggression is terrible for your career.

I’ve taken to saying, “Some people just want to watch the world burn – the rest of us build it anyway.”  If you aren’t a builder, at least stop burning down what the rest of us will happily accomplish with you.