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Mañana

July 24, 2014
General
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Mañana

Obviously there are going to be days, or even weeks, when a team is necessarily focussed on delivery. Sponsors and Product Owners have deadlines, the world dances to its own drum, and sometimes it’s a struggle to meet those critical dates.

At times like these, attempting to also focus on longer-term improvements – such as building trust – can just add more stress, and seem to detract from the task at hand.

So, mañana becomes the default response.

“When will we talk about morale?”
“Mañana.”

“When will we invest some time in sharpening our saw?”
“Mañana.”

“Can we do something about our level of capability to deliver?”
“Mañana.”

“I’d like more predictability, lower costs, more responsiveness and higher quality.”
“Mañana.”

And so on.

How does your team find the balance between the demands of today, and mañana?

– Bob

Further Reading

LEGO, Square Wheels, Innovation, Leadership and stuff ~ Dr. Scott Simmerman

The Business Case For Organisational Psychotherapy

July 22, 2014
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
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The Business Case For Organisational Psychotherapy

I’m 99% certain that 99% of the people I meet have 99% of no idea what an organisational psychotherapist does, and moreover, the value that such a skill-set can bring to knowledge-work organisations.

In an attempt to clarify my value proposition in my own head, so as I might just be able to explain it a little better to those few folks who are kind enough – or interested enough – to ask, I’m writing this post.

The Ten Second Version

Organisational Psychotherapy:

“Accompanying organisations in their quest for more effective strategies for getting their needs met.”

Three Focii

Organisational Psychotherapy focuses on:

  1. Accompanying the organisation on its journey towards a more congruent collective mindset.
  2. Holding the space for the organisation to work on Improving its health.
  3. Assisting the organisation in improving its collective cognitive function.

Shifting Collective Mindset

The collective, organisational mindset is absolutely key to the effectiveness of knowledge-work organisations of every kind, everywhere. Who better, then, to accompany the organisation on its journey of shifting its collective mindset, than folks who understand organisational psychotherapy?

Note: In my work with Rightshifting and the Marshall Model I explain why mindset is the key to effectiveness – and the challenges involved in making the necessary shifts.

It follows, then that to shift an organisation to the right, to make a business significantly more effective, involves the organisation in effecting major change in its collective mindset. Who has the skills, experience and training to hold the space for the organisation’s surfacing of and reflecting upon its collective assumptions and beliefs? Organisational psychotherapists.

Organisational Health

In addition to shifting collective mindset, and in some ways related, organisational psychotherapy delivers improved organisational health.

Patrick Lencioni writes in his book “The Advantage”:

“The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.”

What is a healthy organisation?

From an organisational psychotherapy point of view, it’s one where:

  • people find deep joy and fulfilment in working together
  • everyone actively and enthusiastically cooperates with one other
  • people are well-aligned to the shared purpose of the organisation
  • we see high levels of trust, self-organisation and mindfulness
  • thinking and feeling are natural behaviours
  • most folks strive to be the best they can be
  • everyone’s needs are being attended to

And why is it “the single greatest [competitive] advantage…”?

Because even the smartest organisation in the world, the one that has mastered strategy and finance and marketing and technology, will eventually fail if it is unhealthy. Because by reducing or eliminating the diseases of politics and confusion and piecemeal-ism, an organisation will inevitably become smarter and tap into every bit of intelligence and talent that it has. And because of the direct correlation between organisational health and cognitive function – and thus the performance of everyone engaged in knowledge-work.

And, why then is it not on most organisations’ radars?

Because it’s hard work. It’s neither a quick fix nor a silver bullet. It’s not sophisticated nor shiny-shiny nor sexy. It doesn’t excite those executives who like to find their next great idea in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. And it doesn’t play well with the mechanistic, Theory-X oriented mindsets so prevalent in businesses today. Nor with their Balance Scorecards and RACI matrices and coercive process-orientations.

Above all,

“…the biggest reason that organizational health remains untapped is that it requires courage. Leaders must be willing to confront themselves, their peers, and the dysfunctions within their organization with an uncommon level of honesty and persistence. They must be prepared to walk straight into uncomfortable situations and address issues that prevent them from realizing their potential.”

A Story About the Benefits of a Healthy Organisation

If you’re interested in a story about the tangible – and bottom-line – benefits of organisational health, you might like to read Lencioni’s “Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive“.

Improved Collective Cognitive Function

Knowledge work such as software development involve people working – thinking, feeling and learning – together. Most people are relatively unskilled and thus relatively ineffective at this. Organisational psychotherapy enhances collective mindfulness – from which emerges both improved awareness and improved group-oriented skills, and thus improved collective cognitive function. And people who are more skilled at working together do better work.

I’d love to hear why organisational psychotherapy and its benefits re: rightshifting mindset, organisational health and improved collective cognitive function isn’t on your organisation’s radar.

– Bob

Further Reading

Seven Reasons Why Every Business Needs A Therapist ~ FlowchainSensei
The Power of Meeting Your Employees’ Needs ~ Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath (HBR article)
Collective Cognition in Humans ~ Clément, Krause, et al.
5 Reasons Why Business Can’t Afford to Ignore Psychology For Another 100 Years ~ Louise Altman

Local Optima

July 21, 2014
Agile, General, Management, Organisational effectiveness, Product development, Rightshifting, Software development
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Local Optima

I’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. And more recently, some research has shown that information presented visually has more likelihood of convincing.

So, here’s a chart. It illustrates relative effectiveness of the different approaches to e.g. developing software products and systems. The X-axis is the relative effectiveness, increasing towards the right. This same axis also maps from a narrow, local focus on parts of a system (left-hand side) to a broad, global focus on the interactions between the parts of a system (right-hand side).

Note: This chart represents aggregates – any given development effort may show some deviation from this aggregate. And also note, we’re talking about effectiveness from the broader perspective: meeting customer needs, whilst also satisfying the developers and other technical staff, managers, executives, sales folks, suppliers, etc. – i.e. all stakeholders. I also assume the aggregates exclude LAME, Wagile and other such faux approaches where folks claim to be working in certain ways, but fail to live up to those claims.

What Is a Local Optimum?

This post is primarily about the pernicious and dysfunctional effects of using approaches predicated on local optima. By which I mean, taking a narrow view of (part of) a “system of problems” aka mess.

Many folks seem to believe that improving one part of the whole organisation – e.g. the software development function, or an individual team – will improve the effectiveness of the whole organisation. As Ackoff shows us, this is a fallacy of the first order: it’s the interactions between the parts of the organisation-as-a-whole that dictate the  whole-system performance. In fact, improving any one part in isolation will necessarily detract from the performance of the whole.

This performance-of-the-whole is most often the kind of performance that senior executives and customers (those who who express a preference) seem to care about – very much in contrast to the cares of those tasked with, and rewarded for, improving the performance of a given part.

“When a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken separately.”

~ Russell. L. Ackoff

Ad-hoc

Also known as code-and-fix, hacking, messing about, and so on. Coders just take a run at a problem, and see what happens. Other skills and activities, such as understanding requirements, architecture, design, UX, testing, transfer into production, etc., if they do happen, happen very informally.

Batch & Queue

Perhaps more widely known as “Waterfall”. In this approach a big batch of work – often a complete set of requirements – passes through various queues, eventually ending up as working software (hopefully), or as software integral to a broader product or service.

Scrum

One of the various flavours of agile development. Other dev-team centric approaches (xp, kanban, scrumban, FDD, etc.) have similar relative effectiveness, whether combined or “pure”.

DevOps

DevOps here refers to the integration of dev teams with ops (operations/production) teams. This joining-up of two traditionally distinct and separate mini-siloes within the larger IT silo gives us a glimpse of the (slight) advantages to effectiveness resulting from taking a slightly bigger-picture view. Bigger that just the dev team, at least.

Lean

Lean Software Development aka Lean Product Development. The (right)shift in effectiveness comes from again taking an even broader view of the work. Broader not only in terms of those involved (from the folks having the original ideas through to the folks using the resulting software /product) but also broader over time. Approaches like TPDS – including SBCE – improve flow and significantly reduce waste by accepting that work happens more or less continuously, over a long period of time, not just in short, isolated things called “projects” nor for one-off things called “products”.

FlowChain

(Including e.g. Prod•gnosis.) My own thought-experiment at what a truly broad, system-wide perspective on software and product development could make possible in terms of improved effectiveness.

Acme

The best possible approach in an ideal world. I’ve included this, somewhat speculatively, as a milestone for just how far we as an industry have yet to go in embracing the advantages of a broad, interaction-of-the-parts perspective, as opposed to our current, widespread obsession with narrow improvements of individual parts of our organisations.

Please do let me know if you’d like me to elaborate any further on any of the above descriptions.

– Bob

Postscript

For some reason which made sense inside my head at the time, I omitted Theory of Constraints from the above chart. For the curious, I’d place it somewhere between Lean and FlowChain.