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Nonviolent Employment

January 6, 2013
Agile, Familiar, Fellowship, Organisational effectiveness, Psychology, Rightshifting
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Nonviolent Employment

Since I’ve begun looking back on past experiences through the lens of Nonviolent Communication, I have come to see this philosophy as permeating many of the policies and decisions with which I’ve been involved over the years.

I’ve written most recently about a needs-based approach to managing projects, and the congruence of that approach with nonviolent precepts.

Only since reflecting on that post have I noted a similar nonviolent thread within the employment policies we had at Familiar.

Voluntary Assignment

“Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.”

~ Peter F. Drucker

Everyone working with Familiar had the freedom to decide which assignments they wanted to work on, and which not. Folks could, at any stage (well, in practice at Sprint boundaries) opt in or out of working on something that was already in progress.

This meant that work had to be in some way attractive, literally. And yes, sometimes this meant we as a company turned away potential business because no one found it attractive enough to commit to working on it.

In NVC terms, if a piece of work did not meet someone’s needs, they were under no obligation to spend time on it.

Status

Everyone had the choice of how they wished to engage with the company. This meant they could consider what they needed – most obviously, in terms of security and continuity of engagement. The options ranged, in practice, from independent subcontractor, through contractor, employee and on to e.g. indentured serf.

And this was flexible, in that someone could change their status as and when they saw fit. In NVC terms, people could make direct, specific, and actionable requests as to the way in which they wanted to engage with the company, at any given time, contingent upon their needs as they saw them.

Compensation

Everyone was free to set their own rate or salary. At the time this was an idea borrowed from i.e. Semco and St Luke’s and rationalised via Transactional Analysis. By which I mean that we wanted a community where everyone could learn how to relate to each other as adults. Who can know what someone’s income / salary / fee needs are better than that person themselves? Indeed, can anyone ever have even an inkling of the personal circumstances of someone else? If not, how could it ever be possible to meet those needs?

Kit

Everyone was free to choose their own equipment, supplied by the company if that’s what they wanted (needed). They were also free to choose their own development tools (editors, repositories, etc), hours of working, and place(s) of work. Whatever best met their individual needs.

Reflections

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see some close parallels between the policies we evolved at Familiar, and the precepts of Nonviolent Communication. I feel sure that these parallels – and in particular the almost accidental focus on folks’ needs, and their subsequent making of requests – contributed much to the wonderful working environment and sense of community at Familiar.

I believe too that the policies described here are the natural evolution of the basic idea that is McGregor’s “Theory Y” (not that we had any managers in Familiar).

– Bob

Further Reading

Open Minds ~ Andy Law
Sociocracy – Wikipedia entry
Holacracy – Website
Holocracy – Definition

Zen and the Art of Organisational Enlightenment

August 8, 2012
Familiar, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
3 Comments

Zen and the Art of Organisational Enlightenment

The Enlightened Organisation

I think it’s fairly safe to say that most organisations lack enlightenment. That is, few indeed are those that perceive their true nature, are self-aware (in the sense of consciousness of their own thought processes, motivations and behaviours) and can act on that perception for positive change. I think it fair to say that most organisations exist in a perpetual state of dukkha.

Does this matter? Does it, for example, impact the bottom line? I’d say yes on both counts (yes it matters, and yes, it impacts the bottom line).

The Buddha described it thus:

Insight into the Four Noble Truths we call “awakening”. This awakening allows us to attain the unattained supreme security from bondage.

Ok, enough of Eastern mysticism already. (BTW There’s a similar Western tradition, Transcendentalism, exemplified by Emerson, Thoreau, et al.).

How does this all relate to “the enlightened organisation”?

Self Awareness

If a person lacks awareness of themselves, of their own thinking, of their way of being in the world, then:

“The more asleep we are, the more out of touch we are with what we are doing, the more unaware we are likely to be of consequences, and the more unaware we will be regarding how what we are doing is affecting us and others – so the fewer opportunities we will have to recognize how often we create our own problems…”

~ Milton Dawes

Or from the Mahout and the Elephant perspective: the reflective, self-aware part of our brain governs our ability to overcome the strong psychological hurdles to our understanding ourselves – and why we do things.

In the context of the collective organisational psyche, I suggest that self-awareness (the organisation’s collective awareness of and sense of self) poses the same kinds of challenges and offers the same kinds of benefits if achieved – but at the organisational level.

By What Method

If the goal is a healthy, self-aware organisation, then how can we set about making this happen?

“A goal without a method is nonsense.”

~ W.E. Deming

Personally, I’d suggest taking a look at how individuals go about transforming their outlook and self-awareness. Effective techniques I myself have used include:

  • Meditation
  • Zen and zazen
  • Coaching
  • Therapy (i.e. help from experienced helpers)
  • Dialogue on the subject (i.e. with others)
  • Reading and study (including much study of Koans and the ineffable Tao)

For me, the organisations I see are much like those individuals trapped in a cycle of self-ignorance – unwitting prisoners of their own psyche.

In Conclusion

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes
Everything under heaven bows together
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

~ Wumen

– Bob

Further Reading

Satori – Japanese term for “Enlightenment”
Samadhi – Buddhist term for “mindfulness” or “no mind” (Japanese; mushin), Flow
The Wedge of Consciousness ~ Online article by Milton Dawes
Knowing Why Beats Knowing How ~ Whitney Hess (blog post)
Innovation and the Art of Riding an Elephant – Online article by Bengt Järrehult
Self-awareness is Vital to Self-improvement ~ Blog Post at PsychologyToday
The Polar Opposite of Self-Awareness: Image Management ~ Steve Beckow (blog post)

Make Bad Hires!

July 11, 2012
Agile, Familiar, Lemons, Organisational effectiveness, Psychology, Rightshifting
11 Comments

Make Bad Hires!

Conventional wisdom, oft repeated on the intarwebs, cautions us to take great care when hiring people. Some folks go to the trouble of quantifying the costs of just one bad hire. But what about the costs of such caution? Here’s a few (sincere) arguments in favour of making bad hires:

  • However much of a misfit someone may seem at the outset, most people have the ability to learn, grow and develop. Recognising this can send a warm, reassuring and respectful message to everyone in the organisation – including the new hire.
  • Sticking with a new hire – even when recognising that the hire was “questionable” – can earn much loyalty and commitment from the person in question.
  • Finding bad hires is a lot quicker and a lot simpler than finding good hires.
  • Who’s to say that someone that looks like a bad hire will in fact turn out to be such? Kahneman cautions against the cognitive biases that makes us think we can predict people’s performance in advance. (This also reminds me of the Zen story “Farmer’s Luck”).
  • If we accept making bad hires as policy, our organisation can gear up for it and streamline the procedures for taking people on and letting people go. Much like the agile policy of “deliver early, deliver often, get feedback.” (See also: Zappos). The increased frequency can help us learn faster.
  • The stigma associated with making ‘bad hires’ decreases or disappears, reducing the delays inherent in people (well, managers, really) avoiding taking “risky” decisions.
  • People other than managers can be “entrusted” with making hiring decisions.
  • If you subscribe to the idea of “Deming’s 95%” – that 95% or the performance of any employee is down to the system (the way the work works), not to their own innate skills, experience or talent, then any gap between “good” and “bad” hires will be minimal (5% of overall performance) in any case.
  • Seemingly “bad hires” will bring diverse perspectives into the organisation, perhaps much more so than “good hires” might.

Note: I would advise retaining one “good hiring” filter: the “No assholes” rule (including filtering-out of folks with sociopathic and/or psychopathic tendencies).

Can you think of any more good reasons for making bad hires?

– Bob

Further Reading

Thinking, Fast and Slow ~ Daniel Kahneman
7 Reasons Why Not Making Mistakes Is The Biggest Mistake ~ Blog post from PurposeFairy
Everyone sucks at Interviewing ~ Blog Post from Jason Freedman
“Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs” ~ Online article by Dr. Peter Cappelli
“Bad Hires Have Cost Zappos Over $100 Million” ~ Tony Hsieh
“What’s Wrong with Job Interviews, and How to Fix Them” ~ Adam Grant

Sardines

June 11, 2012
Agile, Familiar, Organisational effectiveness, Psychology, Rightshifting, Software development
2 Comments

Sardines

It’s not often that my blog posts contain direct advice, preferring as I do the Socratic approach and the Veiled Magic of Questions.

But I HAVE done (and learned) some stuff over the years, and where this stuff is relatively context-free, I’m not averse to sharing.

This is also another in the intermittent series of posts highlighting observable differences between different mindsets – this time it’s office space.

The Rats’ Maze

In many businesses, much effort goes into making the workplace as well-suited as possible to the kind of work taking place. Think: factory floors, warehouses, artists’ studios, automobile workshops – even my local car wash has evolved a pretty darned effective layout for itself over the years.

In the classic, “Peopleware” by DeMarco and Lister – first published more than twenty years ago – the authors explain the significant impact that the physical environment can (and does) have on the productivity and effectiveness – not to mention engagement and motivation – of folks working in knowledge-work businesses.

I have yet to see (outside of Familiar) any organisation that even realises the scope for productivity that a suitable physical environment can offer, let alone take the trouble to find out what works (and what doesn’t) and organise their physical spaces accordingly.

At Familiar, we had around 1600 square feet of self-contained space (plus on-demand access to e.g. meeting rooms, cafeteria, etc). This self-contained space felt “full” with around eight people working in it. So, for us, our optimal density was around 200 square feet per person. This is way more that most every other work space I have ever seen. Recently I was in an office where each person had something like fifty square feet, and that’s including desk space, walkways, seating areas, etc.. Truly this was a daily game of “Sardines”.

Aside: Research has shown the deleterious effects on health, task performance and social behaviours caused by overcrowding.

The Analytic View of Knowledge Work

In most (i.e. Analytic-minded) organisations, folks simply assume that knowledge work is just some (slightly weird) variant of the office work we have known and loved(?) for nigh on a hundred years. Serried ranks of desks, sometimes in cube farms, or more likely these days, open-plan.

The Synergistic View of Knowledge Work

In Synergistic-minded organisations, folks recognise the fundamental differences between repetitive, relatively mindless office work, and the demands of effective knowledge work. These folks arrange their workspaces to better suit the style and nature of the work they’re doing day-in and day-out. Not only is sufficient space allocated, but the nature of the space (in fact, different kinds of space) is carefully tailored to the needs of the work. In general, these organisations perceive that knowledge work is much more like art, design, and learning than it is like office work.

In his recent video about NYU’s ITP projects “What I Learned About Creativity by Watching Creatives”,  Clay Shirky describes the ITP workplace, and how both faculty and students regard the physical environment itself as as much a raw material as the items, art materials, computers, etc. in the space.

– Bob

Further Reading

Teaching Binary Math to Third Graders ~ Rick Garlikov (The Socratic Method exemplified)

 

 

The Familiar Credo

April 5, 2012
Agile, Ethics, Familiar, Leadership, Organisational effectiveness
7 Comments

The Familiar Credo

When starting Familiar, ten of us came together for a day to discuss the possibility of starting a company, explore and exchange our personal values, and take a look at our enthusiasm for working together on something radical. This is what we came up with:

Our Credo

We believe…

On People
  • People are capable of amazing things. With a just little support and encouragement, people can achieve just about anything. No limits.
On Purpose
  • We exist as a community solely to help as many people as possible come to better understand themselves and what’s important to themselves as individuals; and to help each of them (us) make those important things happen.
  • We must subordinate everything else, even our very existence, to this Purpose.
  • To continue to fulfil our Purpose we must meet the basic needs of the group: food, money, shelter, peer respect, etc. (c.f. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).
  • Just as creatures need air to live but do not live for air, we regard these basics as necessary prerequisites to continue living, but in no way the purpose of life.
On Success
  • We must measure our success in terms of the degree to which we meet our Purpose.
  • We can only gauge our success when we agree what it is we’re trying to achieve.
  • Success, particularly in the Information Age, depends utterly on having the full commitment of well-informed people who really want to make a difference.
  • Commercial success counts for nothing if we lose sight of our deeper Purpose.
  • We must constantly guard against gauging our success in terms familiar to other businesses (such as growth, profitability, financial wealth, fame, etc.).
  • Our emphasis on our Purpose will bring far more material success (as an inevitable by-product) than would ever be possible if we tried to make material success the end in itself.
On Sustainability
  • We can sustain our ideas, ideals, values, understandings, improvements and the like only by identifying or inventing suitable mechanisms and implementing them as integral elements of our enterprise.
On Work
  • Work can be the most fulfilling, exciting and absorbing activity known to man.
  • We oppose the notion that work has to be mundane – Death to Greyness!
  • Work exists both to provide people with an environment to find out more about themselves and what motivates them as individuals, and as a valuable forum for social interaction and exchange.
  • People must demonstrate their suitability for particular assignments – no one has an automatic right to meaningful work; it’s not part of the contract, folks!
  • People should regard working through Falling Blossoms as a form of social contract. So long as and to the extent that it suits all parties, it may continue – when it ceases to suit any party it need not continue (and no hard feelings!).
  • Combining all the various facets of life often seen as separate and distinct, such as work, play, social, domestic, fun, earning a living, etc. are all but different facets of the holistic entity that is Life.
On Trust
  • To allow personal growth and learning, and as a matter of simple respect, we have no alternative but to trust intelligent people to make their own choices.
  • People cannot reasonably demand or expect trust, they have to earn it.
On Respect
  • People must expect to be treated no better and no worse than they themselves would treat others.
  • People cannot reasonably demand or expect respect, they have to earn it.
On BHAGs
  • Our operational objectives (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) must always underpin and strengthen our Purpose, rather than undermine or sideline it.
On Commitment
  • Having someone take responsibility for resolving an issue requires them to have gained a certain awareness of the need to resolve that issue.
  • Having someone’s commitment to resolving an issue always requires them to have personally and intimately accepted responsibility for the issue.
  • Commitment therefore comes from an informed view of what needs doing, along with a basic necessary willingness to pitch-in and make a difference.
  • Our job is therefore to help folks become aware of what’s needed, and then help them become aware of ways of meeting those needs.
On Process
  • Intelligent, committed, experienced people still perform better, accomplish more, and have more fun, when supported by established ways of doing things (accepted local best practice).
On Competition
  • Even if we’re not constantly getting better at meeting our Purpose (and all the things that go to help make that happen), we can be certain our ‘competitors’ are.
  • In line with our view of Familiar as primarily a ‘community of practice’, we do not compete so much with other businesses, but rather other forms of community experience.
  • If we fail to compete on these terms, we cannot expect to retain people’s interest, involvement and commitment (at least, none who share our particular Purpose).
On Growth of the Enterprise
  • Growth for its own sake has little merit.
  • We will look to grow when and only when that growth allows us to move closer to meeting our Purpose, or to bring our Purpose to a wider community.
– Bob

Agile – Circa 1997

March 9, 2012
Agile, Familiar, Software development
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Agile – Circa 1997

The Story of INControl

This is the (short) story of an Agile project delivered by Familiar Limited, circa 1997.

Note: There’s a document on my website that describes the approach we used to deliver our projects at that time, then called “Jerid” and subsequently evolved into “Javelin”. Of course, in 1997 the term “Agile software development” had not yet been invented.

“One of the most successful extranet application development projects in CWC history” – Project Sponsor

INControl was CWC’s major extranet application, which enabled all its corporate clients to manage their telephone call routing through the CWC Intelligent Network via a plain old web browser. This replaced their previous service which had involved long and error-prone telephone conversations, plus exchanges of faxes, between customers and CWC’s specialist call centre staff.

The INControl project had spent a long, long time in the Fuzzy Front End. The client – Cable & Wireless Communications –  agonised over both the idea and the proposed technologies (WebLogic, Java, J2EE, Swing, etc.). Sun Microsystems had sponsored a number of technology demonstrators in order to close the deal and sell the necessary tin and string.

Finally the client gave the go-ahead to commit development engineering resources to the project, so we called in the folks we had already lined up to do the engineering, architecting, designing, testing and sys admin-ing, and launched the first two-week time-box – or “cycle”, as we then called it.

We already had some information on the basic features of the project, and the client’s particular priorities. Internally selling the idea across CWC was important to the project sponsor, so we focussed the first cycle on producing a working model of the GUI, selecting a few key event types to implement first. We also took the opportunity to make a start on prioritising user stories and elaborating the first (highest-priority) ones, and scheduled the first of the monthly Risk Workshops.

Being the first cycle of the project we also knew, even before the Risk Workshop, that deliverables of the cycle would include some of the basic ‘contextual’ information – a name for the project, a Statement of Purpose, a Project Charter, a Case For Action and a Vision.

Each cycle, in what turned out to be a thirteen-cycle (i.e. 26-week) engagement, followed the same iterative Plan-Do-Check-Act pattern: Cycle planning on the morning of the first Monday, working according to the plan for the next ten days, and a cycle review (internal process retrospective) on the second Friday.

Each Monday morning the team would get together and plan out the deliverables, and interim work products, for the upcoming two weeks. The project sponsor provided input in terms of which user stories should take priority, and what he and the other CWC stakeholders wanted to see during the cycle, and at the end of the cycle.

The evolving Risk Parade (the main deliverable from each Risk Workshop) highlighted to us those areas where we should take special care, or schedule mitigating work items, and the results of the previous cycle’s Cycle Review (a.k.a. retrospective) reminded us of where we needed to act to improve the development process itself.

The core of each cycle planning session involved the team members identifying what work items were going to be needed to:

  • deliver the chosen stories
  • manage the risks
  • improve the development process

and the team members also estimated how long they each would allocate to working on each of the consequent work items.

Delivery Rhythm

The  results of the first cycle were very well received by both the project sponsor and the various stakeholder constituencies within CWC, so much so in fact that a number of people within the client’s organisation volunteered to work closely with the development engineering team on elaborating the requirements (iteratively) for the project as we moved forward. We would have promoted this first ‘release’ into production, but were waiting for the delivery and commissioning of the necessary server hardware and infrastructure (a joint Sun-CWC responsibility and outside the remit of the development engineering team).

In cycle 4 we booked the Madjeski Stadium Directors Box to present the first fully-functioning end-to-end release of the application to an audience of all the major stakeholders. The day was a great success, with senior CWC management pushing for a live system as soon as possible. Again, we could have released the system into production there and then, had the necessary infrastructure and client release / acceptance test procedures permitted.

Further cycles added further event types and lesser routing options, along with documentation and some minor performance tweaks.

Improving Along the Way

Some of the process improvements we introduced through the course of the project included:

  • a mini feature-schedule to help coordinate the work of the various engineers within a given cycle
  • a daily stand-up to help coordination further
  • work items being specified by their down-stream consumers (as opposed to how we started out, with the producer of a work item outlining the specification)
  • a collection of patterns to encapsulate and share common working practises – such as “FiveLinesOfCode”, “ConstantStateOfShip”, “CommonFrameOfReference”, “QualityGates” and so on.

Into Production – Better Late Than Never

Finally, with the commissioning of the production infrastructure in sight at last, the focus of our final couple of cycles shifted to getting ready to deploy the product into live production.

Some three months after the end of the first thirteen cycles, the client’s customers had received the new service so well that CWC commissioned another couple of cycles to add some more features into the product, and we were able to assess the quality of the system in production. The system had run live and uninterrupted 18×7 for over three months, with only three minor defects reported in that time.

As CWC themselves said of this feat:

“this was one of the most successful extranet application development projects we have ever seen”.

Ironically, one lesson we learned was that it could have been even more successful had we had responsibility for the commissioning of the production infrastructure too.

C’est la vie!

– Bob

Project Charters and Social Contracts

March 9, 2012
Dialogue, Familiar, Software development
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Project Charters and Social Contracts

On just about every project I’ve been involved with over the past twenty years, I have promoted the idea of a “Project Charter” (or better-yet, a “Social Contract” for the project).

I have reproduced the basic template for a vanilla Charter, below.

Aside: These days, I myself would avoid working within the structure of a “project” wherever and whenever possible, the “project” concept being a zero-sum game, at best. But I recognise many folks have not reached that happy place, as yet. Accordingly I’m open to the accusation of helping folks “do the wrong thing righter” with this post. Folks still mired in the project swamp may find it useful, nevertheless.

The Project Charter

The strength of having a charter (a.k.a. Article of Understanding) lies in helping stakeholders – dev team members, sponsors, customers and others – understand the social context and mutual responsibilities involved in working together. When it works well, everyone is more or less “on the same page” with regard to expectations, etc.

Sample

Article of Understanding

In line with meeting the needs of the project’s stakeholders as quickly as possible, the project team wishes to keep the amount of detail in the requirements for this project to a prudent minimum. The following Article of Understanding attempts to set a certain level of expectation amongst all concerned regarding the likely consequences of that wish:

“Project [Project name – TBD] will try to capture every important requirement in its functional- and non-functional- requirements models, but gaps and ambiguities will inevitably occur. To resolve these the project team will need to invent details on their own. On a typical project, hundreds of such gaps can exist, which makes it impractical for stakeholders and the project team to confer about each one. The project team typically resolve the vast majority of these gaps without the stakeholders ever becoming aware that an ambiguity existed.

In some cases, a stakeholder will have a strong feeling about how the project team has resolved a particular ambiguity and will require a different resolution. This happens to a greater or lesser extent on virtually every project. To the extent that a stakeholder clarifies such ambiguities later in the project to mean something different from the project team’s earlier assumption, there will probably be negative impacts on costs or schedules, or both. The project team will try from the outset to structure the deliverables to minimise these negative impacts, but we all know from long experience the inevitability of this unfortunate feature of development. We will all try to remember this.

The project team undertakes to try to be responsive to the stakeholders’ needs and create solutions that satisfy those evolving needs with minimum disruption to costs and schedules.

The stakeholders undertake to remember that the project team tries its best when interpreting gaps in the requirements.”

The key weakness of a project Charter, is the unilateral or one-sided nature of the document. Typically drawn up by the dev team, a Charter rarely affords the opportunity for buy-in and commitment from all stakeholding parties. In many cases, stakeholders do not see the value in spending time understanding and committing to such a charter. Indeed, quite often some stakeholders will fear the loss of control and increased accountability that such a multi-lateral agreement notionally brings.

A project Contract, on the other hand, demands more work and more understanding from all the signatories, which can take much time and effort to negotiate and discuss. Many organisations are not prepared (sic) to commit the level of effort required to make this happen.

– Bob

Postscript

I do not intend for the reference to “requirements” in the above sample to imply e.g. a Big Design Up Front approach to requirements gathering. If you feel the word may seduce your readers into this assumption, feel free to make more explicit the iterative nature of requirements gathering – assuming that’s how you run your projects, of course.

The Starting of Familiar

August 16, 2010
Agile, Archive, Ex-Amplify.com, Familiar, Organisational effectiveness, Software development
5 Comments

The Starting of Familiar

[From the Archive: Originally posted at Amplify.com Aug 16, 2010]

Introduction

In an attempt to give folks some context to some of my more contentious remarks on e.g. Twitter, I reproduce here the story of how Familiar started out, and some of the things we achieved during my time on deck:

A Customer Quote

“One of the most rational and engaging organisations I have ever seen.”

~ G Shekhar, CTO, InfrasoftTech

Familiar Limited was a company that I started with a colleague upon my leaving Sun Microsystems’ UK Java Center in early 1997. We also had the delight of some ten other interested folks helping us form the company and its ethos from the outset.

Green Park, Longwater Ave, Reading – headquarters location for Familiar Ltd circa 1999

Familiar was a software house specialising in delivering advanced bespoke Java web applications, that also shared its expertise on how best to manage the business of software development – in the form of consulting services – with other software development organisations. In fact, Familiar was the first 100% Agile software house in Europe.

Founded on Principles

When we set up Familiar, we had between us seen literally hundreds of development organisations, and we were convinced that it was sound business sense to found Familiar on the following core principles:

  • We would run the company for the mutual benefit of all the people coming into contact with it.
  • We would institute “human systems” that treated people – employees, customers and suppliers alike – like competent, rational, trustworthy adults.
  • We would do everything possible to build a community for the long term. Success depends utterly on having the full commitment of well-informed people who really want to make a difference.
  • Work can be the most fulfilling, exciting and absorbing activity known to Man.
  • No matter how motivated, intelligent and competent people may be, they still benefit immensely from an agreed, common approach to tackling work.
  • Commonly-held “management” assumptions and traditions (for example: jobs, appraisals, standard employment terms and conditions, management authority) are sometimes counter-productive and deleterious to a healthy business.
  • All our business dealings would seek win-win-win-win outcomes (for us, our suppliers, our clients, and their customers)

Guided by Practices

Given the above principles, this led us to institute a number of key mechanisms to advance these principles:

  • People were encouraged to participate in the community on whatever basis they felt most appropriate for their circumstances (for example, as employee, contractor, sub-contractor, apprentice, consultant, etc.).
  • Equity was available to anyone that participated in the community.
  • People were invited to each choose their own personal terms and conditions, including rates / salaries, working locations, hours, tools, and so on.
  • People were continually encouraged to synthesise and evolve their joint working practices (with a baseline set of working practices to make this as painless as possible).
  • People were invited to choose their own assignments, tasks and deliverables.
  • Narrow specialisms, such as sales people, managers, and so on were conspicuous by their absence. Everyone was encouraged and supported to become so-called “Generalising specialists”.

And the product of these principles and mechanisms? A hugely engaged and participatory workforce, and a really humane community, which produced a number of essentially defect-free software products, and pushed the envelope in terms of what was possible from a software development organisation.

As an example, here’s just one quote from a continually-surprised customer:

“With INControl, Familiar gave us one of the most successful extranet application projects in CWC history.”

~ Cable & Wireless Communications

– Bob