Energized Work

Continuous delivery with Heroku, SnapCI and Ratpack

2016-02-09T18:05:01Z

We’re continuously delivering features to a Ratpack application on Heroku via a SnapCI pipeline. So far so boring, but we’ve ended up doing a couple of counter-intuitive things to support the “build the binary only once” principle and also to make it fast.

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Business outcomes are smarter goals

2016-01-22T14:34:14Z

Setting a goal provides a focal point and helps with prioritisation and deflecting distractions.

Have you set any new year resolutions? They’re goals. Promising to exercise more, drink less or eat less chocolate are all too ambiguous and usually end in disappointment. Smart goals reduce ambiguity. But there are smart goals, and then there are smarter goals. How they’re expressed will influence whether they’re treated as targets or approached with a sense of purpose. Look at the following smart goals:

To “lose 6kg in weight in 4 weeks”.
To “fit into a Paul Smith suit bought off the peg in 4 weeks”.

The first is a solution expressed as a statement of measurement. You either achieve it or you don’t.

The second is the desired outcome. It appeals to our imagination. It’s inspirational and thus garners greater emotional response. But, critically we don’t lock ourselves down to one solution—in this case losing exactly 6kg in 4 weeks. We retain the flexibility to explore different solutions in order to achieve the outcome we want.

Smarter goals express a desired outcome.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

—John F Kennedy

He didn’t say, “let’s build a rocket”.

FOCUSING ON SOLUTIONS INCREASES THE RISK OF FAILURE

Solutions fix scope. Too often people define success by having a solution made up of a fixed set of features delivered by a certain date. This is a target. When managers set targets and use them to force performance they bring out the wrong behaviours—we cheat, cut corners, and forget about the real needs of users. The cost of those cuts come back to bite.

An assumption is that the features will produce the desired outcome—which is typically not expressed or visible. What if they don’t? Fixing scope locks in our ignorance and stops us responding to what’s being learned and making adjustments en route to ensure the desired outcome.

Similarly, setting Scrum’s sprint goal in terms of a set of features rather than a desired outcome is fixing scope. And asking the team to commit to its delivery is setting a target. With fixed time, fixed scope, and fixed cost, quality will suffer driving up the cost of future change and the total cost of ownership.

Without smarter goals all we do is chomp through the backlog of features like Pacman. This suits fixed-scope thinkers because they’re measuring progress by the rate at which the backlog is decreasing. Should it look like things are running late we can expect pressure to be applied, bluntly or otherwise.

FOCUSING ON OUTCOMES SETS US UP FOR SUCCESS

Samuel Pierpoint Langley was trying to build the first powered, manned airplane. Solution. The Wright brothers wanted to fly and see the world as birds do. We all know who flew first. Langley promptly quit any further exploration into flight.

Outcomes that we feel are worthwhile drive us. By focusing on a business outcome we’re acknowledging that estimates are never accurate and that we can’t anticipate everything up front. Murphy’s Law tells us that shit will happen. We’re free to explore options and think about different ways to meet user needs rather than gambling on any one feature. We can self-organise effectively and vary scope safely to achieve the outcome. This is the environment for iteration and continuous improvement, and the means to deliver the right thing in the right way at the right time—something that’s desired by users, economically viable for the business, and technically feasible.

THERE’S JOY IN THEM THAR GOALS

How did you feel as you crossed the finish line in that marathon? There’s deep satisfaction to be had when we realise an outcome.

We aspire to more than building features. What matters is that we have a lasting, valued effect on users. So we should set goals that are business outcomes. If we don’t, we can expect to have targets set for us.

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Fiscally Responsible Innovation

2015-07-09T21:51:28Z

How long will it take and how much will it cost? “Who knows” is an honest answer, if slightly flippant. The reality is, product development, and innovation in particular, is both art and science. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” are everywhere. How is it possible to say how long it will take when we don’t truly know what “it” is? That presents an unacceptable problem when a budget has to be agreed. Then of course there’s the deadline. These things are not unreasonable asks.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

– Donald Rumsfeld

Deadlines and Reliable Innovation

There’s a business precedent for financing emergent projects shrouded in uncertainty and risk. It’s called venture capital financing.

Rather than size the budget based on what can only be a guess of time, treat time and cost as constraints to ignite creativity. Set the deadline making some reasonable assumptions and taking into account say an external and important motivator like a marketing event, or a commercial deal, or cheekily a competitor launch. Set the budget based on what you’re prepared to lose if you’re wrong. Then use venture capital financing to incrementally fund innovation from the budget. Rely on iterative development and continuous delivery to put something in the hands of customers early and often, and use their feedback to inform subsequent funding increments. If you haven’t pulled the plug somewhere along the way because the data told you to do it, then be ready to witness something great by the deadline that cost less than the budget.

Funding Innovation

Products, services, and capabilities resulting from a project or venture aren’t fixed. They emerge over time. They require innovation, creating entirely anew. Planning is difficult in ambiguous circumstances and there’s plenty of adjustments required en route. The challenge is to deploy finite resources across a portfolio of investments and to manage those investments to produce the highest possible return. Bill Sahlman provides us a frame of reference.

Any new venture contains some probability that the investment will be written off completely. The spike above the -100% return mark represents this possibility.

The probability of various returns greater than -100% spreads out in the distribution represented by the bell curve.

Ultimately, an investor first wants to reduce the height of the -100% spike, i.e. to reduce the probability of a total write-off, and second, to move the distribution of returns further to the right, i.e. to increase the probability of higher returns.

Budgets versus Incremental Funding

Investors stage their investments in an emergent venture. For example, if a company needs £10 million to develop a product and take it to market, no investor would invest the full amount at the start. Rather the investor would stage the commitment of capital over a period time, preserving both the right to invest more money and the right to abandon the venture. Essentially investors are buying information, which allows them to continuously assess ongoing risk and inform their next decisions to invest, or not. This financial model supports iteration and explicitly incorporates the need to re-conceive a venture as it progresses. Lean Startup calls this pivoting.

Conventional budgeters tend to think of projects as standard capital investment, insisting on full quantification of costs and benefits at the start. This is more like buying equipment than funding a new venture. Given the uncertainty of innovation, expenditures are better staged to buy more information about the right combinations of people, strategy, and tactics. If we lock in our original conceptions and we lock in our ignorance too. We risk dysfunctional outcomes that won’t meet evolving business needs, or business solutions that have serious concealed flaws, which we have yet to discover.

When innovation is delivering value on time, regularly even, and within budget, why add more control? The only thing more control adds is more cost. Iterative development is a means to meet deadlines reliably. This builds the trust necessary to give innovation the space it needs. A virtuous circle. Sweet.

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Iteration reduces the cost of getting it right

2015-07-09T21:50:29Z

The cost of iteration – the cost of changing, tweaking, improving a process and then repeating it again and again – significantly impacts the way work is performed. Reconfiguring a car assembly line can involve buying and installing new equipment, which can be very expensive. Car manufacturers usually do lots of planning before they commit to a configuration. They don’t want to stop production and reconfigure very often. They try to get it right first time.

Agile methods for software development are designed so they can be changed cheaply and quickly. They’re fundamentally empirical and can be continuously improved based on feedback about how the work is working.

Software developers generate new versions of software as often as needed. Techniques such as Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and open-source technologies that allow new versions to be rebuilt easily, keep the cost of iteration low.

When the cost of iteration can be kept low, we don’t need to worry so much about getting it right first time. Instead, we can try things, different options, test them out with users, learn from them, then reconfigure, refine, and go again. Because it doesn’t cost much to iterate, the value of actually doing something is greater than the value of thinking about how to do the something. Doing something can test assumptions and reveal facts. Too much talk without action perpetuates opinion and entrenches assumptions. Cheap and rapid iteration allows us to substitute experience for planning. Rather than getting it right the first time, we can make it run, make it right, and make it great before the big marketing push.

It’s not iteration if you only do it once — Jeff Patton

By iterating and testing as we go, we increase the likelihood of delivering the right thing for less investment; we reduce the risk of delivering the wrong thing and betting the farm on it.

The ability to run experiments cheaply and quickly is an important benefit when the cost of iteration is low. Car makers use simulation technologies to run virtual crash-testing experiments to determine the safety implications of many car body structures, more than they could afford to test with actual cars. There’s science driving low cost iteration but it intrinsically involves artistic creation. For example, before you can crash test virtual cars, you must first create virtual cars.

Cheap and rapid iteration lets you test cars more cheaply, but it also lets you create them more cheaply, and in many more forms. The creation of things to test – in scientific terms, the generation of hypotheses – is fundamentally a creative act. In many business situations, the hypothesis, problem, or opportunity is not well-defined, nor does it present itself tidily formed; it’s definition must therefore be created. Even when a problem or opportunity appears well-defined, often you can benefit from conceiving it in a new form – reframing it to take a different perspective, looking at it through a different lens. The form you conceive for it – the idea of it you have – will determine how you solve it, and how well you solve it.

Cheap and rapid experimentation lets you try new and different things. Cheap and rapid iteration helps you deliver the right thing.

Ref. Artful Making by Rob Austin and Lee Devin

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Pair Programming Trails

2015-06-19T17:04:25Z

Pair Programming As A Workshop

Yesterday I had the opportunity to pair programme for a few hours, something I don’t get to do that much of at the moment. I find it helpful to frame pair programming sessions as workshops of size two. This frame reminds me to be a bit more structured and get more out of the time we’ve got. Like any workshop, an agreed agenda (what we’re going to do and how) and desired outcome (where we’d like to get to by the end of it) really help.

The aim of this session was to spike whether we could easily integrate with a 3rd party public API of a CDN provider we’re evaluating. Since we hadn’t worked together before we started with a brief whiteboard chat about what technology we were comfortable using – language, editor, build tool, test tool and so forth. Then down to business. I have the luxury of a standing desk at the Energized Work lab so we agreed it was ok to work there. We set it at a comfortable compromise of our mean height and began.

Leaving A Trail

I often use personal kanban or a handwritten task list while pairing to chart out the initial trail – what needs to happen and in what order – and update it as we go. Lately I’ve taken to using the bottom of my monitor for post-it notes containing my prioritized list of tasks (left to right) so I figured I’d try something similar for this session. I had a single post-it note on the left indicating our overall goal (‘List Zones’). As we moved from topic to topic I asked what we were now doing, wrote the topic on a post-it and stuck it beside the goal. We ended up with the following trail:

Setup project
Setup test
Aarrgghh logging
Setup service
Loading config Aarrgghh
OAuth
Deserialize zones
Get zone name

Looking Back

After about 90 mins we had reached our destination: ‘List Zones’. We used the trail we had created to reflect on what we’d learned. As we ran through each of the topics in turn we recalled the surprises and difficulties we had encountered along the way. There were quite a few:

Intellij’s support for maven is quite impressive, but the package versions it recommends are unfortunately not up-to-date.
The latest Spring stuff uses logback by default, so an easy way of setting logging levels requires a logback.xml on the classpath.
In our minimal setup, using @Value to load settings from a properties file just didn’t work. After some digging it seems that we were missing some configuration but we had a workaround using Environment.getProperty(). More investigation required.
Lombok @Data is cool. It eliminates the need for much of the typical Java boilerplate.
The 3rd party uses 2-legged OAuth 1.0a with an empty oauth token.
Spring has an OAuthRestTemplate which is a bit clunky but works ok. You can get the response body for failed requests from a specific method (getResponseBodyAsString) on the exception that is thrown (!).
We ended up with a set of nested objects that mirrored the 3rd party API response structure for Jackson serialization which was a bit cumbersome, but we could at least ignore fields we were not interested in.
Spring downloads *a lot* of libraries. Wow.

I was surprised just how much I’d learned. I’m not that familiar with the technology used so much of it was down to my own ignorance, but nonetheless the trail served as a simple and useful device.

Here it is in all of its high-fidelity glory:

The Pen Is Mightier

I’ve always found that simple physical devices – paper and pen, post-it notes, index cards, magnetic whiteboards – have a much lower barrier to entry than their technical equivalents. It’s easy and quick to try out new ideas. There’s something about them being ‘in the real world’ that makes them more fun to use, less serious and less onerous than online tracking and drawing tools.

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Management Innovation

2015-05-29T18:19:57Z

Strategy lifecycles are shrinking. Companies must be as strategically adaptable and relentlessly innovative as they are operationally efficient. Innovation takes time – time to dream, time to think, time to learn, time to invent, and time to experiment. That’s a big ask when knowledge workers are still being managed based on the labour theory of value.

The challenge of managing is, of course, to coordinate the efforts of few or many individuals without creating a heavy hierarchy of supervisors, to keep control of costs without strangling imagination, and to build organisations where discipline and freedom aren’t mutually exclusive.

Drucker defines the practice of management to include:

setting and programming objectives
motivating and aligning effort
coordinating and controlling activities
developing and assigning talent
accumulating and applying knowledge
amassing and allocating resources
building and nurturing relationships
balancing and meeting stakeholder demands

I’m not a fan of the role of Manager because it has conflated the act of managing with authority and power. I’ve always believed that basic managerial skills are a schoolyard requirement for life – it starts with being able to manage your own time and dependencies and therein your reputation and reliability. Without a basic ability to manage it’s difficult to be truly responsible.

Management is an area ripe for innovation. We hear about management theory. We see the effect of MBA-qualified managers. We don’t hear much about management innovation. For me management innovation means systemic and empirical experimentation, quick-fire invention and the continuous improvement of management principles and methods in practice, compounding effectiveness over time to significantly advance an organisation’s objectives and enhance its performance. The aim being:

to dramatically accelerate the pace of strategic renewal in organisations large and small.
to make innovation everyone’s job.
to create a highly engaging work environment that inspires people to give the very best of themselves.

Battling strategic inertia

Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a threat to timely renewal.

The tendency of managers (and executives) to deny or ignore the need to reboot strategy.
A scarcity of compelling alternatives to the status quo leading to strategic myopia or paralysis.
Bureaucracy and organisational rigidities make it difficult to redeploy people and capital behind new initiatives.

How do you ensure that discomforting information isn’t ignored or simply explained away as it moves up the hierarchy? How do you create management process that continually generates hundreds of new strategic options? How do you accelerate the redeployment of people and resources from legacy programs to future-focused initiatives?

Every business is successful until it’s not. What’s worrying is how often top management is surprised when the “not” finally arrives. Belated recognition of dramatically changed circumstances means that the work of renewal can be dangerously delayed. Disquieting developments are at first dismissed as implausible or inconsequential, then they’re rationalised away as aberrant or “can’t be fixed”. Eventually they might be grudgingly mitigated through defensive actions but rarely are they honestly confronted. Executives and senior managers are not close enough to the bleeding edge of change to sense for themselves the growing risks to a long-venerated business model. In the absence of their own corroborating evidence, they’re unlikely to give credence to distant alarms from people out in an organisation’s hinterlands.

Innovation suffers when ironclad assurances of future success and certainty about costs, timelines, and profits are demanded by executives before investing even small amounts in new ideas. Every CEO knows that you have to invest in the future. Yet many companies risk forfeiting their future by funding legacy programs year after year while letting new initiatives go begging. The pressure to deliver quarter-by-quarter earnings growth makes managers wary of backing projects that have long-odds or a drawn out payback. Consequently, they over invest in “what is” at the expense of “what could be”.

What most impedes innovation in large companies isn’t an aversion to risk. Big companies take big and often ill-considered risks every day. The real killer is old mental models and the emotional capital invested in the existing business strategy. When it comes to innovation, a company’s legacy beliefs are a much bigger liability than its costs. Few companies have a systematic process for challenging deeply held assumptions.

Organising for innovation

It’s tough to plan innovation. It’s totally possible to organise for innovation. It can come from anywhere so collocate people with diverse skills in a working environment configured to create serendipitous encounters that might spur innovation. Just because a beancounter’s yardstick can’t easily measure the value of collocation, autonomy and harmony doesn’t mean these things have no value. Intangible doesn’t mean inconsequential.

Hierarchies are very good at aggregating effort and coordinating the activities of many people, but they’re not good at mobilising effort and inspiring people to get out of their comfort zones or go above and beyond. When it comes to mobilising human capability, communities outperform bureaucracies.

In a bureaucracy, the basis for exchange is contractual – you get paid for doing what is assigned to you. In a community, exchange is voluntary – you give your labour in return for the chance to make a difference or exercise your talents. In a bureaucracy, you’re a factor of production. In a community, you’re a partner in a common cause. In a bureaucracy, loyalty is a product of economic dependency. In a community, dedication and commitment are based on your affiliation with the group’s aims and goals. When it comes to supervision and control, a bureaucracy relies on multiple layers of management and a web of policies and rules. Communities depend on norms, values, and personal integrity and peer pressure to drive accountability. Individual contributions tend to be silo’ed in a bureaucracy – marketing people work on marketing plans while finance people run the numbers. In a community, competency (i.e. skills plus experience) and disposition are more important than credentials and job descriptions in determining who does what. Where rewards offered by a bureaucracy are mostly financial, in a community they’re mostly emotional.

Imagine having to compete with a company that not only has a compelling business concept but is a community on a mission with an egalitarian management philosophy.

Under new management

What matters most is not a company’s competitive advantage at a single point in time, but it’s evolutionary advantage over time. You win big, not by betting big, but by betting often – and by staying at the table long enough to collect the winnings. That’s the most fundamental premise of iterative development and sustainable pace.

A lot of top-down discipline isn’t necessary when you have a working environment that weaves Deep Democracy with discipline, trust with accountability, and community with internal competition. Give frontline people a large dose of discretion with the freedom and information to do the right thing for customers, matched by a high level of accountability for results and the incentive to do the right thing for profits. They will use their discretionary decision-making power in ways that drive business forward. Accountability ensures autonomy doesn’t produce chaos. Internal competition ensures a strong sense of community doesn’t degenerate into complacency.

Perhaps the best motivation to innovate comes from the combination of clarity of purpose (or mission) and the joy that people find in their work, given revolutionary goals and the confidence and tenacity to keep taking evolutionary steps. The only way to build a company fit for the future is to build one that’s fit for people, which elicits and cherishes initiative, creativity, and passion.

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Just when you thought everyone had agreed

2015-05-25T12:20:03Z

Just when you thought everyone had agreed you encounter certain indicators that perhaps all is not right. Emotions profoundly affect all important decisions. We all struggle with our inability to acknowledge our emotions, openly share what lies beneath them, and factor these things into decisions.

In the agile world, servant leadership and facilitation admirably attempts to help everyone in a self-organising team say what they want to say, and create ways for every view to be given genuine consideration. Alas, resulting consensus is often weak, if not fake. Inclusive decision-making is messy and painful.

In a group situation, the group’s consciousness refers to the proceedings of which everyone is aware. The unconsciousness refers to the dynamics that are present but concealed. Like an iceberg, most of what’s going on is out of sight – beneath the surface.

Decision-making together

Most of us vacillate when making a decision, especially so when a decision is emotionally charged – and many decisions are emotive simply because of our biases. Personal decisions can be difficult enough. Group decisions multiply the vacillation by the number of people involved. Getting everyone to buy in to the eventual resolution can be a long haul, and that’s before we even get to the challenges of implementing the decision. Hesitations, doubts and confusion arise whenever more than one person has a stake in the outcome.

We grow up with rules and boundaries imposed. How did you feel when your teacher commanded you to do something rather than invite your cooperation? Your hackles probably rose. Autocrats consider that reaction irrelevant, as long as their edicts are followed. Autocracy is the least productive social structure. Lack of buy-in provokes resistance. The degree of buy-in to decisions is directly proportionate to effective follow-through and efficient transformation.

Someone’s position doesn’t have to be reasonable, attainable, fair, or popular to make it worthy of being considered. The fact that it exists means that, eventually, it will be heard one way or another. The result of a majority vote does little to influence an individual’s strongly held views. Felt unheard, they’re as passionate as ever about their argument and those powerful feelings inevitably find an outlet. Just because democratic principles dictate that someone should go along with the majority doesn’t mean that they will. When denied the right to be heard fairly, people are driven to what Deep Democracy calls the Terrorist Line.

The Terrorist Line

The Terrorist Line begins when a strongly held view is driven underground. Initially it takes the form of subtle, covert challenges to the majority position. Left unaddressed, it develops into progressively more overt gestures of revolt, until it explodes into acts of terrorism directed at destroying whatever the majority has created.

Being on the Terrorist Line doesn’t make you a terrorist. We’ve all resorted to covert acts of rebellion when deprived of a voice.

Jokes and Sarcastic Comments

The start comes disguised as innocent fun. When we first lose a vote or find ourselves excluded from decision-making, we make jokes about the decision. When we’re uncomfortable about openly addressing issues, joking can feel like a safe way to express our feelings. Sometimes a joke is just a joke but, as a symptom of brewing dissent, jokes tend to have an edge. And if they’re left not responded to, they become increasingly barbed.

Excuses Continue to Continue

When we do things 3 or 4 times it’s a good indicator that our actions are based on emotional unconscious dynamics rather than rational or logical process. When emotions remain unrecognised, what happens is the unheard or excluded minority finds one excuse after another for not supporting the decision. The excuses always have an element of truth. Confusion is compounded because the minority may not be aware of underlying issues; in their minds the excuses feel genuine.

Gossip

Behaviour or excuses that continue to continue are almost always accompanied by gossip. Gossip is inevitable and mostly relatively harmless, but it escalates when views aren’t being heard. When we need an outlet for our feelings there’s no better place than with friends over a drink. This is often where genuine reactions to decisions come to light.

Lobbying

If unheard voices remain underground, gossip becomes more purposeful and the minority lobbies around its issue. Those feeling excluded solicit support for a challenge to the status quo. If their viewpoint isn’t addressed, they dig their heels in. The emotional distance between majority and minority groups increases and the minority start openly opposing the decision. The minority voice has surfaced into the group’s consciousness. Positions have polarised. The situation has become adversarial and positions are likely to become more rigid and oppositional. At this point the issue has burgeoned way beyond its original appeal.

Communication Breakdown

Unsuccessful lobbying is followed by a complete breakdown in communication. People stop talking to one another. We can email, instant message, or text while avoiding contact with the other person. At this point inefficiency and ineffectiveness are blatant. Yet we’re capable of tolerating communication breakdowns for months, even years.

The Go-slow

When communication breaks down, the minority become increasingly desperate to be heard and begin to flagrantly disrupt the majority’s agenda. We’ve all experienced others dragging their feet. This deliberate slowing down shows that the person really doesn’t want to serve. Repeatedly putting tasks off till tomorrow is another go-slow tactic. Sometimes the go-slow takes the form of someone telling you, with apparent regret, that helping you isn’t in their job description, or would violate standard operating procedures.

Strike

If slowing down doesn’t do the trick, the minority will stop participating in the group effort altogether. Striking isn’t always a rational strategy. More often, it’s an advanced stage of a process driven by frustration and despair. The more domineering or autocratic, the more pronounced the rebellion.

“War” or Separation

The final stage is complete withdrawal. As a last resort the minority either completely separates itself from the “system” or goes to “war”, i.e. in this context, expect anything from feuds where individuals reject one another to overt acts of sabotage. All contact between the groups has broken down.

The Importance of Buy-in

To secure buy-in we must make decisions that honour and include everyone involved – everyone must have a stake in its success. Those in the minority find the majority position unpalatable and they’re watching their own wisdom and creativity trivialised or disregarded. The aim is to find intelligence in both positions and to craft a decision that draws on the ingenuity of the entire group. This is the only kind of decision that can realistically win buy-in from everyone involved. Consequently, it’s the only kind of decision that can ultimately succeed in serving the true interests of the entire group.

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Time To Think: Part I: Business As Usual

2015-05-24T21:15:03Z

Author’s Note: This is part of a series following on from a 20 minute talk about prioritisation at Product Tank London aiming to provide some detail behind the ideas shared.

Product development is a world dominated by process, method and measurement. This is the business of turning ideas into reality. Those directly involved must understand how they can integrate their work¹ to create coherent products and services. Programme managers must be supplied with sufficient information to make decisions about their portfolios. Stakeholders must be managed and informed about the progress of their investments. In this setting it is so easy to lose creativity – a requirement for innovation – by not explicitly protecting a vital resource – the time to think.

The Day To Day

We continually work to keep those directly involved in product development, those investing and those managing the investment synchronised with each other (and with reality). The coordination effort needed to maintain a shared understanding of where we are and where we are going can be paralysing.

Calendars are frequently choked up with ‘synchronisation’ events (project board, status updates, roadmap planning, product reviews etc.). Many of these events use internal-facing presentations as the medium of communication (“the deck”)². The cumulative time involved in preparation, attendance and follow-up can be huge. I’ve worked with organisations where the demands of these activities have far outweighed the effort put into the actual product.

This synchronisation overhead can be exacerbated by various factors. Poor meeting discipline³ (unclear objectives, late attendance, lack of preparation etc.) is common. Remote or geographically distributed working styles usually require more effort to get everyone on the same page.

A Vicious Circle

The danger of throwing ourselves into (or being eaten by) our work system is that we never have the time to connect the dots and make sense of our world. Taking time to synthesise our experiences is an essential element of learning⁴, without which we miss important patterns and connections.

The pace at which we work and live often precludes us from being able to form our own perspectives. It can also prevent us from contributing to and creating a shared perspective with those around us. Decision making is shallow (or absent), consensus is weak, important insights are missed and opportunities are lost.

Business As Usual

Some days just keeping the wheels turning can absorb all of our time and energy. When the pressure is on the time to think quickly evaporates. Internal needs and unforeseen events get all the attention. Big questions slip past us without notice.

Why is it that so many organisations run environments that are simply not conducive to thought? (If you disagree, try reading a book for half a day in the office. If all goes well, consider yourself most fortunate.) Moreover, how can we change these environments so that they afford us sufficient time to think while still enabling us to service day-to-day needs?

References / Notes

The Theory of Constraints Handbook (James Cox III & John Schleier, 2010) cites the two primary risks any project faces are ‘whitespace‘ risk (unidentified requirements) and integration risk (outputs from different teams or individuals do not join up to create the desired outcome).
Death by Powerpoint (Tom Fishburne, 2011)
There is a lot of literature out there about effective meetings, but I recommend checking out the Training Within Industry (TWI) norms if you haven’t already.
Two of the four stages of the Kolb Learning Cycle are “reflective observation” and “abstract generalisation”.
Image credits – News Laundry

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Safe To Fail

2015-05-22T08:04:40Z

Author’s Note: This is part of a series following on from a 20 minute talk about prioritisation at Product Tank London aiming to provide some detail behind the ideas shared.

The term “Safe To Fail” has entered common usage in product circles thanks to the Lean Startup. The underlying concept contains two basic premises:

the ultimate test of an idea is to try it ‘in the wild’ and find out if it really works
there is real value in understanding what happened – especially in the event of failure

Fail-Safe

Minimising the downside of failure – fail-safety – has been part of engineering literature for a long time. Wikipedia defines it as follows:

“A fail-safe or fail-secure device is one that, in the event of a specific type of failure, responds in a way that will cause no harm, or at least a minimum of harm, to other devices or danger to personnel.”

Personal Risk

Product development is risky business. It involves guessing. Worse still, it involves guessing about the future. A product that visibly fails to meet its goals can have serious personal consequences for those involved. From career progression and social status to happiness at work (the inverse of effort required to get out of bed), personal identity and self-perception, association with product failure can form a stigma that is difficult to shake off. A black spot.

Countermeasures

Defensive countermeasures to this personal risk are numerous. “Play it safe”, CYA (cover your ass), “over-communicate” (i.e. spam everyone), avoid clear accountability, blame suppliers for not adhering to plan, add more process and bureaucracy, book holidays around key product events, get ill, blame other departments for lack of cooperation and so forth.

Skilled practitioners can pull off these kinds of countermeasures with finesse. Unfortunately this creativity and effort does not contribute to the developing of a viable product that people actually want (and will pay for). In fact, it usually works against it by pushing reality further away and wasting the most valuable resource we have – time.

Culture

“Safe To Fail” is cultural. We collectively agree to expose our reasoning to public scrutiny, despite the risk to ourselves. We accept that our knowledge is not perfect, that the future is unknown and that things may not go as we had hoped or planned. We also accept that in those situations it is the idea or its expression that falls short of expectations, not those who are associated with it. Finally we understand the importance of using feedback from the outside world to improve our thinking so that we can become more useful. Such a culture does not arise from senior edict or company policy but rather from individuals holding these values, socializing them and applying them in their work and interactions with others.

Getting There

I think of “Safe To Fail” as an end state. It is observable to outsiders in how we work. Getting there has two prerequisites:

Safe To Think
Safe To Challenge

Safe To Think

Thinking takes time. Environments that are optimised for utilisation (read busyness) are also optimised to prevent thought. If you, or those around you, do not feel safe to take time out of the regular schedule to observe the world, satisfy curiosity, read what others have written and attempt to synthesise this information into new perspectives then what remains is reliance on past experience and mimicry of competitors. No new information is generated. No new insights emerge.

Conversely it requires personal disciple to use time to think. It’s all too easy to flip from being that person who wants to change the world into a passive, reactive state of mind – waiting for interrupts from email and social media, surfing news and novelty, actively seeking distraction. Knowing how to manage your own attention and allowing yourself to think is a skill not to be underestimated.

Safe To Challenge

Organisations usually have one dominant narrative about who and what they are – an identity. For example, they might see themselves as a retail specialist, a B2B provider, a high-end service provider, a champion of the customer, the most cost effective solution and so on. The flip-side of this identity are the things the organisation considers itself not to be; the things they will not consider becoming, e.g. we do not do logistics / fulfilment / information technology / direct sales etc. These rules can manifest themselves explicitly in strategy and positioning statements but often exist invisibly as part of the shared perspective formed by people who have worked together for a time. It is the “status quo” and persists even when the company strategy has moved on.

There is an inherent tension between this shared perspective and product innovation. Consider Larry Keely’s excellent perspective from his book the Ten Types Of Innovation:

Profit Model – how you make money.
Network – how you join forces with other companies for mutual benefit.
Structure – organizing company assets—hard, human, or intangible—in unique ways that create value.
Process – how you create and add value to your offerings.
Product Performance – how you design your core offerings
Product System – how you link and/or provide a platform for your multiple products.
Service – how you provide value to customers beyond and around your products
Channel – how you get your offerings to market
Brand – how you communicate your offerings
Customer Engagement – how your customers feel when they interact with your company and its products

Exploration of ideas in any one of these areas may well end up challenging the organisation’s dominant narrative and mental models of the world. Creating a way for people to safely challenge the prevalent wisdom so that new ideas can be shared, discussed and evaluated without reprisal is a vital capability for any product development organisation.

Conclusion

We often lack specific language to discuss experiences and phenomena. “Safe To Fail” provides us with a means to discuss the inherent bind that exists between the risk required to create innovative products and the forces that act on individuals and groups which prevent them from taking those same risks. It’s not about making failed products. It’s not about “celebrating failure”. It’s about affording ourselves a fighting chance of success. If we can build our worlds so that it is safe to think and safe to challenge then maybe we can better harness our diverse talents and create a workplace we want to be part of.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”- Thomas A. Edison

References / Notes

The Lean Starup, Eric Ries, 2011
Ten Types of Innovation, Larry Keely, 2013

For more information on fail-safe systems, see:

The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dorner, 1997
John Gall’s wonderful Systemantics (3rd edition 2003) which contains gems such as The Fail Safe Theorem:

“When a fail-safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe”

“celebrating failure”
A bizarre double-speak meme where people brag about how much investor money they have lost. It even has its own conference.

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Working effectively requires responsibility, commitment, and accountability

2015-03-15T17:56:11Z

Working effectively with others requires us to embrace and uphold the very essence of responsibility, commitment, and accountability. Consider the meanings of:

“commitment” in the context of marriage,
“responsibility” as a parent, and
“accountability” (for your actions, say) in the eyes of the law.

These are important words.

Responsibility

noun; the state of having a duty to deal with something
noun; the state of being accountable for something
noun; the opportunity or ability to act independently and take decisions without authorisation

Responsibility cannot be assigned; it can only be accepted. If someone tries to give you responsibility, only you can decide if you are responsible or if you aren’t.

– Kent Beck

In such companies where responsibilities are assigned, consent is implicitly purchased by tying responsibilities to the pay scale. Unrealistic expectations are easily dodged by hiding within the ambiguity of poorly defined responsibilities. Deming spoke of a call centre operative who was asked to “be courteous” while taking 25 calls an hour. Which goal do you think she dropped? The ambiguous one. Often, even when we willingly volunteer and accept responsibility, the terms of that responsibility are still ambiguous. And when things go wrong we hear ourselves saying things like: “we failed to manage expectations” or “there was a failure in communication”.

The failure in communication starts right up front when we fail to make the terms of our respective responsibilities explicit, be it for a role we assume or a task we take. That failure continues as we are required to make constant small refinements and share new information as it comes in. We’re all infected with the Responsibility Virus. Without setting out clear responsibilities, as situations come and go, each of us can become under-responsible or over-responsible. Working effectively with others requires us to combat this virus. Collaboration doesn’t afford heroes grabbing the wheel and others taking a backseat. The critical improvement required of us all is for the apportionment of responsibility to be explicit, equitable, and discussable.

I will introduce the Responsibility Ladder later in this post. The aim is to facilitate constant dialogue so you can set your responsibility in the open, according to your capabilities, and in so doing make your reasoning explicit and invite contrary views. Through such dialogue you seek to jointly explore mutual responsibilities with your colleagues to achieve the desired outcome. The only real difference is in the level of responsibility each of you accepts in agreement with the others. At the same time we must build our capabilities. Set your responsibility to exceed your current capabilities by a small amount. That way you’re challenged beyond your comfort zone to broaden your understanding, learn new skills, improve your competency, and gain confidence without being overwhelmed.

Commitment

noun; the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity
noun; a pledge or undertaking
noun; an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action

Sadly the word “commitment” has become scary because accountability has often been imposed against unrealistic expectations, and without the freedom, authority, and resources to really act and achieve. Blame lies just around the corner.

Here are some examples of misusing or abusing the notion of commitment:

Being asked to “commit” to the delivery of a list of specific stories rather than a goal. Prescribing features in a given iteration is imposing fixed scope, fixed time, and fixed cost. The only freedom you have is along the quality axis. What happened to Scrum’s sprint goal? Being asked to commit to a goal with the freedom to figure out the necessary stories and how best to achieve it is a different thing. There’s still room for an unrealistic goal but you’ve got a lot more freedom and authority, and with Gilb techniques up your sleeve you have the means to refine the goal, remove ambiguity, and come up with options to make it realistic.
Someone else estimating your work for you. Whether it’s the intention or not, chances are, the estimate will be received as your commitment. For me, this is not only unfair I consider it unethical but I recognise that traditional managers might consider it their duty.

a commitment is something i offer you. a mandate is something you impose on me. not the same thing. tx @MBoumansour

— Kent Beck (@KentBeck) April 2, 2014

A commitment is a pledge that you can only make willingly. That right should always be respected. If there are unrealistic expectations you have personal “authority” to call them out and renegotiate. If you’re asked to make a commitment under duress you have the right to say no. You have to learn or be brave enough to do this.

Accountability

Working effectively with others requires commitments to carry currency in the form of accountability. In accepting responsibility you make yourself accountable for those commitments you willingly make. In this way any one of us can reasonably hold another accountable to the responsibilities they explicitly set for themselves. A “commitment” made unwillingly is not a commitment and therefore carries no currency.

Commitments need to work because they constitute peer agreements that provide the means to maintain focus and direction, and prevent things falling into disarray without there being a hierarchy of people in charge.

Making a commitment is one thing. Managing the communication around a commitment is another thing entirely. This is where most of us drop the ball.

You can’t control others’ expectations. You can tell them what you know so their expectations have a chance of matching reality. It’s not my job to “manage” someone else’s expectations. It’s their job to manage their own expectations. It’s my job to communicate clearly.

– Kent Beck

Regardless of how explicit the responsibility, failure can still strike at any time – maybe there was an error in apportioning responsibility; perhaps one person involved did a bad job; or there was just bad luck. Not informing people with expectations in a timely fashion, especially of changes, issues, or situations that impact your ability to fulfil your commitment is remiss. Not telling them anything is negligent. Either way, you’re effectively withholding opportunity for them to adjust their expectations. Is it any wonder they’re disappointed (and often angry) when they only find out come the due date that you haven’t got the goods? People may not welcome the news that you need to adjust your commitment but most will understand that shit happens and will appreciate early notification. Being brave enough to reveal bad news early can help build trust.

Manage the information around your commitments well and you can retain flexibility for adjustments without losing the trust of others and risking a reputation for being unreliable.

Collective Ownership

With all this talk of explicit responsibilities don’t think that commitments are black and white. You own your commitment but you can have dependencies on work done by others. Likewise, other people with their own commitments may require your input or involvement. This is basic work administration. In collaboration there must be constant dialogue to resolve dependencies and enough slack to work on things other than your own commitments. That greater good is usually some overarching goal or purpose that aligns everyone. Think about the collective ownership a team has for delivering agreed business outcomes to a client. A self-organising team will implicitly prioritise commitments by prioritising the work – usually highest value first. This can provide everyone with an agreed running order.

In a working environment of explicit responsibilities and commitments, collaboration must remain front and centre, e.g. you may own a story but you collaborate by pairing up with other people to deliver it and fulfil your commitment. The responsibility ladder demonstrates this point.

The Responsibility Ladder

A key aim in the reform of Energized Work is to eliminate one person’s over-responsibility and another’s under-responsibility to enable both to test and build their skills, thereby advancing their individual capabilities and the capabilities of the community.

There are six levels or rungs on the responsibility ladder. The rungs are designed to represent the natural breakpoints in taking responsibility for decision-making.

The lowest rung at level 6 involves taking on no responsibility. This is the classic dumping of a problem onto the lap of another (usually someone designated or perceived to be the leader). I’m sure you’ve all experienced someone coming to you and informing you that something terrible has happened, then standing there, wide-eyed, waiting for you to make some decision. This warns the other person they had better step forward or else the decision won’t get made and whatever problem spurred the decision will only get worse, not better.

Level 5 appears almost identical to level 6 with the notable difference that you make it clear you will apply to the next case what you learn from the other person’s involvement this time around. You’re saying you will gradually take on more responsibility and the other person will not be asked to assume total responsibility every time. It signals a willingness and interest in developing your own decision-making capabilities in order to share a greater portion of the burden going forward.

At level 4 you ask the other person for help in structuring an issue or task. Problem structuring is the most abstract part of decision-making and the most difficult. By thinking about the decision at hand you take a vaguely defined problem or issue and frame it as a choice among mutually exclusive options. This signals to the other person that you don’t want them to just take over and make the decision. Rather you wish to collaborate as they lead in the structuring. The critical point here is that you deal with the ambiguity rather than, for example, expecting a well-formed story card with acceptance criteria.

At level 3, you take on responsibility for structuring the decision and developing options, but you do not feel capable of coming up with a recommended choice from among the options. You’re saying: “I’ve noticed a problem, I’ve thought about it, and I think there are four options for dealing with it. What do you think?” You’re essentially asking for support.

At level 2 you feel capable of analysing the options and coming forward with a recommendation. You’re not sufficiently confident to make the decision yourself and accept the consequences. You’re taking on a large portion of the decision-making responsibility, even if the other person takes responsibility for making the final decision.

At level 1 you’re operating unilaterally. After structuring the decision, generating options, analysing those options, and making the final decision, your only interaction with the other person is to inform them of the decision you’ve made. This is the traditional definition of heroic leadership.

Operating at level 1 or 6 reinforces the negative frames that feed the responsibility virus and undermine any inclination to collaborate. In contract, taking responsibility between levels 2 and 5 causes the both of you to work and think together. This has the effect of building relationships, growing positive frames, and inoculating against the virus. We want to spend most of our time between levels 2 and 5.

Responsibility isn’t all or nothing

You don’t have to be completely responsible or not responsible at all. The Responsibility Ladder gives you the language and structure to reach agreement on intermediate levels of responsibility, matched against capabilities, when you share a goal or the tasks to solve a problem. The ladder enables a finely tuned and more sophisticated conversation that distinguishes between the types of tasks and allows for more precise adjustments to responsibility as capabilities grow. By growing capabilities and distributing responsibilities equitably we can achieve more, deliver more value, work better together.

A better work experience

I believe the need for explicit responsibilities and the practice of true commitment with accountability are paramount.

It’s my hope that individuals taking greater responsibility will increase capabilities, resourcefulness, and engagement. By sharing responsibility, risks, and rewards I hope people can get past their worries about failure and embarrassment, and start to see actions consistent with a developing sense of collective ownership for the outcomes of their work.

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