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Reduce Your Fear, Increase Your Status

2009-11-09T16:30:00+01:00

Some managers don’t like the idea of empowering people. They fear a loss of authority, power, and control. They also fear competition when subordinates become more knowledgeable than their own managers. And finally, after empowering their subordinates, managers fear there is nothing left for them to do, which makes them feel redundant. (This is particularly a problem in an economical downturn, when organizations need to cut jobs, and top management is looking for dispensable people.) When managers feel insecure about their jobs they hang on harder to their power and position, reluctant to share it with (what they perceive as) competitors.

Here's an important message for these managers:

Giving power to your people does not diminish your own power. Quite the reverse. It is more likely to increase it.

The power and status you have in an organization is a function of the power and status of the people you are leading. Consider this: What sounds more interesting and powerful to you? Leading a team of industry veterans, who are building a high-quality system that knocks people off their feet? Or leading a group of interns, fresh from school and wet behind the ears, building a system so bad it knocks your brain out? I’m quite sure that being the manager of the celebrity team means you have a much higher status in the eyes of many. The better your team, the bigger your power. And to make your team better, you empower them.

The only way to make yourself indispensable is to make yourself dispensable. - John C. Maxwell

A complex system is often not a zero sum game. Making poor countries wealthier does not diminish the wealth in rich countries. The European settlers in the Wild West of America did not steal jobs from Native Americans. (Though they stole plenty of other things, I’m afraid.) And my “social capital” on Twitter and LinkedIn does not decrease when I compliment or recommend any of my friends or contacts. On the contrary, my on-line social standing depends on my support for others.

If you find yourself in a position where you fear for the loss of power, control, and maybe even your job, consider this: I invest in other people’s social capital because it increases my own. And I believe in migration of work to poor countries because it creates other and better jobs at home. And I believe you must empower people because it will increase your own status in the organization. Don't forget, we call them complex systems because situations are never as simple as people think, and often quite paradoxical.

Oh, and from personal experience I can tell you that top management usually doesn’t fire managers of empowered teams. They are more likely to fire the ones responsible for unmanageable systems. And, of course, the ones that had their brains knocked out.

(image by Rodrigo Adonis)

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I Need Your Help!

2009-11-05T01:22:53+01:00

The nice thing about being a blogger is that you don’t need to feel embarrassed when asking for a favor.

Chris Brogan did it. Scott Berkun did it. And I’m doing it right now.

I need you to help me find cool projects for our new social media business unit.

The customers of our (parent) company normally want us to build e-commerce web sites. (And we’re good at that.) But we strongly believe more and more customers will want us to build a social network presence, and social network integration with back-office systems. That’s why we started a new business unit, with a dedicated team, for all social media-related projects.

To show off our skills, we created the amazing Sociotoco Search tool. Our team has been very busy building experience with many social network API’s. And we keep ourselves up-to-date on the latest social trends and technologies.

Now we’re ready for some challenging projects!

I need you to think with me, and answer one or more of these questions:

Do you know an organization in need of a (better) social network presence?
Do you know anyone who needs integration of a back-office system with social networks?
Can you name a project in need of some cool (and handsome) social network developers?

Let me give you some examples (real) projects that we’re currently pitching:

Customer A wants to enlarge a small community on its web sites. We’re offering them to build a feature that allows registered users to invite friends from their Twitter, Facebook, or Hyves networks.
Customer B prints digital photos and sells photo albums on their web site. We’re offering them to allow their users to synchronize uploaded photos with their accounts on Flickr, Picasa and Facebook.
Customer C has a tool that assists recruiters in finding job candidates. We’ve offered to include a feature that helps recruiters to screen job candidates using their social network profiles.
Customer D has absolutely no experience with social media. We’ve offered them to assist with everything, from blog writing to brand monitoring, from tweeting to managing profiles.
Customer E has a CRM system with millions of people in it. We’ve offered to scan their database to see which of their contacts are among the most influential people on Twitter and Facebook.

All of these are real examples for warm leads. But we’ve started only recently, and it takes time to get things rolling.

I’m sure that some of my loyal readers have their own ideas about projects for potential customers. I invite you to share your ideas with our experienced social media team!

IMPORTANT: If you’re able to generate a hot lead for our team, you will earn yourself a reference in my book under “Acknowledgments”. And if your lead results in a real project, I even promise you a free copy. Each project in our team gives me valuable stuff to write about. So it’s only fair that I share our findings with my readers.

Oh, and Arno will play a song for you on his saxophone. You don't want to miss that! (He doesn't know this yet.)

So, do yourself a favor, and contact us with your suggestions!

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Emergence in Development Teams

2009-11-02T16:00:00+01:00

When trying to translate the concept of emergence to teams, we can recognize a host of interesting phenomena. The first is the possibility of collective decision making without central planning. Swarm raids of army ants are reported to be among the largest organized operations carried out by any animal. But not a single ant has a picture of the entire operation in its mind. Likewise, no team member has a complete picture of the whole project. And yet it is common for good plans to emerge from the interaction of team members, where each can only work with incomplete information.

From research into human consciousness we can learn that multiple conflicting views can result in a (seemingly) singular view of the entire system. Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky both explained that “one stream of consciousness” is an illusion. According to Dennett there are actually “multiple drafts” of consciousness, which Minksy called the “society of mind”. Our brain resolves these multiple competing interpretations of the world into something that we call one identify, or a “self”. For an illusion it works remarkably well. Similarly, the multiple views of the world in a team can resolve into a singular team view. The team identity is an illusion, and yet it works by having a real impact on their projects. Paradoxically, human consciousness works because of the underlying multiple drafts. And the team identity works because of the underlying disparate views. I am sure some people will be glad to know that their diverging opinions may turn out to be crucial for a team identity to emerge. (Just don't blame me next time you get into a fight.)

It is also known that a system can be more than the sum of the parts. Our brains have a stable alpha wave of between 8-12 Hz. It is an accurate clock, though it is constructed from manny sloppy ones, because all the individual neurons have their own rates of discharging, varying between 8 to 12 times per second. And yet the emergent alpha rhythm is more reliable than that of any of the neurons. Similarly, it is not uncommon for a whole team to perform better than the best performance of any of the individual team members. DeMarco and Lister call this a “jelled team”. It is “a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The production of such a team is greater than that of the same people in unjelled form.”

Finally, the nature of emergent properties is often unpredictable. Water, consisting of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom per molecule, is subject to state changes like freezing and cooking. There is nothing in the properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms predicting these properties of water. It is the same with teams. You cannot predict the behavior of a team by analyzing individual team members separately. The emergent behavior of the team is a result of the interactions between the team members.

The only thing you can predict is that they will always try to undermine your profitability by asking for more time, better education, expensive tools, food, or conferences in luxurious resorts.

(image by feserc)

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Why We Delegate: The Darkness Principle

2009-10-29T23:25:24+01:00

From a complexity perspective, there is a good reason why teams in an organization must be able to make decisions together. This follows logically from the Darkness Principle:

Each element in the system is ignorant of the behavior of the system as a whole [...] If each element ‘knew’ what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element. – K.A. Richardson

What we learn from the Darkness Principle is that each team member can only have an incomplete mental model of the whole project. That is why they have to plan and decide together. It is why Scrum and Extreme Programming require the whole team to be present during planning meetings and daily stand-ups. The team members must aggregate their limited mental models and agree on a joint approach.

Some managers are not comfortable with the idea of allowing a team to make decisions together. They feel they lose control over what's happening when teams make decisions without them. Managers assume that decisions must be enforced, or otherwise anarchy unfolds. But that same anarchy has constructed an entire universe, all by itself. So it cannot be all that bad.

“The switch to worker self-management is occurring because it is a way to increase control over the uncertainties facing a work team.” – Kenneth Thomas

Managers must learn that they are “in charge, but not in control” (Ralph Stacey). In fact, any attempts to “control and contain” usually don’t work, and sometimes even have counterproductive consequences. For example, it is found that attempts of the police to control and contain crowds can cause the problems that the police is trying to prevent (New Scientist).

Nobody on a team (or in a crowd) has a complete picture of all that's happening in the entire group. By letting them solve their problems and make decisions together you actually increase control over the situation.

Mike Cohn once said that agile software development is micromanagement by the team. The Darkness Principle makes it clear that it is this micromanagement that must be delegated from the manager to the team.

(image by a2gemma)

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Our Project Dashboard with Pivotal Tracker

2009-10-28T17:31:44+01:00

In our team we use Pivotal Tracker to track the features of our amazing people search tool called Sociotoco Search. We're using Pivotal Tracker because it's free.

And it's simple.

And it looks good.

And it's actually quite usable.

Here's a screenshot of our Dashboard (click to enlarge):

The left column (Current) contains our sprint items. We have a somewhat “loose definition” of a sprint, because our team is allowed to pick additional items from the middle column (Backlog) anytime they want. We do have a “planning meeting” every Monday, but (for this project) we see no reasons to go through the motions of actually planning and estimating all sprint items. The Product Owner (that’s me) sits with the team, and we can do these things on-the-fly throughout the week.

You can see that Pivotal Tracker distinguishes between features (marked with stars) and bugs (marked with cute little ladybugs). The small blue stripes are our estimates (in story points). With bugs we don't get to choose story points (which is exactly how it should be!) Unfortunately the range of numbers for estimates is a bit limited in Pivotal Tracker. You can only choose 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8. That's it. In our case 8 means “too big, and has to be cut into smaller stories before we start”.

We are numbering the stories and bugs ourselves, because the (long) ID's that Pivotal Tracker provides are too cumbersome to work with. And besides, they are not shown on the dashboard. (Feature request for Pivotal Tracker: add an easier auto-number system please!)

There are multiple statuses in the Current column. In the screenshot above there is one story that I (as a Product Owner) can Accept or Reject. We release multiple times per week, whenever we feel like it. So I do this every time a new version went into production. In this screenshot the top story is already accepted (green background color). Eight stories are in development (they must be Finished a.s.a.p.); four stories are ready to be delivered to production; one story was rejected and must be restarted; and one story hasn't started yet. (You can see that the name of the button is the next action to be performed on the story.)

The middle column contains our backlog. These are the items that the team is allowed to pick up at their leisure. You can see there are both reported bugs and features in this column. And some features at the bottom have not been estimated yet (showing multiple stacks of blue stripes). When a developer clicks the Start button, the story (or bug) is automatically moved to the Current column, and the name of button changes to "Finish".

The right column (Icebox) is mine, and mine only. This is where I, as a Product Owner, can organize and prioritize all my crazy ideas. I keep these in a queue until the backlog (middle part) is sufficiently emptied by the team. The team cannot touch the icebox (but they are allowed to add their own ideas for the product). You can see that most of the features in the icebox have already received a preliminary estimate from the team. (I asked for that.)

Pivotal Tracker automatically calculates the velocity of the team (upper right corner). From this velocity I can see that the items in the Current column will probably keep them busy for most of this sprint, and the features I gave them in the Backlog column are enough for at least another week. Pivotal Tracker is actually smart enough to calculate how much work can go into a sprint (based on your velocity) and automatically adds another week in the column when the story points exceed the limit.

The only real problem I have with this dashboard is that I cannot easily print it. This is a problem when I want to compare it with our physical task board. (Feature request for Pivotal Tracker: add a Print Dashboard feature please!)

I’m just showing this as an example of how our team self-organized the process and the tool into a situation that works for us. It’s a bit of Scrum, and a bit of continuous flow, and that’s fine. Note that I’m not here to promote Pivotal Tracker. But we found it’s a nice tool that matches how we like to work in this project. You may want to give it a try.

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Latest, greatest and favoritest posts:
Best People Search in the World
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