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We’d Do This?
Wise ole’ Ron Jeffries and dumb ole’ Bulldozer00 go back… way, way back. Ron prolly won’t remember the multi-week e-exchange we had, but back in the 90’s we engaged in a passionate, tete-ah-tete tango on the merits and “perceived lack-thereof” of the eXtreme Programming (XP) software development process. That historic exchange (which changed the course of history!) actually happened before the invention of social networking and effortless person-to-person comm – OMG!.
After the dust was settled, the chaw was spat, the pistols were re-loaded, and the ‘nads were comfortably repositioned back into the sack, Ron graciously sent me a signed copy of “Extreme Programming Installed“. I’ll never forget his generous gesture.
It Has To Be This Way
This Fortune blarticle, “When you’re the boss, who gives you reviews?”, starts out with:
“A chief executive at a fast growing tech start-up recently approached executive coach Dave Kashen with an all-too common problem. The CEO frequently reached out to his executive team for feedback, but whenever he sought their opinions, his subordinates seemed to shut down and withdraw.”
Well, duh. This systemic behavior is the result of the cultural environment that CCH forms of governance auto-install into each bozone layer – all the way down the pyramidal stack. In corpo CCHs, the dudes at level N-1 are “taught” by the system to be subservient to their bosses at level N. Dudes at level N-2 are “taught” to be even more subservient to the bosses at level N than their own boss man at level N-1.
This “that’s just the way it has to be” indoctrination is so successful that it works the other way too. The dudes at level N are “taught” by the system to require subservience by the lessers at all levels below them. I wonder if the flustered CEO in the quote realizes this.
If the corpo system wasn’t designed to work this way, there would be anarchy and annihilation. No “ifs“, “ands“, or “buts” about it……… right?
FOSTMA And NASHMA
Whoo Hoo! I thought of a positive complement to my negative FOSTMA acronym. It’s, it’s, it’s….. NASHMA = Nayar, Semler, Hsieh MAnagement:
Of course, in order to prevent chaos, NASHMA orgs still have hierarchical structures, but they’re not run as stratified caste system CCHs. In NASHMA orgs, there’s real, two way accountability; and symmetric relationships exist up and down all levels. Most managers in NASHMA groups are PHORs and not STSJs who spend all their “valuable” time planning, watching, controlling, and evaluating.
Now mind you, to avoid the trap of dualistic thinking, an org shouldn’t be judged as fully belonging to one class or the other. There can be pockets of FOSTMA groups in a NASHMA org and vice versa. Nevertheless, my scientifically collected and analyzed data revealed this current distribution of institutions along the FOSTMA-NASHMA continuum:
Over time, hopefully the threshold will move to the left – increasing the currently miniscule NASHMA to FOSTMA ratio. However, there will always be powerful and scary psychological forces opposing the movement.
Double Loop Learning
Chris Aryris is a giant in the field of organizational development. LinkedIn e-colleague Gene Bellinger recently posted this classic Argyris article, “Teaching Smart People How To Learn“, to his “Systems Thinking” group. In the missive, Mr. Argyris gives a great example of double loop learning:
I have coined the terms ‘‘single loop’’ and ‘‘double loop’’ learning…. To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68 degrees is a good example of single-loop learning. A thermostat that could ask, ‘‘Why am I set at 68 degrees?’’ and then explore whether or not some other temperature might more economically achieve the goal of heating the room would be engaging in double-loop learning.
Because of the Law Of Impermanence (LOI), it’s inevitable that what worked in the past won’t work at some unknowable time in the future. The top half of the figger below illustrates the LOI in action. On the left, we have a successful org or individual happily humming along. The successful “entity” repeatedly performs actions that lead to success. As long as the external environment doesn’t change, this self-reinforcing loop of success can be sustained for quite a long time. However, since the LOI is constantly and relentlessly operating in the background, insanely doing the same thing over and over again will eventually guarantee failure. The failure may occur instantaneously like a broken axle while driving on the freeway, or it may manifest gradually like an excruciating death by a thousand cuts. Bummer.
Possibly the only way of keeping the LOI at bay is to institute double loop learning. The figger below shows the painful, transformational process of adding a second action-result-reflection loop to the system. By adding the skill of reflection, deteriorating results can be detected and action can be periodically tuned to accommodate a changing world.
Just because “deteriorating results can be detected and action can be tuned” doesn’t mean they will be. The forces against truthful org and individual reflection on poor results are formidable. Denial, angst, and fear, which are all dysfunctions of the individual and collective human ego, conspire against improving system robustness and viability via change. Reorgs, appointing the same people to funky new titles, bumping up compensation/perks, cutting costs, and attempting to apply all other textbook management tools amount to wrapping bandaids around a massive hemorrhage. Double bummer.
The hardest aspect of getting a double learning loop into operation is connecting the “Reflection” node back to the “Action” node so that actions can be changed. As I know too well, it’s relatively easy to reflect on one’s actions while exhibiting the same insane behavior over and over and over and over………..
“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” – Frank Zappa
Dilbert Disservice
Merry Christmas and Ho, Ho, Ho! Dear reader, if you don’t want to be negatively influenced today, then please move on and don’t read any further.
Before Dilbert and Scott Adams rocketed to fame and fortune by speaking about the unspeakable, DICsters toiling down in the boiler room at least had hope that the grass was greener on the other side. However, the Dilbert strip has unveiled what many didn’t know prior to its public emergence: the grass most likely isn’t greener “over there“.
Every day, Dilbert and his cohorts drive home the point that dysfunctional corpricracies are as ubiquitous and pervasive as the weeds in your garden. The strip has actually helped CCFs by demotivating DICsters from leaving toxic environments – because now they think that “it’s the same everywhere“. D’oh!
The Curiously Recurring Scramble Pattern
It’s funny to watch software development teams hack away for months building a just barely working patch-quilt monster that they can hardly understand themselves – and then scramble at the last minute generating design documents for some big upcoming management design review or “independent” auditor dog and pony show (woof woof!).
In this Curiously Recurring Scramble Pattern (CRSP), a successful attempt to avoid the labor of thinking is made as developers frantically sprinkle Doxygen annotations throughout the code and/or load the beast into a reverse engineering tool that mechanistically generates UML diagrams to model the as-built mess. It goes without saying that the tool’s “verbose” mode is selected in order to obscure meaning and promote the illusion of high falutin’ sophistication. Of course, all of this is a waste of time (= $$$$) because the dudes doing the reviewing (self-important managers and bureaucratic auditors) don’t want to understand a thing.
When the review or audit does take place; a couple of cream puff questions and comments are bantered about, check boxes are ticked off, a couple of superficial “action items” are generated, and the whole lovefest is rubber-stamped as a great success. Whoo Hoo, we rock!
Without a doubt, you and I have never been culturally forced to participate in an instantiation of the CRSP. We are above that nonsense, right? We do something like this.
“A meeting is a refuge from the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.” – Bernard Baruch
void Manager::pitchInWhereNeeded(const Work& w){}
Unless you’re a C++ programmer, you probably won’t understand the title of this post. It’s the definition of the “pitchInWhereNeeded” member function of a “Manager” class. If you look around your immediate vicinity with open eyes, that member function is most likely missing from your Manager class definition. If you’re a programmer, oops, I mean a software engineer, it’s probably also missing from your derived “SoftwareLead“, “SoftwareProjectManager“, and “SoftwareArchitect” classes too.
As the UML-annotated figure below shows, in the early twentieth century the “pitchInWhereNeeded” function was present and publicly accessible by other org objects. On revision number 1 of the “system”, as signaled by the change from “+” to “-“, its access type was changed to private. This seemingly minor change broke all existing “system” code and required all former users of the class to redesign and retest their code. D’oh!
On the second revision of the Manager class, this critical, system-trust-building member function mysteriously disappeared completely. WTF?. This rev 2 version of the code didn’t break the system, but the system’s responsiveness decreased since private self -calls by manager objects to the “pitchInWhereNeeded” function were deleted and more work was pushed back into the “other” system objects. Bummer.
Yahoo! Boohoo!
Unless you were born yesterday, you’ve probably heard about the death spiral that former internet great Yahoo! has commenced. In this blarticle from TechCrunch, “Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed“, a couple of quotes from former employees brought a tear to my eye.
…it does provide a picture of a company that bogged its acquired-startups down in its company’s administrative BS. As Chad Dickerson, former Yahoo developer evangelist and the current CTO of Etsy comments, “In my experience, entrepreneurs moving into Yahoo! often got stuck doing PowerPoints about “strategy” instead of writing code and shipping products.”
Elliott-McCrea writes: I recently pulled up a worklog I was keeping in 2008-2009, and I found 18 meetings scheduled over a 9 month period discussing why Flickr’s API was poorly designed and when we’d be shutting it down and migrating it to the YOS Web Services Standard.
What I’d like to know is: “Did any of the layers of corpo honchos have any conscious clue that the patriarchical and bureaucratic monster they brought to life was killing the golden goose?” What do you think?
Leader Or Dictator?
After reading Chetan Dhruve’s “Why Your Boss Is Programmed To Be A Dictator“, I’ve had a change of heart. I’ve concluded that hierarchy is a symptom and not the dominant cause of dysfunctional corpricracies. In his book, Mr. Dhruve skillfully develops a compelling case that the lack of the right to vote managers into and out of higher status slots in the hierarchy is the real cause of poor org-wide performance and DIC-force suffering in the workplace.
Mr. Dhruve asserts that there are two canonical forms of power systems: leaderships and dictatorships. By his definition, leaders are elected into power by those they lead, and dictators assume power by any other means. In corpricracies, dictators don’t assume power by shedding blood, they assume power in a civilized manner; by anointment from higher status dictators.
The unquestioned assumption in dictatorships is that superior status equates directly with superior knowledge and judgment. In corpo dictatorships, un-submissive subjects aren’t killed. They’re marginalized at best, and fired at worst. Chetan closes his masterpiece with a brilliant quote targeted at anyone in any power structure:
If you aren’t elected, you’re a dictator – Chetan Dhruve
Monitoring And Learning
Courtesy of this Scott Berkun retweet,
I latched onto this Harvard Business School paper abstract:
Even though the paper is laced with impeccable math and densely “irrefutable” logic, the conclusion of “looser monitoring -> more learning -> more creativity & innovation” seems intuitively obvious, doesn’t it?
Assume that the top leaders in your org embrace the idea and sincerely want to put it into action to detach the group from the status quo and propel it toward excellence. Well, fuggedaboutit. The scores of mediocre middle managers within the institution who do the monitoring will instantaneously switch into passive-aggressive mode and thwart any attempt to institute the policy. They’ll do this because it will most likely expose the fact that they are not only suppressing creativity and innovation where the rubber hits the road, but they are not adding much value to the operation themselves. How do I know this? Because that’s what I’d feel culturally forced to do. But not you, right?
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Meh!
D'oh!
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