What the Culture? Chicken or the Egg

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Since the late 90’s and over the last decades we have been bombarded with buzz words, “hipster” ways of working and living etc. Our workplaces have undergone numerous changes in both managerial and social spheres, all under the banner of increased efficiency and improving the work environment. Yet regardless of what the goal is we often hear the term “Culture”.

So what is culture?

Culture is a pivotal concept in anthropology, which includes a range of phenomena that are transmitted through human societies by social learning.

Evident in the social behaviour and norms of human societies, culture is “the way of life” for groups of people which has been passed down through generations, often tightly linked and specific to the groups environment, history and even genetics (sickle cell anaemia). Their shared ideas, customs, procedures and their shared world view or perceptions.

In our modern lives, the most invasive and under-defined term used would have to be culture.

So why is this a problem?

The issue is that when most people use the term culture, they seem to regard it as a lever to effect change. The idea you can simply, enact new procedures and change the “Culture” of a company is flawed at best and potentially dangerous.

So why and how do people truly change?

Like evolution, Culture is the product of a change based in advantage. The better suited a species is to its environment, the more likely it will have an evolutionary advantage. Similarly Culture is gradually developed and evolved over time with the underlying driving force being an advantage, better social cohesion, support, robustness etc.

So if you wish to enable true and lasting changes such as “Culture” there must be a definite advantage. In the workplace this could be more pay, job security, better and clearly defined processes and therefore roles, better management and a greater sense of self worth in the companies landscape both socially and economically.

The idea that “culture” can be changed from the top down is doomed to failure because if the advantages of the changes are not obvious, why would anyone adopt them.

“What’s in it for me,” is the driving force behind all change, even Altruism. Without an advantage why would anyone change the way they do anything.

Culture is not a lever or process but the goal to attain an improvement and lasting change for the better which is reflected in the mechanisms we perform.

Culture can be a Vexing Word

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This post has been inspired by a conversation about culture with Tobbe and Steve.

I was pondering why I have trouble with the word ‘Culture’ and it’s related to the ways we misinterpret words and misuse them to influence people.
So I tweeted a thread earlier this week which captures some of the problems

Culture can be a vexing word

In this context ‘vexing’ means causing annoyance, frustration or worry (from the google dictionary)

The word ‘Culture’ is annoying when used as a convenient excuse For example ‘the culture is not right here’ or ‘we need to change the culture’

The word ‘Culture’ is frustrating when we try to define it
‘We need to change the culture’
…..’What do you mean by culture?’
‘You know – how we do things around here’
…..’What things?’
‘How we communicate, interact, collaborate…’
……..
…
…..’What is collaboration?’

And the word ‘Culture’ is worrying because it can lead to rabbit holes, wild goose chases and cans of worms It’s far too easy to focus on activities attempting to change the culture directly (and these are very hard to measure – see previous tweet about definition)

It’s very easy to vent about an issue and a lot trickier to propose ways to address these issues.
The simplest first idea is to stop spending large amounts of time trying to define culture – sometimes it’s like…discussion about culture eats everything else…(with apologies to Drucker – although according to Quote Investigator the quote might not be directly from Drucker).

The next simple idea is to catch ourselves when we think ‘the culture needs to change….’ or similar and apply something like the 5 Whys to it.

  • Why do we think the culture needs to change? – Because people keep doing the same things and won’t try new ideas
  • Which same thing are we concerned about and why? – The funding process
  • Why is the funding process a problem? – Because we have to fill out timesheets
  • Why do we fill out timesheets? – So that we can be paid
  • Are there any other reasons why we need to fill in timesheets? – I don’t know
  • Who might know? – HR, Finance, Managers
  • Why is filling in timesheets a problem? – Because the codes are confusing and it takes around 15 mins a week when I could be doing more valuable work

We can see that the list of whys and who might know is getting very long and there are a lot of interesting and branching threads to explore. The timesheet one can be fairly simple to follow and it often ultimately relates to how an organisation does its accounts as well as allowing us to get paid properly. Accounting standards are fairly universal and are not going to change very quickly – so we are much better off educating ourselves about the need of the organisation to meet taxation, corporate governance, audit etc. requirements and finding more effective ways to achieve these as well as communicating this need with our colleagues.

We might find that a very measurable thing (that an organisation is a going concern in accounting speak) can have a dramatic impact on culture when we focus on flowing our work around that need.

Agile Governance

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Or…How it is Difficult to Understand a Thing if you don’t Already Know the Key Thing

Governance is a word that throws me off – wondering what it really means.

It’s supposed to mean having clarified roles, accountability and responsibilities.
It means understanding how decisions get made and who makes them.
It means making sure that policies are in place and that processes are monitored to ensure that they are working as intended.

It’s tricky to explain governance in agile when people don’t already have a good grasp of governance in traditional organisational constructs.

It’s similar to when I was a new video editor and our organisation bought a fancy piece of equipment called an ADO – Ampex Digital Optics (It flew a small picture around the screen and cost over $100k AUD in the 1980’s/90’s…now you can do the same thing with free software).
We did not purchase the training reference materials and only had the operating manual – which kept stating to do this, that, or the other with a thing called a ‘keyframe’.
I had no idea what this keyframe thing was – and the glossary was not helpful – so I stressed and tried a few things – and eventually called another video editor who was more experienced and asked him.
He explained that in any movement from point A to point B, the key frames would be the start and end point (so you basically put the small picture into the spot you wanted it to start at and press the ‘keyframe’ button and then move it to point B and hit ‘keyframe’ again – then the small picture would move from point A to point B whenever the effect was run).


Once I understood what a keyframe actually was, the whole machine was unlocked and I could use all of the features – but until I understood it, I could not even start to use this very expensive machine.

Back to governance and agile – when we understand how decisions get made – it’s quite easy to translate roles such as Product Owner into an organisation – the same decisions are being made – we are packaging them in a different way in agile teams.

When governance is not well understood, we end up circling around definitions for Product Owner etc – we are already causing confusion by introducing a completely different way of working. And on top of that, we need to break apart the decisions, accountabilities and responsibilities and place them into the daily planning, checking and doing aspects of agile delivery.

A way forward is to spend some time ensuring that the governance principles are better understood for the pre-agile ways of working and only after that, attempt to translate into the agile context. It feels like taking a step backwards – and it is much better than going around in circles and talking at cross-purposes.

If governance was never really there in the first place – this is one reason for the impression that governance is absent in agile.

PROCESSES LEAD TO CHAOS, DEFINED PROCESSES LEAD TO SUCCESS.

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To help understand the idea behind the statement that processes lead to chaos and defined process lead to success, consider a trip to any location say Healesville. We could drive, catch the bus, walk, run or ride our bicycle, even fly or parachute in to Healesville, these are all modes of transport. Next we could go via Lillydale, Kinglake or Yarra Glen, these are the three most direct routes possible from our location, these are the routes of journey.

Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue trying to work out who will go, who will stay; who drives, who rides etc and lastly the route we wish to take. You can see the inefficiency of the process if we allow it to go undefined. If leave it undefined we have issues with Who, What, How and When. The when is not only dependent upon the time we choose to be in Healesville but also the mode of transport taken by the people going and the route taken. So by not defining the process, we can easily end up in a state of option paralysis, which results in nothing being done.

Now if we define the process by saying “We are going to drive to Healesville via Yarra Glen, to be there by 1:00pm next Saturday, for lunch (2hrs).” The organisation of the task becomes infinitely easier because many high level decisions have been removed as options and this has forced a focusing of intent. Now finding the answers to Who, What, How and When has been simplified, to much simpler and more logical questions, such as:

Who has a Drivers License?
Who wants to drive? Influenced by road familiarity and road and car conditions.
Who wants to go to Healesville? Influenced by total time and other commitments.
How big a vehicle do we need? Influenced by how many people.
How many vehicles do we need to take? Influenced by how many people.

Be defining the Mode of transport, Route and Time of the Event, departure times and the total time required for the round trip can be defined. If we drive we can say 1hr to get there and 1hr to get back plus 2hrs at the lunch roughly. These estimates also allow us to understand how much of our Saturday afternoon/evening will be taken up and if we will be traveling at night. These factors will influence who may wish to come.

So the better we define the processes we wish to take to get where we are going the higher our chances of success. You may also of noted that high level defined parameters does not remove all freedoms when planning and in fact with this high level guidance we are often liberated to achieve our goals.

Personal Philosophy 101: No Solutions, just Tools

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Personal Philosophy 101: No Solutions, just Tools.

In a world driven by a culture with a need to compete, complete, deliver and rapidly produce. I put forward, the simple personal perspective that there are no solutions, only tools and choices.
The need we all feel to deliver a “solution” for our customers and ourselves is admirable but it also has a much darker side and consequences. The unspoken idea that we can give people and organisations a solution, can be very harmful and blind us to the true solutions. The cold hard truth is that we can not give anyone a solution to anything, we can only provide them with tools, which they can use to help find their own solutions.
The underlying premise is that only “self” can find the “true solution” because only self can know the factors needed to solve anything often with many conflicting needs and consequences. To complicate the process even further, often these factors specific to attaining your true-solution are partly or mostly unknown. Therefore, if the self doesn’t know the required factors to attain the true-solution required how can a third party give them a solution?
It is this philosophical viewpoint, which leads me to the personal view that regardless of saying we deliver solutions, we actually can only ever provide tools so the client (“self”) can determine their own solutions.
We can provide options, opinions, advice and other tools but we can not actually quantify completely their requirements and the level of “hardship or discomfort” the client would find acceptable. In actual fact, they themselves, often are unaware of some or most of these factors, when they engage you to solve their “issue”.
The “solutions” we provide often become band-aids because of this very fact. If we do not know the complete environment, how can we provide a solution? If the customer is not aware or educated about the options, constraints, and issues how can any “solution” they ask for be anything but a band-aid? Just like a band-aid, these solutions sit on the surface and never actually become part of the “self” or culturally absorbed. The true-solutions are derived from “self” only when awareness of the goal and the issue matrix surrounding the goal are realised.
This may seem an unbeneficial viewpoint, yet if you and your staff understand this, then this acceptance will liberate and empower them to focus on the why and what-ifs.
Consider the developer asked to provide a solution for a customer, the first step is to usually focus on the constraints of the solution, not the issue matrix for the customer. In this step we immediately become solution focused not customer focused. Then we focus upon the constraints of the individual technologies we force upon ourselves to be used, not the evaluation of the best technologies or processes for the particular case. Again solution focused and constrained.
If we see our job as to provide tools we more easily embrace the path of discovery through discussion, communication, advice, options, and opinions and avoid the pitfalls of assuming the responsibility of a flawed band-aid solution.
The old saying “The customer is always right” always annoyed me, even when I worked retail. The simple fact is that if the customer knew what they needed, they would not need you. Your role is to help them make a good well-informed decision, your job is to give them the tools to do so! It is then up to them to decide their appropriate course. Some customers only focus on cost and then complain, others focus on brands and then become frustrated (you can’t complain when you spent that much). A few customers realise they need help and trust you will do the right thing by them. They are the customers you want and need to try and develop through education and together we may move a little further towards a better outcome, a true relationship.

Agile is like using a Chef’s Knife…

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Agile has been described as a change in mindset, which is a tricky concept to explain and even trickier to do.

What if agile is additive instead?

Here’s an analogy.

If we only had a butter knife in our kitchen, there would be some tasks that we can do very well, such as spread butter and jam on bread. Imagine if we wanted to chop up tomatoes. The tomatoes would be in very big chunks and it would be very messy with a lot of waste.

Then we discover the chef’s knife and learn how to use it. Now we can chop tomatoes (and other things) with a lot more precision and much less waste.

We do not get rid of our butter knife though (I imagine that trying to spread butter on soft bread with a chef’s knife will result in a very torn and unpalatable result).

Now we can do many more tasks in the kitchen, using the tool that is best suited for the job and the main changes we have made is to purchase the chef’s knife and learn how to use it properly – which is a case of ‘both/and’ not ‘instead of’.

The 12th State of Agile report from VersionOne has just been released, below is some data from the 11th (2017) report about the challenges experienced adopting and scaling agile.

Source: VersionOne 11th annual State of Agile report

www.StateOfAgile.com

Back to our chef’s knife analogy – it would be unwise of us to purchase one and start waving it around – they can be quite hefty and very sharp things. If used inappropriately, they can be very dangerous. We need to start slowly and learn how to use it until our muscle memory kicks in and then we can go a bit faster.

It’s the same with learning new ways of working – we need to know when it’s appropriate to use them and be careful that we don’t cause unintended damage as we build our ‘muscle memory’ and get used to the new practices, principles and techniques.

It’s interesting in the state of agile report data above that 2 factors appear that we can address in fairly obvious ways with training, coaching and deliberate practice.

  • Lack of experience with agile methods (47%)
  • Insufficient training (34%)

The remaining 10 factors have a lot more complexity and uncertainty to them and will be much trickier to influence.

If we stop thinking of agile as a change in mindset and see it instead as learning a new set of tools, perhaps that would help us to focus on the 2 factors above and reduce the impact of the other 10 at the same time.

It’s nice to get new things – and even nicer when we can still find uses for those items we have grown to love (like a favourite butter knife).

 

OFFICE SPACE AND SEATING ARRANGEMENTS HAS IT GONE FULL CIRCLE.

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Nowadays most of us spend most of our lives in an office type environment.

The idea of an effective work environment has always been present and yet often rarely discussed or analysed by most of us, myself included. I just know what I like and often modify my surroundings to make the best from a less than ideal situation.

The old school office/cubicles strategy, was rooted in hierarchy and even class structure. The “us and them” school of though between “management” and “labour”, yet it did allow for personal and private spaces which meant an inherent feeling of safety and ownership.

The open plan strategy, has its ideology based in the “we are a team” and “we are all the same” mindset. These ideas have issues in a work place; the bigger the team the more difficult to find harmony and we are not all the same. The funniest thing about the open plan office space is that a major reason for its popularity is not to develop an effective work environment but that its cheaper per headcount by easily fit more staff into smaller spaces and also that you can see everyone, giving the illusion of control.

The simple fact is that we often ignore or actively block out our environment be it work or otherwise. Details of our environment and how they effect our mental state, often go unnoticed and therefore are allowed to impact us without being monitored or adjusted.

How many of us remember the office spaces of our past and television sitcoms, cubicles, isolated offices and founded in the “us and them mentality”. Nowadays, we have the antithesis, being touted as the best option, the open plan, no partitions idea of office space. The driving force behind each extreme model, is only partly based in trying to allow for effective work.

The irony is that, as humans we need interactions with others and also our private space. Much like marine fish in a fish tank, I’ll get back to this later.

The traditional office space of the decades past, was one of higher management nested in largish offices around a space of partitioned cubicles. This lay out although not great had it’s merits. The physical barriers allowed the occupants to have a sense of private space and belonging. The ocean of cubicles provided a pocketed approach to office space, reminiscent of battery hens. Each isolated and working to produce, under the watchful eye of the farmer/manager.

As time and ideas changed the partitions got smaller in height and less common, the offices reduced in number and common areas began to spring up. The idea of this was to remove the barriers physically and hopefully mentally from the work space to allow for communication and a sense of community and partnership, to hopefully evolve.

The interesting fact is that different cultures behave differently but people tend to require the same things.

Ironically as the physical barriers, like walls and partitions, have been reduced or completely removed others have been erected to fill a need. The partitions have gone but the need for private spaces has meant that isolationist devices have become common place. The modern office space is open plan and headset isolated. The human need for self-space has replaced the partitioned cubicles with the modern cultural equivalent of isolation tanks.

The supposedly open office to encourage freedom and so we can have a sense of community and belonging has gone full circle to the isolationist mentality of boxes.
The mental isolation in the modern open plan work space is, far more detrimental than the cubicles of old and more difficult to see.

Personally I felt happier in cubicles, with lowish partitions and one glass partition so natural light could be allowed further into the room. The partitions were set out in blocks of four or six and sometimes even eight, allowing for team groupings and interactions.

The partition walls were low enough to see over, when you were standing but high enough to utilise them as extra work surfaces for charts and the tracking of work in progress. The sense of privacy was there and you also had a sense of belonging. You could hear others if you wished to focus or easily ignore the office murmurs.

If you have ever kept a marine aquarium or any fish tank for that matter there is a paradox which occurs when stocking your aquarium.
“The more hiding places there are the more you see your fish and the less stressed they are.”
In a marine environment fish are constantly on the look out for predators and prey alike, always aware and highly observant. The fish in a tank are no different, being exposed is stressful and a bad thing. A stark and barren environment, is a terrifying place and that is why fish kept in these conditions are rarely seen and often found cowering in what few corners or hiding spots there are. An aquarium with lots of hiding spots and ample swim throughs will make the inhabitants feel safe since they can always dart into a secluded spot, when danger is felt.

Maybe we should bare this in mind when designing work spaces.

A final thought is that traditionally homes are designed with common areas, lounge and living rooms, common rooms for eating and cooking and most importantly private zones the bedrooms.

 

 

 

Effective Efficiency

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Efficiency is not a good goal, effectiveness is a better goal.

What do we mean by being efficient? In simple terms it means doing a good job, a job that has the intended outcome with the minimal amount of effort. At an organisational level this is usually interpreted as saving costs and that can lead to what I would call some ‘cheap and nasty’ outcomes.

So we have started to rebel against the cost-cutting aspects of efficiency and are now very focused on effective outcomes…almost to the point that using the word ‘efficient’ is not really acceptable.

We can be both effective and efficient, and we should be. It’s a good idea to monitor for opportunities to reduce waste, while being selective about which types of waste make sense to keep or reduce.

The one place that it makes sense to be less efficient is when we are tackling complexity. This requires a probing, exploratory approach which can actually be more effective when it is not super-efficient…because we are looking for things which we are uncertain about.

The thing that holds the thing that the Stakeholders were holding

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So we all know about stakeholders…those people that care about what we are doing and should have a say in what happens.

Are there also people that care about the thing that the stakeholders care about that we would not call stakeholders?

What does the ‘stake’ mean when we refer to the stakeholder? According to Wikipedia, the term originally referred to the person who temporarily held the stakes from a wager until the outcome was determined. Business has since co-opted the term to mean people interested or impacted by the outcome of a project.

Tobbe and I were having burgers for lunch today…they were so tall that they had skewers in them to keep them together. So the chef held the skewer (stake) and we held the skewer when we ate the lunch, but the person serving us never touched the skewer…just the plate that supported the burger with the skewer in it.

That got us thinking about what supports the interests of the stakeholders, and yet, is not a stakeholder of a project or outcome?

It may be what we call governance. The scaffolding in an organisation that ensures that business interests are looked after…ensuring that our burgers arrive safely and without toppling over onto the floor.

ITSM and Cynefin – Lightning Blog

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I attended the itSMF 20th Anniversary Conference in Melbourne this week and it was great to see the emphasis from many speakers about automation and using DevOps principles.

The Cynefin Framework is subjective and I was thinking about where many of us see the service management framework and ITIL on it. It is easy to imagine incident management in the chaotic domain and standard change management processes in the obvious domain (highly repeatable and therefore great candidates for automation).

So it was interesting to see the keynote from Lindsay Holmwood titled ‘Mixing Oil and Water: DevOps in an ITSM World’ where Lindsay busted the myth that DevOps and ITSM don’t mix. ITIL and the service management framework are great tools to identify the candidates for automation and for where to ‘build in’ governance to our continuous deployment pipelines.

If we want to get into the market with safe and small changes that take into account operability, security, regulatory requirements, and resilience, we really need to partner with our service management colleagues.