‘..impossible to superimpose an integrated process on a fragmented organization’.

This theme is also touched upon by Jeff Sutherland in his talk ‘Scrum and Not-Scrum‘. Jeff Sutherland is an expert on agile software development.

Interviewer: How does Nokia tell if a team is doing Scrum?

Jeff Sutherland: Do you have fixed iterations – that start at a specified time and that ends at a fixed time? And that iteration has got to be less than six weeks (this is not Scrum, but this is just their policy). It’s not iterative unless it’s of a time box that’s less than six weeks. If people answer yes to that, they go to the next step.

Well, at the end of the iteration, do you have working software? And this tends to rule out a lot of people, because if you don’t have working software you’re not doing iterative development.

And then they say, well, at the beginning you want to be able to start in an agile way. Do you have to have a complete specification in complete detail before you can start your iteration? If you have to have that, that’s not incremental development.

And then, finally, they say, it’s important for working software at the end to have testing as part of the increment. So, do you have testing at the middle of the development? That tends to rule out about half of the scrum teams, before they even begin to go on to scrum issues.

Interviewer: Why does it matter?

Jeff Sutherland: It matters because the whole point of agile development is that there are several interaction points. You want to have everybody in the process working together. You want the people responsible for formulating the product, the people that are building the product, the people that are testing the product, and the users who are going to use the product. You want them all working together.

If you separate things into, these people here they build the spec, and they hand over a document to the people who are going to build it. And they build it and hand over software to the testers. And then the testers hand it over to the customer. The customer says: ‘it’s not what we want’. So, you cycle back to the beginning and you go through it again. And if you go through this three times, they cancel the project. That’s why there are so many projects killed all aver the world.

So, you have to be doing everything at once.

Doing everything at once is possible if the organization is not fragmented there where the team dependencies lay. Fragmentation of the organization is inevitable, but it need not harm the operation. Just be careful where to put your partitioning.

An exerpt:

The power in most companies still resides in vertical units — sometimes focused on regions, sometimes on products, sometimes on functions — and those fiefdoms still jealously guard their turf, their people, and their resources. The combination of integrated processes and fragmented organizations has created a form of cognitive dissonance in many businesses: the horizontal processes pull people in one direction; the traditional vertical management systems pull them in another. Confusion and conflict ensue, undermining performance.

That’s not the way it has to be. in recent years we’ve seen a number of companies make the leap from process redesign to process management. They have appointed some of their best managers to be process owners, and they have given them real authority over work and budgets. They have shifted their focus of their measurement systems from unit goals to process goals, and they have based compensation and advancement directly on process performance.

Now I’m sure two things are of importance in overcoming those flaws in my communication. And these two things are very close related. I would not be surprised if they stem from the same underlying quality. The first is humility, in an article on warning signs that our ego is getting the best of us, this is explained not to be the opposite of ego, but to be the result of a well balanced ego. The second is listening. I think I would be a better listener when I would be able to balance my ego. I think a balanced ego is a goal that cannot be approached directly. But I can imagine the listening skills so beautifully described by Brenda Ueland, to be a means to approach this ego balance:

I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk, to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject.

My balancing skills might involuntarily improve while attempting to listen in this active, respectful manner.

De eenvoudigste wijze, om communicatie mogelijk te maken, is die mensen die voor elkaar qua relevante informatie van belang zijn samen te brengen in een organisatorische eenheid. Natuurlijk is het niet altijd even zwart-wit welke informatie nu het meest relevant is. Het in kaart brengen van relevante afstemmingsbehoeften en het toekennen van een gewicht qua relevantie is echter een belangrijke stap om tot inzicht te komen. De belangrijkste informatiestromen kunnen dan in de organisatiestructuur ondersteund worden. En die afstemmingsvlakken die vanwege zwaarder wegende relevantie van andere vlakken niet volledig op organisatorische wijze kunnen worden ondersteund, kunnen dan in ieder geval goed worden onderkend. Hierdoor kan er voor worden gekozen om de communicatie omtrent deze afstemming op andere wijze vorm te geven.

Een procesgerichte organisatie is gevormd rondom haar meest relevante proces(sen). Welk proces het meest relevant is, is voor iedere organisatie anders. De meest voor de hand liggende methode voor het in kaart brengen van de meest relevante processen is door middel van interviews met medewerkers. Geselecteerd op basis van een dwarsdoorsnede van de organisatie.

Welk proces het meest relevant is is voor iedere organisatie in de loop van de tijd aan verandering onderhevig. Voor een procesgerichte organisatie is het daarom noodzakelijk de relevantie van haar processen te toetsen. En om zelf de kunde op te bouwen om, indien er signalen zijn dat de communicatie niet meer voldoende ondersteund wordt in de bestaande structuur, te komen tot een nieuwe structuur. Eventueel kan hierbij opnieuw de hulp van een externe deskundige worden ingeroepen, maar het is van belang dat de organisatie zelf in staat is snel te zien dat de huidige structuur niet meer voldoet. Op die manier heeft de disfunctionele structuur niet zoveel tijd gehad om emotionele schade en vervreemding te veroorzaken.

Now I found this webcast to be worthwhile not only because of the enlightening content, but also for the dynamic way in which Kenny Moore tells his story. It is very interactive and he has a marvelous gentle and refined sense of humor.

Some excerpts that I really liked:

Answering the question: How do you deal with employees who are negative no matter what the company does or what message they deliver?

Kenny first tells us that he loves those people, as they represent a part of him. Next he says, let’s take a look at a way of looking at this. He puts on a model, based on the work of Claes Janssen, the 4-room apartment.

This model says that everyone is always in one of the four rooms of the apartment: contentment, denial, confusion, renewal. How do people behave when they are in one of these four rooms? People in ‘contentment’ are happy, life’s good. People in ‘denial’ are angry, sarcastic. In ‘confusion’ people are frustrated, anxious. In ‘renewal’ people are engaged, entrepreneurial, energetic.

In this four-room apartment, there are doors, but the doors only go one way.

The door from contentment only goes into denial. Denial only goes into confusion. Confusion only goes into renewal. And renewal only goes into contentment.

Now, in Western thought we believe that only people in renewal and in contentment are good and that people in denial or in confusion are bad.

This model, which is based on how living systems thrive and prosper, says: no, actually, all four rooms are good. We need to increase our tolerance for these people. That’s the future of the organization! People who see things, they experience the shadow side of corporate life, and they don’t like it, and they want it changed.

Or, maybe the question is a larger one: ‘What might be an appropriate response to help people when there in one of these four rooms?’

People in contentment, what do you do for these people? Leave them alone, unless the buildings on fire, then you tell them to get out. But it’s just a matter of time before these people go into denial.

Angry. Sarcastic. Passive aggressive. What do you do for these people? There are three things you do, there is one thing you never do.

The three things you do: First, listen. Sometimes just by listening people feel affirmed. The other thing you can do that helps, is raise awareness. The third thing you do, is ask questions. My two favorite questions to ask people in denial: Obviously you’re not happy. What do you need to do to take better care of yourself? The other question that I like to ask people in denial is: What can I do to help you?

The one thing you never do for people in denial, is give them advice. For two reasons. They don’t want it. Secondly, if you give it to them, they will take it, they will go of and try it, of course it will not work, and then they’ll come back and they’ll want more advice. These people will suck onto you like a leach and suck you dry and spit you out.

People in denial will eventually move into confusion. There are two things we do for confusion. By the way, denial and confusion in some regards have some of the same emotional texture. The big difference is, people in denial don’t want to do anything, they just want to sit and moan. People in confusion want it fixed.

For the people in confusion you do two things. You bring them together. So, when they complain and they say ‘nobody’s thinking about the costumer’ and ‘this whole system is going to fail’, I’ll say ‘well, you sound very much like Mary. Go contact Mary, share your concerns with her, she’s on the team. She’ll take that information and move forward with it. If she doesn’t, get back to me, and I’ll help you.’

The other thing you do is focus people on the future.

These people will eventually move into renewal. What we do for them is: we try to limit the amount of good things they want to get involved in.

So, to the question: What do we do for these negative people?

You know, they’re in denial, you support them. You let go of the need to fix or judge them. And that will help.

Further on in this webcast he also sheds some light on the interesting matter of what do you do when you manage? What is the transition you go through when you shift focus from work to possibilities.

There are things we meet in the business world that are called problems. Problems have their natural resolution in solutions. We like solving problems. When we do that we go home at night and we feel that we have made a contribution. We have had our expertise used, we sleep well.

If you’re good at solving problems in corporate America, we promote you. And when you are promoted you no longer deal with problems, you deal with, what I call it, predicaments. Predicaments are the imponderables. The dilemmas of corporate life. There are no answers. Regardless of what the consultants say. And it’s terrible dealing with predicaments, because we feel anxious, we feel ambiguous, we feel uncertain. When we go home, we don’t rest well. We feel vulnerable. We know that, when we wake up the following morning, we do not look forward to going back to work, because we have not been able to fix anything and the whole thing could fall apart. However, this is the domain of executives. They hate it also, because that is not what they are good at. What they are good at, is solving problems, which is why we promoted them. So we are asking them to deal in a realm that they are not competent in. Which is why they micromanage. They want to do your job. They want to do my job. Because that’s what they were good at.

What helps in dealing with predicaments, when there are no answers, is when you can get the questions right. That proves to be sufficient enough to make a movement. So that’s what you want to do with predicaments, is get some movement. And understanding that’s a flawed movement, that is almost two steps forward, one step back. That in remedying one problem, you create another. You can’t get it all.

The theological term for predicament is mystery. Which is why I know something about it. The natural resolution of problems is solutions. The natural resolution of predicamnets is movement. What is the natural resolution of mystery? Awe. Like Mozes standing before the burning bush. Actually, the word mystery comes from the Greek, meaning ‘keep you mouth shut’. And that’s what you do. I remember a woman to stop by my office last year to share with me that her daughter is dying of leukemia. You understand that’s not ‘a problem’. I don’t open my file cabinet, look under ‘L’ for leukemia. There’s no answer. There’s nothing we can do for that person. We are in the realm of mystery. I’m told that when doctors complete their medical school, they’re informed that 50 % of what they learned, is wrong. But we just don’t know which 50 % that is. Because when you’re dealing with people, it’s not mechanical, it is not mathematical. It has elements of the sacred, it has elements of mystery. Because someone said ‘computers are useless, all they can do is solve problems’. Which I kind of like, because you understand that that’s the realm of problems and solutions. I think that there’s also some other correlations here. I think that the more junior you are in the organization, the more you deal with problems. The more senior you are, the more you deal with predicaments and mystery. I think chronologically, the younger you are, you deal with problems. The older you get, life confronts you with predicaments and mystery.

It is a highly recognizable tale of the way performance measurement cripples performance in many of our organizations. The nice thing is that the article doesn’t stop at that. It also tells us about the importance of measurement and of how we can measure the things we need to know.

A quote:

‘There are two related keys to ensuring that a performance measurement system is focused on the right things.

The first is to emphazise end-to-end business processes, the cross-organizational sequences of activities that create all customer value. Processes transcend functions and other organizational units and are the mechanisms by which the myriad activities performed in an enterprise are integrated to realize results. Typically an enterprise of any size has five to 10 primary business processes, each of which may be decomposed into a similar number of subprocesses. By focusing its measurement system on processes rather than functions, an enterprise helps create alignment and a common focus across disparate units; instead of each seeking to optimize its own unique metric, departments are encouraged to work together to improve the performance of the process(es) of which they are part. …

The second key to ensuring that the right metrics are selected is to determine the drivers of enterprise results in terms of these processes. … to determine what factors were most critical to the company’s success and to identify metrics that captured them.’

The full article can be downloaded on the website of Hammer and Company.

When asked: “How do you change, when you see things are not right?” Wessel Ganzevoort answers:

You begin with looking at what’s really there. Often we are accustomed to look at what’s not OK. And we will design the opposite of what we really are. … The starting point for development is to start with what your good at, and to acknowledge what doesn’t work. Also in this matter there no basic difference between people and organizations. If you are very insecure, the first question I would pose is: ‘OK, what’s wrong with that? Let’s just let this insecurity be.’ Acceptation is the most receptive ground for change.

To me Buddhism in a way seems to encourage you to step over your negative feelings. While I believe that only by fully accepting and acknowledging your negative emotions they will transform, when the time has come, and not any second sooner. I recognize these thoughts in this quote:

Wijze vrouwen – Women of wisdom by Susan Smit, on her talk to Zsuzsanna Budapest:

In dutch:

Zij had uitgesproken ideeën over de donkere kant van het leven, in het bijzonder die in onszelf. Ze vond dat we in de westerse maatschappij een neiging hebben om een zonnige, blije kant van onszelf te presenteren en al het andere weg te moffelen. ‘Ik kom liever uit voor mijn jaloezie, irritatie of boosheid. Het is onnatuurlijk om die emoties geen ruimte te geven. Om je de waarheid te zeggen,’ zei ze met een ondeugende blik, ‘I think even the Dalai Lama has some shit going on.

Translation:

She had very outspoken ideas on the dark side of life, in particular the dark side of ourselves. She thought that we in the West have a tendency to emphasize the sunny, happy side of ourselves and to smooth over all else. ‘I’d rather admit being jealous, irritated or angry. It’s not natural to deny those feelings. To tell you the truth,’ she said, with a mischievous smile, ‘I think even the Dalai Lama has some shit going on.’

Zsuzsanna Budapest:

Or, as is my interpretation of the famous Oscar Wilde quote:

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it…

I first read this quote in English classes (introduced to the likes of Oscar Wilde by my Swinburne loving teacher) in a different way: ‘the only way to resist temptation is to give in to it’ and I still like this one better as it sounds even more true to the king of paradox.

‘When ambition is the motivating factor, the leader is not a true leader, but a commander. This kind of leader gives orders, doles out punishment, offers rewards, and manipulates everyone because the leader’s aim is to fill a hole within by taking from others.

The true leader doesn’t set out to lead at all. Whether other people follow is, to him or her personally, of secondary importance. These kind of leaders don’t lead, they follow—a dream, an ideal, freedom for their country, a good life for their family. And they’re very clear about it, which touches the people around them who then want to share in the dream. True, authentic leaders know they are connected to something bigger. Their wish is to serve that.’

and

‘It may not be your aim to save the world’s climate, but to be a support to your young dyslexic neighbor. More to the point, anyone who is always preoccupied with the climate and doesn’t see his neighbor may well be primarily occupied with his ego. Because as lofty as your goal appears, it will take shape right beside you, down at your level. ‘

I especially like this because I think that leadership does not show in big events or big responsiblities, but it (or the lack of it) shows in every aspect of your life. We all have the huge responsibility to live a life that’s true to our heart. It is tricky as there are no rules. It is so easy to lie to oneself.

Providing trust is in fact the only issue left for management to manage. It spreads top-down. It cannot be projected upwards in the hierachy. And the hierarchy is a fact, though often denied nowadays. If it does not exist explicitly, it is causing its effect implicitly. It is inevitable.

It is only by really empowering others, by acknowledging that their input is indispensible in the process, that the organization can act to its full potential.
This empowerment does need to go beyond the patronizing layer it is usually restricted to.
In order to do this, management should make this most precious move: it must trust itself. Meaning: there should be no identification with status.

Strolling the net I came across this interview with Alfie Kohn, regarding his book ‘punished by rewards’. I like it especially as he also describes what would be nessecary to inspire learning; the ‘three C’s’. (Bit of a turn off there, seven S’s, five A’s, six sigma, seven habits,… – all those numbers make me lose my concentration. My mind always wants to escape as soon as numbers show face) But… these three C’s are not that bad: content, community, choice.

From the article:

Content: Has the child been given something to do worth learning? If you ask me what to do about a kid being “off task”—one of our favorite buzzwords—my first response is going to be, “What’s the task?” If you’re giving them garbage to do, yes, you may have to bribe them to do it. If the kids have to endlessly fill in the blanks on dittos, you’re not going to get rid of rewards or threats anytime soon.

The second C is community: not only cooperative learning but helping kids feel part of a safe environment in which they feel free to ask for help, in which they come to care about one another as opposed to having to be manipulated to share or not be mean. Some of the outstanding work on creating caring communities is being done by the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California.

The third C is choice: making sure that kids are asked to think about what they’re doing and how and with whom and why. You know, kids learn to make good choices not by following directions but by making choices.

Parents who have read the book ‘Punished by rewards’ tend to go overboard with not punishing their kids by rewarding them. Scott Noelle wrote an entry in his blog on not throwing away the baby with the bathwater. I like this entry as it is about the undercurrent in communicating. It speaks about what will come across whether it is verbalized or not.

I think this applies to rewards too. A reward is a punishment if the undercurrent of what is communicated is ‘your worth does not equal mine’.