The Leadership Dilemma

Why does anyone take on a management or leadership position?  Certainly some people like the power, some people like the relational elements of it, some people like mentoring, some people are administratively gifted and like planning, budgeting, etc.  That said none of these reasons alone are sufficient to hire another person.  You wouldn't spend your own money to employ someone for one of these reasons.  Ultimately I believe that people manage or lead other people so that they can multiply their effort.   A person may be phenomenally good at what they do, they may push the limits of reasonability in their work ethic, and they may have boundless ideas but there exists a limit to what they can accomplish on their own.  In order to accomplish more they have to manage or lead other people (or get happy not accomplishing but only a part of what they'd like to.... or get someone else to champion their ideas, etc.)

I've been thinking about this in terms of a mathematical function:

I'm sure volumes and volumes have been written about how to optimize first summation.  That is, how do I efficiently manage a team, what's the ideal team size and structure, how do I identify and develop the "beta" of my people, etc.  I'm interested in the second summation of the function with the "alpha" terms.

That represents the leftover time that a person has after pouring themselves into leadership/management.  In other words if a person would passionately do tasks X, Y, and Z on their own is there any time left to do some of those things after they're done leading.  Mathematically if 100% of a leader's time is spent managing then 1- the summation will be 0 (i.e. no left over time).  On the other hand if 10% of a leaders time across all of their people is spent managing them the manager will still get to spend 90% of their time doing things that (presumably) they enjoyed doing as an individual contributor.

I want to be a participatory leader.  I want to have time left.  I don't want the cost of my alpha to be 1 leaving me no time/energy to do anything else.  I like the creative/building process and leadership isn't worth it to me if I don't get to participate.

Process and Innovation

Last night I was talking with Shiree about work and a quote popped off my lips that was particularly quoteworthy.  So much so that I wonder if I've accidentally plagiarized it.

Process doesn't make a lightbulb.  It makes 10 million lightbulbs.

At work yesterday I was in a meeting an a colleague was lamenting how he spends time trying to have a well ordered plan and then it just gets messed up by things like Thanksgiving, or delays from other folks.  I quipped something like "maybe we don't need the process."  Another colleague replied "so we should have anarchy instead?"  The comment pissed me off so I sparred back with "you process people.  It's so black and white; process or ANARCHY."  It's not that black and white.

I suppose almost any orderly pursuit can be labeled as a process.  Thomas Edison tried 1000s of different things before find the one that worked to make his lightbulb.  He kept journals, ran experiments, recorded results, and tried out new ideas methodically; all in service of finding the solution.  He was deeply engaged in process (the scientific method for one), but it wasn't a process that existed to make 10 million lightbulbs.  It was a process that existed to make ONE.

It's not that I don't like process or that I think it's unnecessary.  Rather, it's that certain processes create lightbulbs and certain processes create 10 million of them.  I want to work in a process aimed at creating ONE lightbulb (metaphorically... the first X) not the process that creates more of them more efficiently.  It seems to me that some of the things that are being implemented at work are the controls and metrics around making more lightbulbs not making the first lightbulb.

I wonder if Edison set schedules/deadlines/etc. for his inventions? Did he measure his progress?

The burden of TED

If you've read any of my past writing you probably know that I watch a lot of TED videos.  One day I said to Shiree "we should take the family to TED some day.  I'd tell my kids one thing as we went...  'Work to make a life for yourselves like these people.  If you take away nothing else from these talks take away the hope of making a life like that.'"

I was a little disheartened to find out how apparently challenging it is to even be ABLE to pay the $4,500 registration fee.  I don't have any illusions that I'll ever grace the stages of TED as a presenter (though I hope that my life would someday be that inspiring to others) but I didn't expect that I wouldn't have done enough to even go to TED.  Check out their registration form (you may have to create a TED account first).  You have to answer all of the following questions and they consider them in your candidacy as a TED participant.

1. If a friend were to describe your accomplishments in up to three sentences, what would he or she say?
2. What other achievements would you like to share?
3. What are you passionate about? (work, creative output, issues, communities…)
4. What do we need to know about you that we didn't ask? (Up to 300 words)
5. (Optional) Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

So now instead of aspiring to attend TED I think I'm going to just have to aspire to be accepted to TED.  Or just cough up $1000 and be a part of the anonymous masses watching it in a webcast.

Trust and Dates

I was in a meeting recently where a couple of developers presented some cool work on an iPhone application we're building.  After the meeting the discussion shifted to dates and a couple of senior folks were essentially asking the question:

How come it's taking so long to ship this product?

Throughout the conversation I was troubled by something.  Thinking about it afterward it was the fact that the question above, as phrased, is a question of (mis)trust.  Generally I like the people who were asking the question so I don't think they were saying:

What are you wasting your time this time?

How come you're not as talented as all those other developers who finish iPhone apps in 1 day?

etc.

However it was not difficult to turn their question into those.

I don't know the situation, but if the team had said "we can build the app in 2 weeks" and then later changed the tune to "we plan on finishing the work in 2 months" management would certainly be justified in asking:

You said it would take two weeks and now it looks like it's going to take over 2 months.  What things impacted your original estimate, and should we keep pushing forward to finish?

Are there any resources that I can bring to bear to help deliver closer to schedule?
etc.

Barring some previous discussion of schedules/estimations/etc. I think questions like "how come it's taking so long?" from senior (not the ones building) are almost always out of place without violating trust.  Hire the best people and motivate them to give a 110% and when it takes 6 months even if that seems long assume that they're doing the right thing and that they want to deliver as fast as the business does.

Back to the question above...  One final observation...  It was asked at the wrong time and in the wrong context; after a cool demonstration and in a relatively public setting (many people had left).  It should've been asked to a smaller audience at a time specifically dedicated to talking about the execution/delivery.

Too big to understand

If you're an adult and you have a pulse you've heard the phrase Too Big to Fail in the past two years as the American financial system nearly imploded taking the world with it while bureaucrats and financial geniuses raced to stop that.
As the health care bill wended it's way through the house and senate and I listened to conservatives and liberals talk about it. To some it's the "nightmare before Christmas" to others it's the "most important piece of legislation since Medicare"  These can't BOTH be true (can they?).  And let's assume that above average intelligence, thoughtful, and rational people are making these diametrically opposite statements.  Why is that?
It's not just health care either.  It's global warming/climate change, it's MFN status for Zambia (not that we're doing that), or the farm bill.  So is it just that our political discourse is just too eristic and that the way to really find sincere debate that leads to consensus is in the public market?  But it's not just public and political either.  I've seen similar dynamics at work too; two ways to solve a problem one the anti-Christ the other the second coming.
I think these problems are are "too big to understand".  We can't assess them in their entirety; no one's mind is big enough to hold all of the details together at once and evalutate the whole thing fairly.  So instead we hold the parts in our head that we like and talk about it like those are the only parts.  I don't know that this is necessarily a problem but perhaps a couple of other solutions are in order:

1. Make things smaller.  Don't pass ENORMOUS bills.  Break them down and pass them in bite-sized chunks.  Hmmm...  America is too impatient.  Politicians want to pass a bill, says "health care is FIXED" and then move on.
2. Get REALLY patient.  Stop sniping at the "other side" focus our effort on making sure that we can agree on some minimal common ground.  Then let history be the judge.  I don't know whether the health care bill is a colossal mistake or a legacy maker for Obama, but I am sure that history will be a pretty good judge in 10 years.

Running faster than your buddy does not a team make

Our most recent project at work was kicked off not primarily with a clear mission and requirements but instead with a date.  It wasn't this blatant: "I want X by Y and neither X nor Y are negotiable." but it was pretty close.  So rather than wasting another second we started sprinting to figure out how to get there.  The "bold date" strategy seems to have worked in the past.  In our case the date seems a little too bold.  No one I've talked to thinks that it's an achievable date.
The greater tragedy beyond achieving or not achieving the goal is that it is creating unhealthy competition.

When hiking with a friend if you encounter a bear you don't have to run faster than the bear you just have to run faster than your friend.

We look at solutions and here's how the thinking goes (whether it is stated or not).

1. What all do I have to do?
2. Can I finish it before Y?
   • Yes:  Yow...  Poor team Z, no way they can possibly hit Y.
   • No: Uh oh...  How can I shed work on team Z or otherwise cut corners?

I'm not sure if this dynamic is the result of a cultural pathogen that needs to be cured or if it's because everyone sitting around the table is thinking "there's no way!".  Makes me really curious what all of the engineers, project managers, accountants, etc. were thinking when Kennedy set such a bold goal.  Also makes me wonder how bold it was.

Responsible people do the right thing

I was watching a discovery channel show about traffic (I think it was called The Truth about Traffic) when I learned about a fascinating experiment in traffic engineering.  The show featured the city of Dracthen Netherlands where they:

[....] removed almost all of its traffic lights. Major intersections have been converted to roundabouts, smaller intersections just let drivers work make decisions on their own.

The project was pioneered by a Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman who said this of the Dracthen experiment "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt."  The article goes on to say:

Instead of relying on a set of hard rules, drivers are asked to take their safety, and the safety of others, into their own hands. The result is that people are more aware, more careful and drive slower, but are far less frustrated while driving. Bikes and walkers now rule the roads and can pretty much travel non-stop around town.

Wow.  Remove the hard rules and give people control and their safety increases?!  The Discovery channel show was even more bold and it essentially argued that the instruments of safety in place in American roadways, traffic lights, signs, paint, merge lanes, etc. actually subvert the safety they aim to provide.  Here's why...  The enable people to be autonomous man-machines while driving.  People are individuals disconnected from each other because the road system creates the illusion of safety.  "It's a red light, of course no one is in the intersection."  BANG!  In Drachten and other shared space they seek to put people in control and to connect them to each other (note the eye contact comment above)...  To make people responsible NOT the system.

So...  Does this apply more generally?

I was thinking about it in the context of work where we often talk about process and tools for managing software development.  The struggle is that it rarely fits perfectly and that often the tools constrain in some way or you have to hack around them, etc.  In wrestling with that it dawned on me.  Perhaps if we ditch the tools and put software developers in control that they'll do the right thing?  Much like drivers in Drachten...

A couple of caveats are probably in order:

1. The shared space model relies on responsible people.  Clearly drunks will continue to exist and are likely to kill people.  That's true regardless of system.  That said if you shift driving behavior I bet even drunks driver safer (rather than barreling down the highway at 100mph confident in the paint and stop lights... a bullet looking for a victim)...  A software management of the same shared space model would require hiring "responsible" people (maybe even more important than smart, capable, skilled people?)
2. The model had SOME structure/process.  There were roads and roundabouts.  The point though is that it was the RIGHT structure.