Categories
Read Other People’s Stuff

Read Other People’s Stuff: 2

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLlfK_GQwko.

This is the most compelling software-related post I have read in a while:

Web 3.0 harkens back to the days when engineers thought Object Linking and Embedding and Open Doc were the future. The reason those things failed is because it’s more difficult for average people to think (or care) about information that is distributed than information that is centralized. Think about this: What percentage of Word documents sitting on computers around the world today have a live reference to a chunk of cells in someone else’s Excel spreadsheet?

Something that I tend to think of as a rule for ascertaining the long-term success of a technology is: does the technology make sense for people, or does it make sense for engineers?

If you are interested, here are some things I have already written that complement this topic:

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Categories
Agility Scrum

If a Tree Falls: The Sprint Review Is the Most Essential Ceremony of Scrum

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSCVOQv4j6E.

Prologue

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the pandemic has made professionally-oriented content feel overtly trite. Families and personal lives are eminently more important than they have been in our lifetimes. Out of respect for my readers, I’ve deliberately reduced my blogging for several months, writing occasionally rather than prolifically. My sense here in February 2022, though, is that people are slowly resuming their interest in new things about our work lives, as long as these things are simple and refreshing. This is the first in a series of columns written in that mold.


Many years ago, when I was in the habit of interviewing software engineers on a regular basis, I would often ask:

Apart from the Sprint itself, what do you feel is the most essential ‘ceremony’ in the Scrum framework?

I never kept count of the answers I got over the years, but there is no doubt that the most frequent answer — by a long shot — was the Daily Scrum. In many cases, this was the only ceremony the candidate was familiar with, which was a handy sign that he or she really didn’t have a full understanding of Scrum.

I recently shared a poll on LinkedIn posing this question, and received the following results:

  • Sprint Planning: 18%
  • Daily Scrum: 32%
  • Sprint Review/Demo: 32%
  • Sprint Retrospective: 18%

Is there a correct answer? Strictly speaking, of course not. But as a leader whose organizational responsibilities have included “agile transformation” for as many years as I can remember, I’ve developed an opinion that there is, in fact, one ceremony that is particularly essential in delivering on Scrum’s “inspect and adapt” principles. That ceremony is the Sprint Review.

The Sprint Review is where all of Scrum’s magic happens. Scrum without a Review is a tree falling in the forest with nobody to listen. The Review is the home of “inspection” and the springboard for “adaptation.”

The poll tells me that the majority of my readers’ brains are perturbed right now. Please allow me to elaborate.

First off: The Sprint Retrospective. Sprint Retrospectives are immensely powerful tools, and a place where inspection and adaptation — of process rather than product — takes place. Many Scrum practitioners are dogmatic about Retrospectives — but I like to say that the only place where dogma is acceptable is in religion. Woe be unto you if you treat Scrum as religion. As Scrum teams mature, with healthy self-empowerment and active daily conversations, Sprint Retrospectives are likely to decrease in relevance. It’s perfectly OK — arguably, healthy — to skip a Sprint Retrospective or two in a Scrum team that has been performing consistently well for weeks or months on end. A high-performing team will always ask itself, and answer honestly: do we need a Retrospective? If not, it’s OK to move on.

Secondly: The Daily Scrum. Here’s something controversial for you: Arguably, the Daily Scrum is the least important ceremony of Scrum. Why? Because high-performing and tightly-communicating Scrum team members are more likely to understand each other’s progress, work to come, and barriers as artifacts of their interactions throughout the day. Daily Scrums are absolutely essential for new teams and teams that are not good at identifying and articulating barriers (which is, admittedly, a whole lot of teams.) The most mature Scrum teams I have worked with have incredibly short Scrums, and even occasionally skip them to no ill effect.

Thirdly: Sprint Planning. I know what you are thinking: How can you have a Sprint, let alone a Review, without Sprint Planning? Isn’t Sprint Planning equally as important as the Review, if not more important? (More important? Let’s not get carried away! A planned and executed Sprint with no Review is a waste of time.) Here’s the rub: It is entirely possible to start an agile initiative with a Review of work that was not borne of a Sprint Planning session: A Review that consists of a display of skunk-worked/hobby-level/unplanned work that a team believes has merit. I call this sort of Review a “Big Bang Demo”; an “origin of the universe” kind of event. Once it happens, one of two things follow: a fizzle, or a proper Release/Sprint Planning session.

Of course, most Scrum initiatives start with some form of Release Planning, following up with Sprint Planning, so I can appreciate those of you who argue for Sprint Planning as the most essential answer in my little poll. But: apart from the very first Sprint Planning session, all subsequent Sprint Planning is informed by the outcome of a Sprint Review! Without those Reviews, there is nothing to adapt for subsequent Sprint Planning. If your Sprint Planning sessions don’t incorporate adaptation from your Sprint Reviews, I would argue that you have enough certainty in your project to merit a waterfall approach, and that you’ve chosen the wrong tool for the job!

This is why, to me, there is no doubt that Sprint Planning is a close second to the Sprint Review in terms of its essence. Scrum is a project management tool for uncertain initiatives.

The Sprint Review is where we learn. It is the fulcrum for all decision-making. If there is no Review, there is no learning, there is nothing for the Product Owner to approve, there is nothing to adapt from, and there is nothing that has been thoughtfully approved for release to the customer.


But all of this is more than a mere thought exercise. If your organization is on an agile transformation journey, you will do well to prioritize the quality of your Sprint Review culture over everything else in your Scrum process.

  • Make sure that your Product Owner attends and participates in every Review.
  • Do whatever you can to ensure that the Review grabs attention. Don’t ramble; stay focused.
  • Condition your Product Owners to be honest — yet respectful —about their feelings. Accepting work that the Product Owner is too uncomfortable to reject is a recipe for disaster — and arguably one of Scrum’s most frequent failure points.
  • Condition your implementation teams to avoid defensiveness. They should be ready to set aside all or part of a Sprint’s work if that is what the Product Owner decides.
  • Script and rehearse the Review so that there are no surprises. Don’t review work that hasn’t been reviewed and tested.
  • The team should strive to ensure that the Review is a learning experience, each and every time. If there is no learning, there is no point in employing Scrum.
  • Try to have as much fun as you can! Make the event something everyone looks forward to. Bring donuts. Or ice cream. At the very least, bring a few good jokes and a roomful of smiles.

The Review should feel like the point of Scrum. It should feel like Christmas morning, or the first day of Hanukkah, or any other day that you used to look forward to each year as a child. Done well, it is the “push” for the snowball that is your project, and each and every Review will see your snowball moving with greater momentum. If you get your Reviews right, your team will bring a positive and focused spirit to all of the other ceremonies of Scrum, from Sprint Planning through Daily Scrums and, yes, even to Sprint Retrospectives.

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Categories
Commitment Compassion Empathy Humility Invisibleism Patience Vulnerability Willingness

Look Up

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5ArpRWcGe0.

When you get to know someone, do you focus more on what’s wrong with them, or what’s right with them?

Is there a benefit to focusing on one or the other?

How do you feel about your own flaws? Do you admit them, or do you try to hide them or compensate for them?

Why do you think that’s the case?

When I was a young executive, my boss once shared the following pearl of wisdom with me…it’s explicit, but this is the way I learned it:

If you look up someone’s ass, you’re always going to find shit.

—H. Eliot Subin

Every one of us has something that, once discovered, will be off-putting to others. If we look hard for these things, we are certain to eventually find them.

When we find someone else’s poop — knowing that we each have our own — why does that so often surprise us, and make us think differently about them? Perhaps because most people like to like people. When we get to know a person and we like that person, it brings us joy; it makes us feel like the world is a better place. We like the honeymoon period, before we find the poop. We like the Hallmark Channel.

When we discover flaws in people, it’s all too easy to feel let down. But it’s a terrible mistake to dismiss someone else when we discover their poop. How would you feel if the shoe were on the other foot?


If you’ve been in business long enough, you’ve undoubtedly been asked about the leaders who have inspired you on your journey. For me, the most immediate answer has long been George Martin. He’s an admittedly unusual choice. I’m a lifelong Beatles fan, and while I love the Beatles’ music, I find their group dynamic even more intriguing.

The Beatles were four young men who loved music, and who had a deep appreciation for one another. But despite a few friendly and intense years in the early half of their career, they were decidedly not in love with one another. In fact, their creative peak paralleled their social nadir. They had different values in life and in their music. They worked hard to keep themselves together in the way the world expected, and George Martin’s greatest contributions were in providing musical balance to complement their competing ideas. Watching his deft, delicate, minimalist hand at work in Peter Jackson’s recent Get Back documentary series is a powerful illustration of this. As their closest colleague in the studio, he routinely mediated compromise, helping four very different people become something much greater than they were individually.

At this point, it feels appropriate to revisit the quote from Victor Hugo on The Progressive CIO’s home page, which presaged this very post two years ago:

“But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, ‘That is all there was!’ But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.”

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

If you lead teams of talented and smart people, they will have differences with one another — sometimes significant ones. They will find things to dislike in each other’s philosophies, politics, lifestyles, or approaches. It is your ability to embrace, cultivate, coach through, and complement these differences that paves the road from disaster to brilliance. What does it take for you to develop a deft and delicate hand to manage this?

First: Never forget your own flaws. This requires humility.

Second: Get comfortable talking about those flaws, which will be reassuring to those who you serve and who you lead. This requires vulnerability.

Third: Develop an ability to not be surprised or disappointed when you find flaws in others. In conjunction, develop the ability to lock, arm-in-arm, in your shared humanity, This requires compassion.

Fourth: Understand that what you perceive as a flaw might not be perceived that way by others. Try to look at this perceived flaw from different perspectives, and consider invisibleism along the way. This requires empathy.

Fifth: Learn to take a breath and stay calm when others find flaws and react in unbecoming ways. This requires patience.

Sixth: When walking through these concepts with someone who is struggling with what they have found: stop, smile, and share Eliot’s quote.

Then, explore the dialogue that opens this post. This requires willingness.

Finally: Teach these lessons forward.

Of course, there are limits that, from time to time, you will confront in managing this dynamic. The Tyranny of Competence comes to mind. The best way to address this, should you need to, is through compassion, and not through anger, remembering that we all have our flaws. This will give you the best shot at addressing difficult interpersonal situations before someone simply has to go.

I think many workplaces understand the need to manage differences; what differentiates the best ones is the way they manage the flaws we discover in one another. There will be failures. There will be break-ups. Even George Martin’s work couldn’t keep the Beatles together. But a great team’s finest work comes only with significant attention to managing their reactions to one another’s flaws, however ugly they may be.

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Categories
Blockchain Current Events: 2022

Crypto + Time < Crypto

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnbQFVxiSmk.

It seems that every day, we are getting better reporting and research to illustrate the fragile houses of cards we know as blockchain and Bitcoin. I’ve enjoyed tracking and sharing some of the choicest tidbits as postscripts to my first article on the subject.

I am troubled by the confidence that many people have in these technologies. Here’s what I tell those people:

Cryptocurrency is everything money professionals don’t understand about money combined with everything computer professionals don’t understand about computers.

This week’s most revealing academic work, which was nicely summarized in the The New York Times, highlighted the ‘decentralization theater’ that underpins Bitcoin. It is a must-read if you wish to stay on top of the latest in the ongoing dialog. What it also highlights, in its final paragraph, is something that we mustn’t lose sight of, and which I have attempted to summarize in my pithy headline for this post: what is encrypted today is not likely to stay encrypted tomorrow. Have a taste for what the authors were able to achieve from their research, and then understand that we are not too far away from quantum cryptography that brings us even closer to all of the details of the Bitcoin blockchain, and you begin to see how much “bunk” we are all being served.

You might like to take comfort in the fact that NIST is working on Post-Quantum Cryptography, but what does that portend for the contents of today’s blockchains? Some people project that we will move our crypto assets to newer technologies, but the remnants of today’s transactions will remain ripe tomorrow’s analysis. Even technology providers like IronCore Labs, who offer solutions in “crypto agility” (which, on the surface, sounds like a very good thing) will tell you that “That data is public and copies of it exist around the world. There’s no way to protect that data if an algorithm is broken or weakened, and that data will still be there twenty years from now. The future of blockchain in a post-quantum world is concerning.”

All of which is to say that, as a career CTO & CIO, I find that so much of our time is spent in the role of goalie to help deter the pucks being thrown at our organizations and their employees. It’s a tiring role because the situations we are protecting our organizations from are so much more complex than they used to be. Anecdotally, it is the minority of software and IT professionals who truly understand the holes in what’s going on right now; many are just as susceptible to the rhetoric behind the technologies as the neophyte on the street. All of this is ultimately demoralizing, because our time would be vastly better-spent — in almost all cases I can think of — on strategic things.

Goalies unite! The best tool in our arsenal is a public discourse to support one another as we fend off the bad information on a journey toward the good. Share these articles we find (as this site does so well), and continue to be critical of the bunk being hurled at us every single day.

James Reimer

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Categories
Commitment Willingness

Do Hard Things

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEiCNDHnpsU.

I once led a small, incredibly talented innovation team at a healthcare informatics business. We were a company of many firsts. Notably, we were arguably the first company in the United States to use the pubic cloud to host healthcare data, using many thoughtful and proprietary security techniques.

Our software stack was innovative, featuring many capabilities focused on ease of use and speed of operation. We had a relentless focus on security and user experience, which are not easy things to balance.

Like many agile organizations, our team sat together in a collaborative environment, and I enjoyed my first-row seat watching their daily interactions. One day, during negotiations in a sprint planning session, a thoughtful systems engineer described an upcoming feature to our software engineers that would bring significant value to our software’s audience.

“That’s hard,” said one of the software engineers.

What happened next was one of the most memorable and perfect utterances of a single word that I have ever witnessed in my entire life.

“So?” said the systems engineer.

Can you think of a better response than that?


(For those who are curious…of course they did it.)

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Categories
Curiosity Humility

Speaking is Disempowering: The Value of Shutting Up

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtzhvJh9NRY.

How many essays have you read about the power of active listening? Given the volume of writing on the topic, are you curious about why so many people seem so bad at it? I have an idea: there is not enough written about the complementary idea of shutting up.

Our ability to learn when to shut up is arguably more valuable than any active listening techniques we can master. Try something the next time you are tempted to speak: Stop, count to three, then ask yourself: Why am I about to open my mouth? Is this about me (merely demonstrating something that I know or wish to share because of how it makes me appear)? Or is it genuinely for the benefit of others?

More than any of us would like to admit (or perhaps more than any of us fully appreciate), we speak merely to increase our status or relevance in a series of conversations. Many years ago, I participated in an Agile Systems Engineering Workgroup for INCOSE, and was fortunate to spend time with a particularly well-rounded engineer who introduced me to the work of Keith Johnstone, an improvisational theater pioneer. In his famous 1979 work, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Johnstone offers a valuable and breathtaking illustration of how this sort of dynamic plays out in everyday conversation. I promise that once you have read the following excerpt, you will never see a meeting or simple daily interaction the same way again:

When I began teaching at the Royal Court Theatre Studio (1963), I noticed that the actors couldn’t reproduce ‘ordinary’ conversation. They said ‘Talky scenes are dull’, but the conversations they acted out were nothing like those I overheard in life. For some weeks I experimented with scenes in which two ‘strangers’ met and interacted, and I tried saying ‘No jokes’, and ‘Don’t try to be clever’, but the work remained unconvincing. They had no way to mark time and allow situations to develop, they were forever striving to latch on to Intetesting’ ideas. If casual conversations really were motiveless, and operated by chance, why was it impossible to reproduce them at the studio?

I was preoccupied with this problem when I saw the Moscow Art’s production of The Cherry Orchard. Everyone on stage seemed to have chosen the strongest possible motives for each action—no doubt the production had been ‘improved’ in the decades since Stanislavsky directed it. The effect was ‘theatrical’ but not like life as I knew it. I asked myself for the first time what were the weakest possible motives, the motives that the characters I was watching might really have had. When I returned to the studio I set the first of my status exercises.

‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic’, and actors seemed marvellously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’. It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.

Here’s a conversation quoted by W. R. Bion (Experience in Groups, Tavistock Publications, 1968) which he gives as an example of a group not getting anywhere while apparently being friendly. The remarks on the status interactions are mine.

MRS X: I had a nasty turn last week. I was standing in a queue waiting for my turn to go into the cinema when I felt ever so queer. Really, I thought I should faint or something.

[Mrs X is attempting to raise her status by having an interesting medical problem. Mrs Y immediately outdoes her.]

MRS Y: You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema. If I thought I could go to a cinema I should think I had nothing to complain of at all.

[Mrs Z now blocks Mrs Y.]

MRS Z: I know what Mrs X means. I feel just like that myself, only I should have had to leave the queue.

[Mrs Z is very talented in that she supports Mrs X against Mrs Y while at the same time claiming to be more worthy of interest, her condition more severe. Mr A now intervenes to lower them all by making their condition seem very ordinary.]

MR A: Have you tried stooping down? That makes the blood come back to your head. I expect you were feeling faint.

[Mrs X defends herself.]

MRS X: It’s not really faint.

MRS Y: I always find it does a lot of good to try exercises. I don’t know if that’s what Mr A means.

[She seems to be joining forces with Mr A, but implies that he was unable to say what he meant. She doesn’t say ‘Is that what you mean?’ but protects herself by her typically high-status circumlocution. Mrs Z now lowers everybody, and immediately lowers herself to avoid counterattack.]

MRS Z: I think you have to use your will-power. That’s what worries me—I haven’t got any.

[Mr B then intervenes, I suspect in a low-status way, or rather trying to be high-status but failing. It’s impossible to be sure from just the words.]

MR B: I had something similar happen to me last week, only I wasn’t standing in a queue. I was just sitting at home quietly when …

[Mr C demolishes him.]

MR C: You were lucky to be sitting at home quietly. If I was able to do that I shouldn’t think I had anything to grumble about. If you can’t sit at home why don’t you go to the cinema or something?

— Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

Have you ever been Mrs. X, Mrs. Y, Mrs. Z, Mr. A, Mr. B, or Mr. C? I suspect you have been all of them at one time or another; I certainly have. More distressingly, we’ve witnessed this very same dynamic play out before our eyes every day of our lives. More often than we realize, we speak in an attempt to elevate our status, rather than for the benefit of others.

Whenever I revisit this excerpt, it amplifies my desire to shut up in almost every situation imaginable; it’s better to let others have the silly status competition, I remind myself.

Speaking and status play become especially problematic during the sorts of discussions that occur during daily software engineering and IT work, which was the context for the conversation with my INCOSE colleague who introduced me to Impro. Allow me to share a story from my career (with names changed) to illustrate this point in ingeniare situ.


The scene: A requirements elicitation meeting with software engineers; a business analyst (Hal); a CEO (Stan); and the CEO’s right-hand man (Oliver).

The context: Discussion of a thorny business process problem with no clear answer. Stan & Oliver have very different views on what the solution might be, and they are both quite strong-willed in their vision. Hal is an eager engineer, always ready to offer solutions to any problem at hand, with a seemingly bottomless pouch of solutions.

The group gathers in a small room to discuss the issue. The entire team, including the software engineers, has heard about the business process issue for a few weeks, and everybody came prepared to listen to Stan & Oliver with the intent of bringing everyone’s different perspectives to the table.

Stan & Oliver begin to argue about their competing visions in front of the whole group. All the meeting participants ask questions and make suggestions, but both Stan & Oliver resist feedback. Hal, in particular, makes several false starts at articulating what he clearly feels is a brilliant idea (attempting to gain status), but Stan & Oliver are not ready for it. They are more interested in fighting each other’s views than hearing from anybody else.

After 20 minutes of this, both Stan & Oliver start to slow down, betraying a certain weariness. At long last, they begin looking around the room, with an openness to feedback. Their eyes, however, are more certainly trained on Hal, who they trust more than anyone else present. They look to Hal in a way that a golden retriever might, after being deprived of food for two days. Hal, a dutiful lieutenant, is ready with what he perceives to be a brilliant solution (and to embrace the status he has been granted), and the mood of the room — weary of the arguing — allows him, at last, to go into great detail about the idea he has been pining to offer.

Stan & Oliver seem relieved, and let Hal know that they think his idea might be the best solution. The group agrees to codify the new process into software for the next sprint.

After a week of hard work and a sprint review, the solution is put into production. Everybody is happy, particularly Hal. He’s proud that he was able to diffuse such a difficult situation with his ingenious idea.

But a week after that, Stan & Oliver are not happy with the solution.

Hal is devastated. He comes to me, and tells me the backstory. “My first idea was a failure. But I have two more. What do you think I should do?”

I suggested to Hal that none of his ideas mattered.

“Hal,” I said, “You will undoubtedly need to have another meeting similar to the one you had two weeks ago. But this time, I want you to do something different. Stan & Oliver will once again argue in front of the whole gang. But when they look to you, I want you to remain silent. The issue is that our suggestions are enabling them to avoid the difficult conversations they need to have in order to come to a solution that they both believe in. They want you to feel special, but that won’t solve their problem. I tell you what: I will join your next meeting to support you. If I think you are going to open your mouth in a way that allows them to avoid finishing their difficult disagreement, I will send you a message over instant messenger to help keep you in check.”

Hal agreed. We scheduled the meeting for the following day.

The format and tone of the second meeting was uncannily similar to the one two weeks’ prior. Stan & Oliver continued their now-infamous argument in front of the gang. But the room was quieter this time; Hal had shared my conversation with him and had asked all of the software engineers to take a back seat, as was his own plan per our conversation.

After another 20 minutes of arguing, Stan & Oliver once again grew weary. Predictably, their eyes veered toward Hal, with the very same golden retriever look that Hal had experienced before. Hal looked so incredibly eager to give in. There was a tremble, a redness, an eagerness…then I typed “Shut up” into the IM window in my laptop.

Hal looked down. He looked back up. He took a breath. Stan & Oliver looked at him for about 10 seconds, with no sound uttered. They looked at each other, and at the floor, and at each other, for what was probably only 60 seconds but what seemed like an eternity.

Then, eyes were back on Hal. But Hal dutifully kept quiet.

After 15 or so additional seconds, a magical thing happened: Oliver said to Stan: “I think we need to take this offline.”

The look on Hal’s face was the look of someone who was able to breathe after two minutes underwater — a palpable sense of calm and relief. The meeting ended as any meeting of this type would…with a unanimous eagerness to leave the room and move on to better things.

Stan & Oliver argued daily for two weeks after that meeting.

At the end of those two weeks, Oliver came to Hal and explained that he and Stan had come to an agreement, and they determined a way to address the situation in a surprising way: changing an upstream business process that the engineering team assumed was essentially immutable.

The team got busy writing up specifications and coding the new solution. Two weeks later, the revised software and business processes were put into production, putting a definitive end to the arguments between Stan & Oliver. (Well, at least about this issue.)

This is what led me to coin the phrase “Speaking is disempowering.”


Hal’s desire to offer a solution enabled — in the negative sense of the word — Stan and Oliver to avoid their obligations to argue. In opening his mouth, Hal got in his own way in providing a solution to Stan and Oliver’s problem.

My advice to anybody in a similar situation is to remember that when we take center stage, we force others to the edge of the stage. That presents a real danger.

I believe that “Speaking is disempowering” tells a different story than the more traditionally-offered “Silence is golden.” (Although I do love the modern twist: “Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.”) It is wise for us to remember that speaking carries a high degree of risk: risk in interfering with the status of others; risk in alienating others; risk in short-circuiting conversation. We often believe that opening our mouth will bring about positive change (feeling like a form of power), but the change it brings is just as often at odds with what we want or need to achieve.

The more we shut up, the more that people within earshot of us are able to draw their own conclusions, in ways that are both satisfying and lasting for them. Our real power comes from the self-control that allows that to happen. When we speak — when we are on center stage — we actively remove the privilege for others to speak and be heard.

Don’t ever forget to listen. But please raise a glass for shutting up.

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Categories
Agility

When Do I Choose an Agile Approach?

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFyzzcbSQ.

I’m often asked: is there a simple rule that will help me know when I should take an agile approach? This is my answer:

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Categories
Commitment Compassion Empathy Foundational Values Humility Patience Vulnerability

A Room With A View

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcJAWBsLVZ8.

In The Invisible Propeller, I concluded with a quote from Lisa Hermsen (the Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities at RIT):

“The difference between an engineer who can communicate and one who cannot…is a room with a view.”

In other words, if your communication skills aren’t top-notch, your career opportunities — and resultant lifestyle — will be limited. It’s my opinion that this should be the first lesson in any aspiring engineer’s education, lest we set students on a miserable journey toward dashed career expectations.

This is not what you see from the window of your parents’ basement. (Pix4free)

Longtime readers of this blog know that my father taught me this lesson at just the right moment in my life, and I have devoted the second half of my career to paying his lesson — and my good fortune to absorb it — forward, tirelessly.

For those of you who are new to this blog, the core communication skills are embodied in six of The Progressive CIO’s eight foundational values: Vulnerability, Humility, Empathy, Patience, Compassion, and Commitment.

I once had a software engineering student at RIT who told me that he was skeptical about the value of his own major (which is distinguished by a balanced emphasis on human and computing skills.) He said something to the effect of “too many software engineers can get away without knowing anything about computers. Only computer science majors truly understand computers, and I would hire them to program before I would hire a software engineer.”

And there I had it: an otherwise progressive young man within my own field, denigrating the value of what many condescendingly call “soft skills” that are essential to success.

I asked the young man to consider doctors for a minute.

There are MDs who supervise medical research in laboratories for companies. MDs who consult for the government. MDs who work for insurance companies. MDs who perform pathology or radiology. Then, there are the MDs who “lack bedside manner” (many fine surgeons). These doctors are at their best when they are handed an established problem to solve. In software engineering, we might call these people coding monkeys.

But these are not the doctors who elicit problems from patients.

The doctors we tend to value most are those who interact well with us when we don’t feel well, and help us figure out what might be going on. Through keen listening and empathy skills, they are able to turn vague symptoms into accurate diagnoses. These are the doctors most of us seek as a first resort, always ready to lend a listening ear, a thoughtful mind, and a sympathetic eye.

“You,” I shared with my student, “are like one of those doctors.” Computer scientists may be better-trained for the laboratories of our field, away from the patients the software engineers are better-trained to serve, but it’s one thing to understand computers; it is an entirely other thing to understand people.


I’d like to revisit the condescension of soft skills.

What are “hard” skills? Math, science, logic, and other formal methods that bachelors of science work to master. These skills do not come naturally, and are learned through reading, formal exercises, and other pedagogy. Hard skills can be tested objectively.

What scientists refer to as “soft skills” can only be tested subjectively, making them easy for scientists to dismiss. Whenever the term is uttered, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in the same way that they did when I — as a computer-programming, clarinet-playing, poetry-writing youngster — was called “wuss,” “fool,” “sissy” or many other hurtful things. “Soft skills” is condescending because it is a dismissive epithet, deliberately crafted to distinguish these skills as something “fuzzier” and less legitimate than scientific methods.

Fact is — and I didn’t invent this phrase inasmuch as I arrived at it on my own at some point — the soft skills are indeed the hard skills to find in quantity and quality in the workforce. Most people seem to agree that the Venn diagram of great scientists and great communicators does not have a huge union. (Indicators of the presence of this notion tend to be hidden in comments to articles like this one.) Despite what scientists might like to believe, however, development and testing of subjective skills can be done effectively. Just ask a liberal arts professor.

How would a scientist feel if I were to condescend or dismiss their hard skills by calling them “soft,” given my own capabilities for communication, audience analysis, listening, empathy, vulnerability, trust, and so forth? (I admittedly do this from time to time, just to make a point.) Is it possible for us to move on to a world where we use less judgmental terminology?

We could go with: Objectively-Testable Skills and Subjectively-Testable Skills? OTS and STS.

Let’s posit that engineers who are asked to work with other humans on a regular basis should possess something approaching a 50:50 ratio of OTS and STS. Computer Scientists can be successful with a higher OTS:STS ratio; Software Engineers and IT professionals will be most successful with a higher STS:OTS ratio. I don’t care what the scientists say; that’s a maxim.

If STS and OTS sound novel to you, then I’d ask you to appreciate the fact that I’ve deliberately snowed you. What this is really about is nothing new; it’s simply arts and sciences, in balance with one another.

Great scientists benefit from experience and practice in the arts of life. Scientists don’t serve science; they serve humans. Those who learn this lesson will always have a room with a view.

Isn’t that what we all want?

“The difference between an engineer who can communicate and one who cannot...is a room with a view.” —Lisa Hermsen, RIT

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Categories
Leadership

The Best Leaders…

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNMgncH5-w.

The best leadersare the ones who don’t seek to be leaders.They just focus onhelping people feel comfortableto successfully navigatethe uncertain journeys of life.

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Leadership Priorities Vulnerability Willingness

Your Personal Values Underpin Everything You Do. Have You Taken the Time to Write Them Down?

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There’s nothing quite like a car accident to help you identify your values.

Thirty years ago, Hyrum Smith became well-known for his “Productivity Pyramid” and popularized the practice of value-setting in his Franklin Planner system:

  • How can you identify things to do if you haven’t identified your goals?
  • How can you identify goals if you haven’t taken the time to identify your values?

While I was trained in the Franklin Planner, and appreciated the fact that what I do each day should have its roots in goals and values, Hyrum Smith’s approach always felt a little bit soulless. Why should values focus on productivity? Life is not all about productivity. It’s about floating through space on an earth-sized boat with trillions of other creatures, supporting one another while we try to make sense of what we are doing here together. While I had developed some values that underpinned what I did back then, all I can recall about them is that they were unremarkable and unmemorable.

I don’t think I’m alone. Most people I know — leaders included — have not taken the time to write out and articulate their personal values in a way that brings them personal clarity and vision. It’s a worthwhile exercise, as I hope you come to see.

In my first winter in Rochester, NY, my daily commute to Webster, NY involved driving over the infamous Irondequoit Bay Bridge. Traveling eastbound in the highly-cambered left lane one chilly January morning at 55 miles per hour, my car slid on black ice into the central barrier, ricocheting across all three lanes of traffic, straight toward the water side of the bridge.

In that moment, I closed my eyes.

I was sure that I was going to fly right off the bridge and into the cold bay below. It’s hard to describe what the human brain can conjure in the course of one or two seconds, but I can tell you that this is what came into mine:

“I am going to die. But at least I’ve settled every issue and shared my key life lessons with others, with no lasting regrets.”

Crash.

Then, I bounced from barrier on the water side of the bridge, ricocheting back into the middle lane of the highway, where my car came to rest. No other cars hit me. I opened my eyes, yet I was fairly confident that I was dead. Airbag smoke filled the cabin, my glasses were blown off my face, and I could not see very well. I took a minute to think about whether or not I was dead, and thought, “Well, if I am alive, I should at least be able to get out of this car.”

Getting out of a car on a busy highway is a bad idea, but adrenaline and cortisol have a way of making you do dumb things. I wound up being perfectly OK, with only a seat-belt bruise across my chest (which I didn’t discover until taking my shirt off later that evening.) My car was totaled, but I walked away with the greatest epiphany of my life:

“Whenever I confront my mortality the next time, I want to have the very same feeling that I did this morning.”

My values didn’t change in that moment; they merely became clear. Over the following years, as I went back to articulate my values, they developed into this:

  1. To love my partner Charles all day, every day. To be with him as often as I can, and to help him with whatever he needs. To learn from him, to listen to him, to make my life better. To do the same for him as he does for me.
  2. To be ready to pass away at any time, and to get others to understand why this is a valuable way of going about life. This involves sharing — never hoarding — my experiences and everything I know, ensuring that others are able to use what I share. This requires persistent teaching skills, and a dedication to knowing that this is an utmost priority.
  3. To do something rather than nothing. To take small steps toward an uncertain future. A partially complete plan with a spirit of commitment toward that uncertain future is more likely to survive the loss of a key person than a plan that never took root at all.

I would never wish you a car accident, but moments like this have a way of bringing all sorts of clarity.

Can I help you articulate your own core values without such a scare? Allow me to try.

Start by trying to identify your top three values:

  1. The first should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It should involve your devotion to a person, or being, or people who are closest to you. It might help you to amplify the earthly actions that drive your relationship with this person, or being, or people.
  2. The second should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It might involve things that inform your daily behaviors and that ensure a sense of assuredness when you pass away.
  3. The third should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It might involve the approach you take to do the things associated with your second value.

The values I value — and that are of value to us all — are the values that involve our soul, and not our work. I hope you can sense, as I do, that well-articulated values can have a huge impact on how you carry about your work. If your find that your work is at odds with your values, however…what you have, dear reader, is a bad job.

If the culture of your workplace allows it — and I hope that it does — I recommend that you and your leadership peers work on your individual values, and share them with one another. It can be especially valuable to do if your team is working on defining your company’s values; it’s almost impossible to do this well if the group of people doing it don’t have an appreciation for each other’s personal values. Although it requires a great deal of vulnerability, when done thoughtfully, thoroughly, and openly, this sort of exercise will enhance team understanding better than any Meyers Briggs test series can.

Are you willing to give this a start, today?

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