Agile Management | NOOP.NL

Complexity Everywhere

Ernst & Young recently “discovered” that employees will resort to corruption and fraud when they are squeezed by management. Or, in other words, when you treat them unethically they will behave unethically.

Surprise, surprise!

It is hard to count the number of similar discoveries people have made over time. Patrick Hoverstadt, author of The Fractal Organization, wrote that Theory-X managers get constant feedback that their world-view is correct. They treat employees as people who cannot be trusted. Et voilà, the result is indeed that nobody can be trusted! You get what you measure! (Goodheart’s Law). Ralph Stacey, author of Complexity and Management, called it reflexivity. There is no objective observer.

The observer influences the system, and the system influences the observer.

This makes it all the more strange that some complexity thinkers aim to provide a framework for dealing with different kinds of systems. If the observer judges the system to be “complicated” then he should apply “Sense-Analyze-Respond”, and if the observer thinks the system is “complex” then she should use “Probe-Sense-Respond”.

Sorry, but that just doesn’t make much sense to me when I take into account reflexivity and the influence of observers. Because maybe, when I treat a complex system as simple, this is exactly how it will behave to me. Or when I judge the system to be chaotic, this could indeed be how it will respond, but only because that's how I treat it. The way I treat the system will influence how it behaves. The observer influences the system. For example, why bother deciding if the behavior of a system is chaotic? Simply the act of ignoring chaos could make it go away! Problem solved. (It could also blow up in your face. You just can’t predict the cascading effects of your actions.)

It’s much easier just to assume complexity everywhere.

You can always reduce the universe to a few domains or categories later. When you have time, over a cup of coffee. With a delicious slice of Welsh tea cake, as I just enjoyed.

(image by Jonathan Lidbeck)

 

What Makes a Great Conference?

I’ve been asking around on email and on the social networks what makes a conference memorable, special, or amazing.  This topic has my special interest, not only because I attend between 20-25 conferences per year, but also because I’m trying to help make the DARE 2013 conference in Antwerp, Belgium a great experience.

The obvious replies that people usually have are “amazing speakers” and “great hallway conversations”. I agree, and there’s plenty that organizers already do (or should do) to make that happen. But personally, I am more and more convinced that “greatness” is an emergent result of the complex interplay of little things.

Here are some suggestions I received:

• Have great coffee available during the conference. (Johan Oskarsson)
• Have dinner with strangers at the end of a conference day so that attendees get to know each other better (Ángel Medinilla)
• Let people rate speakers directly after their sessions, and repeat the best session at the end of the conference. (Tiago Andrade e Silva)
• Use feedback/happiness doors to capture quick feedback after each session.
• Do phone interviews of speakers and edit their descriptions to match the audience. (Lee Copeland)
• Have an icebreaker party before the conference with a jam session of speakers and organizers. (Alexey Krivitsky)
• Print people’s first names on badges in big letters, and on both sides of the badge. (Jon Jagger)
• Use conference apps so that people can easily see the program on their smartphones and mark their favorite sessions.

And there’s much more, ranging from the very obvious, such as give away free books, to the somewhat-less-obvious, such as invite a circus act.

There are three weeks left until DARE 2013. The number of participants is growing steadily, while time is shrinking fast. I’m afraid we cannot implement all ideas people have suggested. But we’re trying hard to hear at least those three most important words, “That was great!”

p.s. I have a discount code for friends. Contact me.

Let's Measure Something Meaningless

Imagine that the government decided an intake of 2.500 calories per day should be the maximum for each person, regardless of age, gender, health, metabolism, dietary habits, etc. And imagine that the government also measured and enforced this every day, claiming it is “for your own health”, and handing out daily fines for each person who went over target. How would you feel about this practice?

Now imagine that the government decided that a speed of 130 km/hours should be the maximum for each driver, regardless of age, health, mental condition, road condition, traffic condition, weather condition, or the condition of their cars. And imagine that the government measured and enforced this, claiming it is “for your own safety”, and handing out fines to anyone who went over this “target”. How would you feel about that? Oh, wait… this is an actual practice in many countries!

I drove 14 hours from Bologna to Brussels yesterday, with a proper break every 2 hours, good nutrition, a healthy mind, a well-serviced car, and an excellent track record as a driver. During that trip I saw people not using their indicator lights when switching lanes, people overtaking others on the emergency lane, people using their mobile phones, and people driving vehicles that barely deserved the name “car”. And among those many thousands of drivers, I’m sure there were also some with mental problems, physical problems, mechanical problems, etc. However, the one who got picked out by the government was me. I got flashed twice because I drove “too fast”.

For every complex goal, there is a metric that is clear simple and wrong.

In organizations we see this all the time. Managers have a goal, such as faster time-to-market or higher productivity. But productivity is a very complex thing. It depends on motivation, creativity, innovation, collaboration, etc. And managers can’t measure all that stuff easily. So they reduce the metric to the simplest possible thing that can be measured with a computer: the number of hours people are physically at the office. And then they turn it into a target: the computer requires at least 8! Or else…

Measuring something meaningful is hard, so let’s measure something that is meaningless but easy.

Measuring real safety on the streets for everyone is next to impossible, so the government reduces it to the simplest possible metric that can be delegated to computers: speed.

I fear the day when governments find a way to have computers measure our daily intake of calories.

Blog Post #700

Actually, the previous blog post was number 700. This is blog post #701.

I wrote blog post #600 almost a year ago. In that year my readership has dropped from 1528 to 853 page views per day, and from 1078 unique visits to 629 per day.

Why? Well, I can make an educated guess.

I have changed my focus to writing the Management Workout articles, which of course means less time for my blog. And there are other new side-projects, such as Happy Melly and DARE. And I stopped making the Top 100 lists, which have traditionally been the biggest traffic magnets on my blog.

But I’m not complaining!

The Management 3.0 book has sold 17,000 copies in its first two years, and my self-published How to Change the World sold 3,600 copies in its first year. (Most self-published books sell less than 150 copies.) The number of RSS feed subscribers of my blog climbed from 6,600 to 7,290, and the number of Twitter followers climbed from 6,800 to 8,700. And the articles of my upcoming book, Management Workout, have (so far) been viewed or downloaded 37,000 times.

You win some and you lose some. :-)

Dare to Be at DARE!

I got myself involved in co-organizing a conference.

Again.

But this is not just any conference. This is DARE!

DARE is a conference conceived by Maarten Volders, the organizer of the wildly successful Lean Kanban 2011 Benelux. Maarten has teamed up with the initiator of the weirdly successful Stoos Stampede (Amsterdam) (that’s me) and the Happy Melly business network.

DARE is for people who dare to discuss wild ideas about organizational change. For people who dare to introduce bold new practices in their businesses. For people who dare to make work more engaging. And for people who dare to quit their jobs.

DARE has a great line-up of speakers: Dean Leffingwell, Jim Benson, Benjamin Mitchell, Ken Power, Paul Klipp, Hakan Forss, Karl Scotland, and many more. And… it has a great looking website, launched yesterday! I find the layout quite daring actually.

DARE is for agile workers, lean practitioners, systems thinkers, Scrum coaches, Kanban experts, change leaders, complexity thinkers, culture hackers, lean startups, and Stoosians. Only the people who don’t dare to make at least something better in their organizations are not invited.

Will you dare to be there?