Organizational ADHD

Have you ever worked in an organization that is a typical case of organizational ADHD? Organizations that change their structure all the time - partially or completely - without respecting or even being aware of the laws of change.Once something does not seem to work (or does not fit the taste or ego of a manager), it's changed . Not by refactoring but in many cases by implementing patch after fix after patch. The first organizational "bug" that pops up is enough to go throught the motions again without worrying about the collateral damage that is created. Things never get the time to stabilize. Before people more or less understand what has changed, the organization has changed again.

A first side effects of this continual cascade of organizational changes is the fact that people get into the mode of "wait a bit, it will change anyway".

Another derivative of organizational ADHD is an organizational structure with a complexity that is not in synch with the complexity of the organization's goals set. An hierarchical chrismas tree with loads of managers, all with a very limited span of control and the "right to decide" on a micro piece of the process chain.

Although you find these "bad smells" in all organizations in one way or another, in ADHD organization, you can find them in extreme forms:

• "limited span of control": For every "two men and a horse head" (translation of a Flemish saying) there is a manager. This leads to upside down pyramids with more managers than "workers".
• "hierarchy over process": due to the fact that managers are all over the place, they need to be recognized and respected in one way or another. Due to that, processes suffer, because they are defined in such a way, that managers and departments get the visibility they "deserve". Resulting in havy processes with endless chains of process steps, and checks, stamps and signatures all over the place ('cause noone can be trusted).
• "too many decision makers": for every step in the process, someone else decides on go/no-go
• "hidden agendas": The personal "at-stakes" get priority over the end-to-end process or company "at-stakes".
• "ego over ratio": Although people know the current way is no good, they don't want to change it as it might damage their position, range of influence, ego.

No change before it hurts

All in all, our business is doing well. We're selling more products than ever. And if we may believe the analysts, "the best is yet to come".

In the mean time, our organizations get into a comfort zone. Things are going well. We're growing and gaining weight. We know we have "room for improvement", but why worry? We're making money, a lot of money! There is no sense of urgency to anticipate on future change.

But everybody knows that fairytales don't last. Like always, change will come in one way or another, whether we like it or not. Our inovative products will become a comodity (let's hope) and we'll have to come up with the next hot thing. Competitors will emerge. Shareholders will come and go. ... Are we ready for that?

When things go well, organizations fall asleep, and they sleep until a real crisis sets in. In the best case scenario, they "get away with it" by restructuring blindly - and getting the shareholders from their back ... for a while - but for some organizations it's the end of their business.

Stay awake! is the message, not to find your self in a "we knew it but we did not do anything about it" mea culpa situation. Stay alert for the signals, get and keep the sense of urgency alive, make your organization look forward and enjoy the rollercoaster of change. And although rollercoasters are scary - at least for me - they are exciting to ride!

Navi-System syndrome

The first time I had a car navigation system I was totally excited. It takes you where you've never been before.

Fact 1: It's amazing to see how people tend to follow the instructions given by a machine. Is it the woman's gentle voice that makes the driver obey the guidance instructions - for the women in the audience, male voices are also availabe for guidance. Is it the colourfull map display or the animated arrow icons that provide the necessary "street credibility" and make you follow the indicated route? Or is it simply becouse you don't know your way around?

Fact 2: When you travel in an area new to you, the quality of the calculated route is difficult to judge. But when traveling in an area you know fairly well, you frequently wonder what logic is behind the routing mechanism. Why is this device seldomly calculating the route you would take blindfolded? The system never tends to choose the natural trail choosen by people who commute every day.

Adding Fact 1 and 2 together, cummulated with the increasing congestion of our roads, results in the estonishing conclusion that these devices always get you where you want to go, but you're rarely the first to arrive.

You'll get where you want to go, but when will you arrive?
What has this to do with a learning organization or even with Quality Management?

Many companies build "navigation systems" for their organization. They provide nice process descriptions, policies, procedures, work instructions, guidelines, piles of document templates... all documented and accessible via sophisticated intranets and controlled by state of the art configuration management tools. Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 series, CMMi, Six Sigma...), with renowned certification programs, stimulate this to increase the capability maturity of your organization

So when you start "driving" around in a new organization, the guidance is only a few mouse clicks or phone calls away. You'll get where you want to go, but again, when will you arrive?

Refactoring Human Resources:
In these well structured and documented organizations, people tend to switch to automatic pilot and follow the guidlines without questioning. I've seen it happening multiple times, the creativity and agility needed for survival in a CMMi level 1 organization, tends to crumble when this organization climbs the ladder of capability maturity. Off course these organizations grow more mature, but what about the agility and creativity of the average worker in these organizations.
As survival is less of an issue in these mature organizations, this agility and creativity could be used for other means. And that's where most organizations tend to fail: refactoring their human resources.

Although I never worked for a CMMi level 5 company yet (lucky me ;-), but I've seen a few acting in the mean time. I've been everywhere between level 1 and 3 in the past years. People stop thinking and lose their imagination, creativity and agility if they are not lead by managers who are aware of these risks and know how to cope with it.
Having process descriptions, procedure for every single task and a job description for every memeber of your staff is fine, but it is not stimulating people to think out-of-the-box and look at things from a "non-documented" perspective. Worse, in some of these organizations, thinking out of the box became a sin once the "certification" is accomplished.

In navigating through an economical climate that changes continuously with an ever increasing speed and frequency, "getting there" is no longer the main requirement. Changing the focus of managment from a purely "operational" perspective to a "change" perspective is the main challenge now. The average manager is not ready for this.

The blue dotted squash ball

Once a week I go squashing with a friend of mine. There are different types of squash balls. Their properties are indicated by a colored dot. We're used to play with a "Super Slow" yellow dotted one. But this time we ran out of our favorite type, so we had to help ourselves with a "Fast" blue dotted ball.

The blue dotted ball turned the weekly routine into a totally different game. It bounced in all directions, points and sets were lost. Frustration filled the squash court. Until ...until I realized that different situations need a different approach, even when it's caused by a small colored dot.
From that moment in time, the game turned. Ok, it didn't turn into the weekly routine game, but I got the ball more or less under control ... and ... won the game.

The game is yours, focus on the ball.

Silver Bullet Methodologies

I started working as a software developer in a C, C++ environment back in 1991. At the end of 1998 I made a career move towards the world of Quality Management in software engineering environments. At that time the Agile methodologies went public with XP at its frontline.

I remember Quality Week Europe 1999 where the first signs of this Agile movement appeared. At that time the subject of the day was all about CMM. XP was mainly seen as "extreme" and "not realistic", a brainfart that would soon be gone.

One year later at that same conference there were multiple sessions on XP and although there were still a lot of people sceptic about it, at least some of the XP concepts were accepted as "might bring added-value".

As the maturity of our industry is "rather" low, Quality management is almost automatically linked to "Change". The Agile movement, and Kent Beck's "Embrace Change" theme in particular, has been shaking the tree for the last 10 years.

As the Agile methodologies are rather shocking for the traditional/conservative European ICT community, they form an interesting playground when studying "Change". I've been reading most of the books that are published so far on the Agile methodologies, XP, ASD, SCRUM and their related practices, with as main points of interest "how is change introduced?" and "How to cope with the resistance to change?”

I do not believe in religious advocacy, in my opinion process fundamentalists - whether they are iterative or waterfall, process oriented or Agile driven - risk of being blinded by their faith. And although I feel great sympathy with the Agile movement, there are no silver bullets, a team needs the "processes" - sorry for the ugly word - that suits it fine, neither more nor less. I guess that's what the scrum guys mean with "self organizing".

Getting Started

It feels a bit strange to kick off a blog, as if I had something to tell the world. What a strange idea.
On the other hand, when discussing agile software engineering practices with many people in my "network", I frequently see a "aha!" reaction. Things that look/sound straight forward or common sense at first sight, are not happening because a number of "only-human" aspects.

Getting into Agile is a paradigm shift that is harder to make than most people expect. I always compare it to the paradigm shift of going from procedural software development towards object oriented development. It all seems straight forward, but when you go through the motions of this change, man it hurts! All those little habits we've built for years, we all have to change them.

Well this blog will dance around this theme, hope you come join - and enjoy - the dance

Lieven