 So if we've got, there's a couple of tables or at least right now that have like two people at them. If you can find another table, five, six more people is good. A lot of stuff we're doing today is gonna be group exercise type stuff. So you guys are great, that table's fine. I will force people in that direction. Cool, so this was supposed to be, it is still making sense of sense making, you can see that the attributions are doc on dev, that's me and Agile Squirrel, who is Diane Zajek-Widi. And we're here to talk primarily about decision making in large organizations. And for me, the most difficult decision that I had to make this week was actually about my co-presenter. So strange enough circumstance, Diane and I were coming from the States, landed in Frankfurt. And when we got through security at Frankfurt through the first round, got to the next kind of international check. And her passports and Visa didn't match. And it actually turned out that she was traveling with a passport that had been reported lost or stolen quite a while ago. And somehow ended up being the one that she was taking, so they didn't match. And the passport she had was not valid. And so the decision that I had to make in that moment was do I stay in Frankfurt with her and skip the conference or do I travel on? And she eventually convinced me to travel on. Yeah, what's the matter? Better? Great, okay. So I've given this talk before, I gave it once in Scotland. And the most difficult decision I had to make that week was how to enter and get out of a roundabout. So this week's decision was much harder for me. All right, can we get, if anyone that's coming in, we've got a table over here that's got room. All right, I'm gonna see if we actually have enough materials. I may need to ask people to help me with getting creative around materials. What we're gonna do, I would like each table is going to be a team, all right? And what we're doing is, you all are starting a new distillery, right? Actually what's happened is you've inherited your family's distillery. And you wanna actually take this thing into kind of the 21st century, right? You wanna make this a much more modern thing. You wanna rebrand it, reinvent it. You wanna cater to this new hipster market. Does anybody know who this guy is, by the way? This is Jay Bloom. Jay is one of the owners of Praxis Flow. And he is actually, I believe, today defending his PhD in temporal contexts, or it's crazy. He is writing a PhD in decision-making today that has cascading effects out to 200 years, which is just a really interesting concept. All right, so you're the owners of this distillery, right? It's been a profitable lifestyle business, but you want it to grow to actually be able to support multiple generations. And you wanna expand to selling online, which currently it doesn't do. And you wanna create an app for reserving tastings, for tracking inventory, supplies, et cetera, all of this stuff, right? So each one of you is a member of this family that now owns this distillery and needs to make these decisions, right? So as you think about this, it's every kind of, at least an idea of what a distillery is. Anyone that does not have an idea what a distillery is, right? So it basically makes, in this case, I don't know, whiskey, right? But is it a small business, family-owned business that creates a product for people to drink, to consume. So as you think about this, think about the types of decisions that you might need to actually make as an owner of this distillery. What are the types of things you need to do to run this business on a day-to-day basis throughout the year? Now what I'm gonna do here, I didn't, I wanted to see how many tables we had first. We'll try this. It doesn't, yeah. You got more post-its? All right, so I don't care. Some of the tables can have post-its, some of the tables can have index cards. We can make that work. But let's just get these kinda, all right. So if you've got post-its at your table, great. If you've got index cards at your table, you can work with those. It doesn't matter either way. What I'm gonna have you do is I'm gonna have you write on these, and I'll give you some prompts for it. Different types of decisions that you would actually need to make as you're running this business. We have enough pens at tables. If folks need pens, we've got some up here as well. So first of all, I'll just give you three minutes. You don't need to come up with one or two items, right? But one item per card or one item per post-it. Decisions that you would need to make on a yearly basis, right? We're just gonna run this for like three minutes. So silent brainstorming, just yourselves, writing down what are the things you need to make on a yearly basis, right? What's mission-critical decisions? Something that somebody else knows, but you don't, right? Things that are risky, but what on an annual basis might kinds of decisions might you need to make? And we're gonna pull all of these together. So if on one, you're like, ah, I don't really know. It's okay, right? The table will come up with a whole set. And again, one item per card or per post-it. Sorry, I'll try and stand more still. I just realized I'm probably making the camera guy crazy. All right, we got a little bit less than a minute on this. And then what we're gonna do right after this is at each of the tables, I just want you to share amongst yourselves what were the items that you came up with, right? If there's any duplicates, go ahead and eliminate them and then you should have a small list or large list, depending on the tables of annual decisions that need to be made, right? So that's, okay. So let's move on to the next one that is, okay. So now, sorry. All right, so now at the table, it's just kind of talking about the cards that you have, you know, would you come up with, eliminate any duplicates and you should create something of a list of annual decisions that need to be made for this company, right? So working together, come up with a list. And let's make sure that there is one item per card, right? So if someone's got a list of stuff and you like that whole list, break it into multiple cards. Primary purpose here is to consolidate to a single list, not so much to evaluate each of the items as to whether or not we agree with it, right? How many of you have got a final consolidated list? All right, so it looks like several tables still need a little bit more time, is that true? All right, let's just like for another minute or two, right? You guys are set? Okay. The objective here primarily is just to de-dupe the list and to share our thoughts, right? It's not, it's, we're not necessarily evaluating, does everyone at the table agree with this? Should we actually, right? We don't need to make our case for why we think this is an actual decision that needs to be made. That's really kind of inconsequential at this point, right? We just want to make sure that we have a set of ideas that we've generated. Do we have any table that still needs more time? Still needs more time? No? All right, everybody set? So we're gonna do this again, but now instead of annual decisions, yearly decisions, we're gonna look at monthly decisions, right? So every month, what's the kind of thing that would come up that you would need to make a decision about? So maybe your annuals were things about like long range budgeting and that type of stuff, right? But now on a monthly basis, what are the types of things that you need to be thinking about as you're running this business, right? What's gonna be happening in the near future? What sort of operational needs might you have? What challenges might you face depending on the different times of the year, the different months, right? What are the things that you might as a business want to be trying or not trying? So what are some monthly decisions that you need to make? Again, three minutes to actually just generate your own kind of personal list and then three minutes to de-dupe and have some discussion and get that down to a set list, all right? So we'll start first with just kind of the each of you coming up with monthly decisions. Not necessarily, right? So it doesn't have to actually cascade. There may be annual decisions that need to be made that don't drive monthly decisions. Maybe monthly decisions that don't tie directly back to annual. It's okay, right? One of the reasons that we do it this way where the first half is silent writing and the second half is discussion. In many, many environments, if we just did discussion there are certain people who would dominate and there are people who would never have their voice heard. But when we do it this way where there is silence and everyone's writing something down and then there's discussion that follows on, more people have an opportunity to have their voice actually heard in that whole thing, right? And we're also not necessarily evaluating the quality of each of the things we're looking at are these duplicates or not? We are building shared understanding more than we're having an argument. Okay, so that's our silent time. Now, next three minutes, looking at what you've come up with removing duplicates and creating your pile of monthly decisions, right? Do one more round. Can you guess what we're gonna do next? We did yearly, monthly, weekly. We're gonna go all the way down to daily. We're skipping weekly, forget that, right? So, same process on your own coming up with some ideas, some lists, right? So, daily we're thinking about stuff that's variable work that comes up on a day-to-day basis. Things that maybe happen that you don't have the expertise in-house. So, you know, you gotta call somebody, right? Routine work that needs daily regular decisions made or incidents, stuff that comes up, right? What are those types of things? So, again, three minutes on your own and then we'll do three minutes of consolidation, right? At that point, we should have a pretty sizable list of different types of decisions that need to be made to help us run this company, right? So, now we'll do the consolidation at the tables, right? So, again, looking at what are the things you came up with for moving duplicates and getting your list of daily stuff. So, everybody should have a fairly comprehensive list of different decisions, right? In that last round, did you also include, you know, incidents, unexpected stuff that came up? Plenty of that? Okay, all right. So, I'm gonna skip, there's actually another round but we're gonna skip it where we usually talk about like, what are decisions that you make atypically, right? But I've found as I run this workshop that people tend to include those in the daily ones. When we do this inside companies, we specifically run the atypically anyway because we want people to really be thinking about that very deliberately. But here for the workshop purposes, I think we can skip that, right? So, all right, so why do we do all this? What is this all about? Well, here's the deal. I'm about to show you a model. And how many of you have heard this quote before? Essentially all models are wrong but some are useful. Yeah, so the model that I'm going to show you is in fact wrong because all models are wrong. But it is a model that I think is very useful. That by the way is George Box. It's my favorite photo of George. I can actually imagine him saying this very phrase with his hand kind of, right? All right, so the model that we're gonna look at, and some of you are familiar with this, but it's a model for actually making decisions. And the way that we're gonna do this is we're going to map all of these decisions that you have on your table into four regions, if you will, okay? So what we're gonna do is as you look at all of these decisions that need to be made, some of them will belong to the category of, oh, these are the types of decisions that everybody that works for the company would know how to do this, right? Or should, if you work for us, you should know how to do that. Anyone could make this decision, right? There are gonna be some decisions where we need an expert. It's probably somebody that works here, but they've got specialized knowledge about a thing or a area of the business or whatever it is. And we would actually need them to help us make this decision, right? So not everyone can make it. There's also going to be some where we're not actually sure what the best decision is. Our expert may have a really strong opinion, but we don't actually know. We'd have to like, let's try a thing and see what happens, right? And then finally, there may be some where it just feels like stuff's out of control. We're not sure how to make this decision or who should make it or whatever, right? So I'd like you to, for the next several minutes, I don't have a timer for this, I'm not sure why not. Put the questions in these four areas, right? On your table. So how you set your table up is fine by me, right? But identify these four areas and sort, working together, sort the questions into either like the decisions. Oh, this is one that everyone in the company would know. This is one where we need an expert. This is one where we're not really sure. Maybe we did some experiments we could try and this is one where like, I don't know, the distillery's on fire, right? It's just completely out of control, okay? So working together, reorganize your decisions into those four areas. Just the one table. Everybody else has theirs categorized into, okay, all right. So you guys generated a ton of ideas, by the way. I saw the thickness of your stacks. So it's understandable. It's okay if they're not all categorized. I think everyone's got a pretty good idea now of like what types of stuff falls into each one of those categories, right? So what I want you to do now, we're building our way up to this as I'm sure you've kind of guessed. I'm gonna see if I can skip over this timer. I can, look at that. Okay, I'm not gonna actually have you write these down. I want you to discuss, just at the table, adjectives that you think describe that particular corner. You've got a bunch of decisions that everybody knows, right? So what, does everybody know what an adjective is? Okay, and honestly, I've given this a couple of times and I've had someone call up to me and go, I'm sorry, what's an adjective? So I don't mean to embarrass the one person, right? But some kind of a descriptive word, right? For this particular type of decisions in this particular quadrant, right? So just kind of two minutes to come up with stuff, just discussing amongst yourselves, right? All right, so what do we come up with? What are some words you guys came up with for this one? Simple, boring, clear, monotonous, repetitive, less risky, easy, yeah, boring, right? These are, I mean, right? So all of these kind of down in that quadrant, right? They're all sort of, you know, they're simple enough decisions, right? I'm gonna actually adjust some of the timers here because I think two minutes was more than enough time for that. So I'm gonna actually drop the timer. So give me a second. We're gonna go ahead and make these just be like 90 seconds a piece. But we're just gonna go through each quadrant and we're gonna have this, you know, kind of quick discussion, right? Each kind of section and see what, you know, what post came up with. So hang on, you're okay with one minute 31 seconds for one of these, right? Okay, so same thing, right? But now let's come up with adjectives for those things where we need an expert, right? Those decisions where an expert is required. What adjectives might we use for those? Okay, so what do we come up with this time, right? Adjectives for this region. Expertise, specialized? Specialist, risky, right? So there's more risk here, right? Focused, outsource, that's unfortunate, isn't it? We need an expert, we should probably go someplace else. So this is totally off script, but it's just, it's one of my most interesting stories. So years ago, the first consultancy that I ever ran, we ran it for 12 years. And as it was winding down, I sold off different pieces of it, and I actually went to work for one of my clients, right? So what I had been doing for them was, this was back in the days before SQL Server actually had replication capability. And so I had come up with a technique for replicating SQL Server databases across multiple locations. And every time they added a new location, they would call me. I had to be the guy that came in and helped them figure out how to configure this whole thing, right? So now they've hired me on. So Monday morning I come into the office as an employee versus as a contractor. And they said, oh, we're launching a new office in Washington, D.C., and we need to know how we're going to actually configure everything. So let's go through our punch list. Da-da-da-da-da-da, SQL Server databases. And I said, oh, we need to do A, B, C, D, E, and F. And the CIO looks at me and goes, it's a pretty good idea. Do you think we should call an expert to make sure? And I said, I'll tell you what, I'll step out into the hallway and you call the phone number you used to call. But it's interesting, right? That as soon as you're an employee, like the experts are out there. So totally off topic, well, off script, but when you said that. All right, what other adjectives for this domain, right? Any others? Analytic, interesting, very good. Costly, delegate, explain that one a little bit more. Ah, delegate to somebody, right? So if I'm the boss, if I need an expert, I'm only gonna delegate to that expert, right? Interesting, okay. Domain, I'm assuming meaning like domain knowledge then, right? Yeah, assurance, very good. Okay, so guess what? We're gonna do it again, right? Solutions that are emergent, what are some adjectives for this? I gave you a minute and 31 seconds because it's a harder one, right? So just kind of among yourselves again and then we'll talk. All right. So for these types of decisions, any adjectives, what do we got? I heard a few that I thought were interesting. Innovatus, so innovative, right? Yeah, innovation, right? Eureka, exploration, dynamic, experimental, is it again? Competitive intelligence, ah, interesting, yeah. Breakthrough, risky, yeah, yeah, very risky, right? So we kind of have seen risk go up as we've kind of moved through these, right? The really simple stuff we said basically was not risky at all, right? And then the stuff that needed an expert, we said, yeah, there's some risk here. Now we're saying, hey, these are actually, you know, quite risky decisions, right? Experimentation, right? Innovation, forecasting, research, yes, right? So these are obviously areas where like that's what we need, right? Is research and development? We need to be experimenting. We're not really sure, right? All right, so let's do the last one. This one might be pretty easy. The stuff where it's out of control, right? So these last sets of decisions, adjectives that we've got. Chaotic, what's that? Trump, there's no following that, right? What are you gonna do now? Tsunami, unknown, challenging, messy. Disorganized, say that one? Disasterous, low demand. What do you mean by, what do you mean? Oh, gotcha, okay, right, right. So that may be what actually leads to like things being out of control. Is that like the product's not actually, there's no demand for the product, right? So you built this thing, you made all this investment and now we can't make any money. Yeah, that would certainly feel like it's out of control, right? You can look at this as an opportunity, right? You could, you can look at stuff at these types of things as unexpected as opportunities and some good stuff can emerge from that. So I think we got some good ones. So basically what I've had you do so far is in a very obtuse way, I've had you actually build the Kenevan Sense Making Framework, all right? And the reason that I do this is I've been studying Kenevan for a while and one of the things that I've noticed about it is it's really hard to understand but it's actually pretty straightforward. So this approach allows us to kind of see the Kenevan Framework in front of us, right? So what you've done is you've thought about the types of decisions that need to be made within your organization. We've done that across a temporal plane so we've thought about it from an annual basis, from a monthly basis and from a daily basis, right? If we were doing this internal to an organization, we would also talk about atypical decisions that need to be made and then we've grouped them into these areas of like, oh well anyone could do that or whatever and that is fundamentally the Kenevan Sense Making Framework. What it is is about being able to understand the types of decisions that need to be made, the types of work that we have to do within our organization and this is the framework, right? So it's not quadrants and what we have is obvious which I think we came up with simple, right? That was one of the adjectives that we used. Simple was actually the original adjective, the original word that was used in this domain but over time they changed it to obvious because simple in a lot of cultures has a context, an implication that it doesn't require intelligence, right? And that's not what we meant. Complicated, right? This is the stuff where like expertise is required, right? Complex, this is the stuff where it's emergent. We don't know what's gonna happen. We have to experiment. This is our R&D space, right? Challenge between complicated and complex oftentimes is that we want to believe that there is an expert that knows the thing about a complex domain and therefore it can be complicated. It should be complicated. Only we could find the right expert, right? So we try and find an expert who proclaims that they know exactly what the product should look like in order for the customer to be happy, right? But they can't actually know that. It's not possible, right? Or we look for the expert that can predict the financial market that we're trying to go after. You can't predict the financial markets. There's no expert that can actually do that consistently. And then of course, chaotic, right? Which is, which we came up with chaotic. That seems like it's fairly straightforward. All right, so this is interesting, but who cares? It's great. So we have a way of looking at the different types of decision we need to make. How is this practically applied in our organizations? So how do I use this thing? That's what we're gonna do next is we're gonna look at how does this actually apply? How do we use this thing? Or how can we use this to help us think about our work, right? So we're gonna start with, think about organizational structures, right? From very tight centralized command, all data moves to one person that one person makes all of the decisions to very distributed where the people that are closest to the information are the ones that are kind of making the decisions, right? As you think about obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, as you think about the types of decisions that you've made, what sort of organizational structure would you want to see? Would you want to have? And what I want you to do is, if you don't have enough post-its, or cards, let's make one for obvious, one for complicated, one for complex, one for chaotic, and then just put them in order on a continuum from central to distributed. Does this make sense? What I'm asking of you? All right, so as a group, and then over the course of the next three minutes, decide from central to distributed, where should these fall? Make sense? All right, did anybody actually get it done? Anybody got them mapped out where they fall? You guys do? So what are thoughts on this, right? What might this look like? Okay, so all right, so if you had to put these next to each other, right, so centralized, what kind of falls towards centralized? Chaotic, complex, complex and complicated fall towards centralized, right? Is that what we're saying? So if we have, the more complicated it is, the more complex it is, the more we need information to be pushed up to the boss and that one boss makes the decision on all of our behalf. I'm gonna tell you, that is totally the opposite of what you want and need, right? That is exactly wrong. Now, that's why this is interesting though. That's why this is interesting, because that is generally how organizations behave, right? The more complicated the problem, the more complex the problem, the more concerning the problem might be, the more likely many organizations are to try and move information to authority and have authority make decisions. But when you need to experiment, when you need to run R&D, there is no one person that knows what the right decision is. What we need to do is bring together a diverse group of professional experts, people who know specific things about that domain, about that problem and they collaborate together, figuring out what are the experiments that we should run and what do the results mean, right? And they're the ones that together best understand how to interpret the data. So power, authority, moves to the data. Authority becomes decentralized, the organization becomes decentralized, right? The more simple it is, the more we can operate with hierarchy, right? Does this make sense? Because if it's obvious work and everyone knows how to do it, the hierarchy becomes about coordination, right? Management of time, evaluation of your performance, those types of things can be done when the work is obvious. Now, the absolute most centralized one boss in charge making all of the decisions and everyone else just does what they're told, chaos, right? When we are in a situation where we know nothing about this, we have never seen this before, we've never been in this situation before. The one thing that we need to do is get out of it. That's it. Our goal is to get out of chaos and get into any one of these other rounds where we know at least some idea of what is it we're supposed to do. In those moments, one person picking up a megaphone and barking out orders is actually the best approach. In chaos, you do something. And then you do something, right? There isn't an analysis evaluation, it isn't even an experiment, you do, right? So what's interesting, I think about these in particular, is obvious is where we've learned the most about management. This is where Taylorism comes from, right? This is work time studies of people moving material across yards. This is work time studies of widgets moving through factories, right? And this is where most of what we know about management actually came from. Chaos is where our hero stories come from, right? This is Steve Jobs returning to Apple when they're about to go bankrupt and saving it, right? These are these stories of these great leaders. Here's the problem, those great leaders that lead us out of chaos are terrible leaders once you are out of chaos because information keeps having to flow to them and they keep having to make all of the decisions. Typically that's the case. So what we know about management and what we perceive as strong leadership, both of those things are completely inapplicable to complicated and complex work, which by the way as software developers, as people who develop product is fundamentally the only work that we do, right? If it's obvious, we've already automated it away. If it's chaos, well, this shouldn't be happening to us very often and if it is, we get out of it and we're back into complicated complex, right? All right, so that's kind of our organizational structures and we sort of moved into even authority management styles. So I'm not gonna do the full three minutes on this because we kind of ended up talking about it, right? But as you think about these types of decisions, again, what sort of leader would you want to have in each of these domains, right? So thinking about basically centralized to distributed would be chaotic, obvious, complicated, complex. Chaos is highly centralized, right? And complex is highly distributed. If you think about the type of authority that you would want, so command, right? True command and control to perhaps delegation, to perhaps collaboration, to facilitation, right? Would you change the order of these at all? We talked about chaos, what's the best way out of that? True command. It picks up a megaphone and starts yelling out orders, right? Trust in getting out of chaos or just in general? It can, right? I mean trust always plays a role in any organization, right? No matter how it is structured, if it is a hierarchy or it is an absolute command structure and I don't trust the people above me, right? Or the people above me don't trust me, that's an issue, right? If it's highly distributed and I don't have trust and connection to the people on my team and the other teams within which I interact, that's an issue. Trust is always a factor in any of these, right? So I would actually argue that for, I'm gonna actually just, I'm gonna skip this timeline. Yeah, I think in that moment, yes. Like the person who's able to actually step up and take command in a truly chaotic situation, oftentimes just that ability to have that presence builds a trust in the moment, right? And I actually was in a scenario where, this was years ago, but actually it was 9-11, right? I was working in a federal building at that time. And we had all kinds of disaster recovery plans. We knew what we were gonna do if the building caught on fire, we knew what we were gonna do, at least we thought we did. On paper it all looked good. But here we are, we're listening to the radio and we've got the TV on and no one can believe what's actually happening, right? This isn't reality, this doesn't make sense. We're all trying to just process what's going on. And all of a sudden, because we're in a federal building, we have 15 minutes to vacate the premises. That's it, everyone's gotta get out. And the CIO froze, head of operations, no one knew what to do. The guy that ran the computer lab at night was still there that morning. He had stayed late to finish some backup stuff. He stood up, pounded the desk, and said, all right everyone, I need you to go back to your offices, grab whatever boxes or bags you have, dump them and meet me in the computer room. And he figured out who was taking home what drives, how we were shutting down the machines. That guy had no positional authority, none. But he took command in that moment and everybody listened and we got out of there. So yeah, it is definitely just being able to present that way, right? And we knew that he knew what he was doing. He was the guy that worked on these machines all the time. The rest of us, right, that's true, right? So they may have actually been frozen by all of the other things, like they're thinking about the legal ramifications, he's not thinking about any of that stuff. He's thinking about how the hell do I get these systems down and everyone out of the building, period, right? So yeah, good point. So as we look at these, right, so we kind of talked about some of this. So obvious, really from a leadership standpoint, what we're talking about is coordination, right? And obviously I mean everyone already knows how to do this thing, right? These are obvious. So leadership becomes about whose schedule to work when. Right, it becomes about actually just coordinating the work, scheduling what's gonna happen when, what's our priority, et cetera, right? And maybe I'm mentoring and teaching as well, but it's primarily a coordination role. When it comes into, when you get into the actual complicated domain, now it's more about collaboration. And the reason that it's about collaboration is I as the leader may actually be an expert, right? But the types of decisions that need to be made require analysis. If I am the only expert, all decisions need to come to me, that doesn't scale. That doesn't work, right? If you ran an auto mechanic shop and every car that came in, you had to do the analysis, you had to make the decision. None of your people could actually do the analysis. You can only run like two cars at a time through that shop, right? It has to be that you're actually collaborating with your folks, they are also experts and they are helping to make those decisions. And in many cases, they are making the decisions on their own, right? So it's a lot less about you being in charge. There's the moving to the complex, now it actually becomes advancing here but not here. Are you seeing that on the screen? So the slide deck here is actually advancing, but that's not. Yep, that is completely frozen. My AV guys? Sure did. It's not showing what is happening on the screens, right? All right, so complex becomes about facilitation, right? At this point, because I need a team of experts to help figure out what are the next experiments should we should run and what do those experiments mean, right? I as the boss cannot be making decisions. So my role now is to actually facilitate the decision making. It is to become a subordinate member of that team to help them have healthy conversations, right? So now we start to talk, you know, we hear about like servant leadership. This is very much where this starts to come into play where this becomes a reality. You as the boss cannot actually make the decisions. So you become a facilitator, right? And we covered obviously in Chaotic what happens. And that is the one domain where, you know, command is actually most applicable. You honestly believe that it's my clicker? The slides are advancing. Yeah, it is advancing. It's not showing up there. In fact, here, I stopped the slide deck. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to be flipping about that. I was a little rude throughout the next slide. So yeah, yeah, so I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. I don't, yeah, no, no, I don't believe so, right? So I don't believe so, right? And that's actually part of the point of this is that, is that as we look at these different types of work, right, that exist within every single organization within those different types of work, we need to think about how we're actually making decisions, how we're behaving, how the organization is fundamentally structured, right? Because oftentimes what we have, one of the things I see so much in software development and product development is the majority of our work, the most significant amount of our work ends up being in complicated and complex. But how are we organized and how do we make decisions? We are organized for obvious. And we make decisions based on obvious, maybe complicated, right? And that mismatch causes a lot of the dysfunction in the organizations, a lot of it. But it may turn out that if you did this at work, if you did this at your place of work and actually talked about what are the types of decisions that we need to make on a day-to-day basis as the help desk support individuals, what are the types of decisions we need to make on a day-to-day basis, monthly, annually, as the mid-tier solution providers, the operations guys, you might actually find that even within your own department, there are groups where it makes more sense that they have a hierarchical structure and there are groups where it makes more sense that they have a flatter team of team structure and there may even be some group where they should be operating, pretty much in command mode all the time. If you've got a site reliability engineering team and their primary job is response as soon as something goes down, they need to be structured in a way that their best performance is happening in a command structure, right? And so it's not a universal way of looking at it. There isn't one way of organizing ourselves to accomplish the work. And that's really what, with this whole workshop, that's the point that we're trying to get to is think about the types of work that you do and based on that, then think about how you're organized, how you make decisions, right? And if there's incongruity, consider making a change the way you're organized and how you make decisions. You will get better performance. But it does mean that from an HR perspective, there's a real challenge here, right? Because one team is entirely hierarchical and so it's okay, like their growth path is all about growing, learning in a very narrow domain and increasing competence. Another team is flat and about research and development, right? And so their growth path has to be different. It isn't about being a dev one or a dev two or a dev three and just kind of walking the ladder, right? It's a completely different way of doing things. So that also means that now HR has to think differently about how work is done. And this is, we do this workshop in organizations to actually help leadership think about how are we doing this? And oftentimes we're able to actually point back to, okay, now let's look at this again. Your architectures like this, your teams are like this, your management structures like this. Right here at the epicenter is this team that you keep saying is a low performing, high problem team. Given everything that you've now seen, if you were on that team, what's the only rational way for you to behave? Keep everyone at arm's length, obfuscate your work, right? Pad your estimates, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, they're behaving exactly as they're supposed to behave in the system you put them in, right? And that's what we try and help organizations see. All right, so let's talk a little bit more here, right? So because I think this is interesting, so all right, so organization structure authority, it turns out that basically from a centralized command to distributed facilitation, they map out the same, right? So what else, what else happens? So it's not just about how we actually are organized and how decisions are made, but what about motivators, right? How do you motivate people? And by the way, the idea that you can motivate anyone to me is just preposterous, but I'm using this word because it is a way that most organizations think, right? So what inspires people to do good work in each of these domains, right? So if we think about, I don't know why chaotic and obvious are on there. If we go from extrinsic motivators to intrinsic motivators, you know, again, how would these map out if you, I know why it's on there, it's not supposed to be there. How would these map out, right? We can kind of do the same sort of thing. Fundamental question, the order that you have now, would it change? Do you know what I mean by extrinsic and intrinsic motivators? All right, well then I'm gonna run through this last piece fairly quickly then, and I apologize for going over. I think the center part actually took longer than I expected it would. All right, so we're talking about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators, right? And fundamentally, there's a study that was done where they took a bunch of groups of people and they gave them complex games to play. I show a child, but it was actually a graduate students and professionals and they gave them complex games. So like pseudo-coup puzzles, that type of stuff, right? And they had them run through these games and what they ended up doing was they gave them rewards for success. So they started saying they were like, oh, you know what, you finished that one really fast. You know, here's a cookie or here's a dollar or here's a whatever, right? And oh, you finished faster than everybody else. So here's an even bigger reward for you. And they ran that for a little while, right? So people were getting rewards for solving problems, for solving puzzles, right? Then they took the rewards away. Now what they noticed when they were giving rewards was that there were certain people whose performance went way up. And so the rational conclusion was that like, oh, giving rewards, performance goes up. This is good. The other thing they noticed was that when they took the rewards away, performance went down, right? Draftically, especially among those who had excelled under the reward system, right? In fact, many of them quit altogether. They just stopped even solving the puzzles. They didn't want to do it anymore. It really wasn't all that interesting to them, right? Now, the mistake that can be made here is the notion that oh, I see that someone's performance went up. People's performance went up because we actually paid them for their performance in solving puzzles. When you look at the group overall, performance went down. So while there were some people who under a reward system accelerated, the collective actually got worse. And then when they took the rewards away, it got worse again, right? So in knowledge work, in the type of work where we actually need to be using our brains and thinking, financial motivators do not work. In fact, they are impediments, right? So financial incentives ultimately decrease performance and when you finally take them away, it gets even worse. If they stay the same, eventually, there's a sense of entitlement and so they actually have less effect, right? But we discovered that choice incentives increased performance. So people who were given autonomy, the ability to make decisions like, I'm going to leave this project because I think it's going to fail, we should kill this project, right? The authority to spend a certain amount of money within a given range. Those types of things didn't have an immediate impact, but over time performance went up. Yep. So I'm trying to blow through this as fast as possible, right? So on a motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic, it turns out that our mapping is exactly the same. So we look at all three of these. Chaotic work, centralized with high command, extrinsic motivators. As we move over to complicated and complex, distributed, facilitative leadership with intrinsic motivators, right? And we are way over time. So I'm going to actually skip this last one. What I want you guys to do when you get an opportunity to think about it is think about at work, about a time for you personally where things didn't go well, right? And then think about what domain were you in, what leadership styles were in use, and how were decisions being made? And then based on that, sorry, had you applied what you now know about that domain, how might it have turned out, right? If in fact you had the right leadership style and decision-making, how might that situation have turned out instead? So an exercise for you to do on your own. I will make these resources available. The primary resource is actually decision-making framework, which is a, it's an HBR article, but it's from David Snowden, and then there's all these resources as well. This slide deck will be made available to everyone. Thank you, sorry, we went over time. And by the way, that's Diane, who couldn't make it because of Visa challenges, but she was supposed to be here to help with it today. Thanks, folks.