 All right building blocks of a knowledge work culture. Yes. I am doc Norton. I am CEO of a company called CTO to we do Leadership agile process coaching for organizations for whom software delivery is critical These days that means just about everyone as far as I'm concerned But I still the qualifier in there because if you don't recognize it in your company, you're probably not our customer You can find me anywhere as Doc on dev. I've got it here. Of course we are at Yep, the tag is wrong in this one. It's not quite the right version We are at Agile India the hashtag is Agile India 2016 that should appear on most of the slides And if you want to actually tweet about this talk in particular the hashtag for this is called trace So I've got a couple things that I want to talk about today I'm going to start off with work types and Management so I just want to see it show a hands quick who here's familiar with Kenevan framework More and more folks are familiar with it. So I'm gonna go through it kind of quick But I'm going through it I think in perhaps a different way than you've seen it before or at least with a little bit of a different dimension to it So start off First of all, this is not a quadrant It looks similar to a quadrant, but actually there are five domains or five contexts and Kenevan is best basically a sensing framework is a way for us to kind of look at our surrounding environment and understand What's going on and where are we in terms of complexity? I want to start off talking about the obvious domain Now the obvious domain This is work that is obvious Right in this we have known knowns Examples of obvious work. I think are things like if you are a cashier at grocery store Right the way that you actually make decisions in this role the way that you make decisions in an obvious domain Is you categorize the thing that's in front of you right you look at it you categorize you sense it in some way you categorize And you respond that's pretty much it there isn't actually a whole lot of cognition that's happening here So using our example if you handed me a box of cereal I See it's a box of cereal. I scan it and I put it on the conveyor if on the other hand you handed me produce Oh, I see that it's produce I settle on the scale I punch in a code and then I put it on the conveyor right there's not a whole lot of Thought for me to do this very it's it's obvious type stuff, right? This is actually the domain where best practices are a real thing There is a best way to do that thing Right there is one Highly optimized best way to do this thing. This is by the way the only domain in which best practices actually exist Now from a management perspective managers responsibility in an obvious domain is coordination Right their job basically is to zoom out a little bit to look at what's going on in the environment to observe To figure out what is in fact the best way to do something to codify those best practices based on what they're observing what they're seeing All right And the rest of it is really around coordinating schedules making sure that people are showing up that they're showing up on time We've got enough coverage etc making rules making sure that people are following the rules right This domain is Basically from whence management was born management as an actual Concept and as a formal role is actually not that old So management started appearing job placements for managers Started appearing in newspapers around the early 1900s perhaps Late 1800s but early 1900s when you started to actually see it happening quite a bit And this is right around the time of Taylor and others and scientific management Which by the way scientific management wasn't Taylor's he kind of absconded the name But right around this time, you know, we're looking at industrial revolution, right so a Lot of the a lot of people are moving into this kind of obvious type of work And we're trying to figure out how do we coordinate all this companies go from kind of small family oriented? Possibly communities to larger and larger and larger. How do we make all of this work? How do we actually have all of this happen, right? The MBA didn't exist until 1921 Harvard was the first with an MBA 1921 was the first so really if we think about it from an actual formal educational standpoint management as we know it is only 100 years old and in those hundred years Think about how much has changed Think about where we are today in terms of the type of work that we do on a day-to-day basis and where we were then Yet the majority of what we're teaching is still fundamentally steeped in The things that we were learning in the 1920s Now the next one that I actually want to talk about is chaos chaos was mentioned in the keynote this morning on a couple of occasions, right Chaos is basically Shits on fire Right. We're in trouble We don't know what's going on. We're not sure how to get out of this Right. This is actually a domain of unknowable unknowns so You don't know what information you lack You don't know what you need to solve the problem and You have no way of knowing what that gap is And this is literally like the places on fire type of stuff Here what we actually need is novel practices and the management structure here Is truly command now we hear about command and control and oftentimes when we look at the obvious domain We refer to the leadership there as command and control But it's in the in the chaotic domain where command and control truly is what we're what what's happening It's actually what we're looking for some one Needs to step up take the helm and Start just barking out orders Megaphone you over there you over there your one and only goal in chaos is to get out of it That's it Once you're out you need to move to a different form of management a different form of leadership a different style Now we look at these two domains and we've got some challenges here I think as we look at where we are today. We know that coordination is Basically where right the obvious domain is basically where most of our Knowledge about management actually came from and not much has changed over the course of a hundred years in terms of our knowledge About management yet what we need to be doing has changed significantly The second thing is in chaos. This is the place where the stories of heroes come from If you think about our heroic leaders in whatever capacity Many of those stories come from this domain, right? This is Steve Jobs returning to Apple. They are two months from bankruptcy That's chaos Novel practices he came in and did crazy things that people said shouldn't be done to save the company and turn it around But these aren't where we This is these aren't where we exist yet. This is where all of our stories and lessons come from So where are we? We also talked a little bit this morning about the complicated Domain now when I talk about this domain oftentimes I refer to it as compound and the reason that I refer to it as compound is it's fundamentally obvious domain pieces Put together in a more complicated manner. So a good analogy think of auto repair Right when someone brings a car in to the mechanic and says my engine is pinging The mechanic has to know enough about cars and maybe even know enough about that particular make and model to understand what are the Three to a dozen things that might actually cause that pinging they've got to ask you some questions They've got to get a better understanding so if they can figure out What is it that I should do to actually fix this now the repair itself might actually be obvious work the repair itself might be Quite simple something that is right, but to get to that point. We need to be able to actually analyze the situation Being able to analyze the situation means we have to have a deeper knowledge and we're actually thinking about the work that we're doing Here we have known unknowns The engine is pinging what could it be it could be one of these dozen things. Let me ask some questions. I Don't know yet, but I know what I need to know Make sense. This is the space of good practices Why aren't they best? Well, they're not best because in many many cases there are multiple valid paths to the same Good end to the same outcome. There really isn't one best way In most of these cases now there may be a preferred There may be a way that you as an organization have decided as a standard But it doesn't mean that it's a best practice. It means it's the one that you chose of the good management here is more about collaboration and that's because At this point I have to rely on the expertise of the people that are actually doing the work I As a manager can't be at every single spot to do the analysis to say, ah, this is what it is now Here's the simple work for you, right? Here's the obvious work for you now that I've done that analysis So I'm I'm a little more involved I'm relying a lot more on people's expertise some software development Falls into the complicated Domain we know what it is that we need to build we know what it is that it's going to look like It does require some additional analysis to figure out how exactly we're gonna get there There was requires expertise from our individuals But I would say that most software development today product development If we want to look at those two things right product development falls into the complex domain if You know Exactly what the product is supposed to be Exactly what it's supposed to look like exactly how the market's gonna respond exactly what's gonna happen one you're fooling yourself To you're not developing product. You're just building it Right that falls into complicated. Otherwise. We're in the complex domain complex We now have unknown unknowns So we don't know How the market is going to actually respond to this we don't know if the green button or the blue button is going to be Better or not and we don't necessarily know what it is that the market's going to respond to We may think that it's really important that we work on the purchase flow and get that perfect But it turns out that our search mechanism is what people really care about because of the style of product We have or whatever right this is domain of emergent practices So here we need to be doing things. We need to basically probe See what that response is make an adjustment do it again and allow Things to kind of come to us as we move through them management at this point becomes a facilitation When you're in the complex domain The best way to get something done is to hire a team of experts In the specific aspects of what it is that you need to accomplish and Let them work together get out of their way Don't try and Don't don't put yourself in the situation of well you guys get together and talk bring me what you think the proper answer is And then I'll make the final decision no one individual can make as Good a decision as a diverse group of experts in a complex domain and because what we're doing is constantly experimenting and Constantly looking at the data that's coming back and trying to analyze. What does that actually mean to us? You need that diversity of thought in that team on that group Are there questions about this or comments on this say it again Yes, yes, the obvious domain is the other name for simple So so if you're familiar with Kenevan and it's it's evolved over time Dave Snowden originally called it simple and over time In the last couple of years Switched it to obvious and there were some reasons about that linguistically obvious was more descriptive of what he actually wanted to convey Simple had kind of this connotation to it that he didn't I don't think he really intended So I kind of covered this right knowledge work Is either complicated or it's complex? I actually argue that most of it is complex I'm standing here at a software development conference. Basically, right? We're all involved in in agility So I would say your work is complicated or complex question. So the question here was Compound or complicated better for waterfall and then complex better for agile. I Don't know. I would almost say that obvious is good for waterfall Which if you think about that then says wait that would mean that waterfall isn't good for software development I Would say that comp that the compound the complicated We're looking at something like a strict scrum framework Right where basically done. She said okay. Here's kind of a recipe for how you can you know Do agile and we put it in place and now we just follow this right when we get into the complex now We're actually talking about emergence. So now we're talking about what I think is actually the spirit of agility And that is that you're Inspecting you're adapting you're adjusting the way that you do things you are responding to the change in your context So you might have started with some out of the book form of agility But that's going to change over time Because that's what your organization needs as you learn what it is that you actually need so knowledge work falls into Complicated or complex Now if we look at kind of we talked about the management styles right if we look at this from a slightly different angle authority moves From absolutely central right remember in chaos. It's about command. It's literally one person in The ideal implementation one person barking out the orders other people just executing falling until we get ourselves out of chaos And as we move more into the complex that authority becomes distributed more and more Across the team less centralized more Distributed I'll talk about motivation and performance for a second and these two things are going to come together So this is a study that was done in the 1970s and you'll forgive me Because of the technical difficulties. I don't have some of my notes But what they did was they took a bunch of people and they they brought them in for several days And they had them play games and solve problems right now I'm showing a child here, but it was actually You know a college age adults and above so working on different types of challenges and problems And they were just monitoring kind of people's behavior, right? You know who's doing well who's not doing well are people teaming up are they not teaming up? Then in the second day unannounced They started giving rewards for success Oh You guys did really well on this you did better than others Here's a little reward for you. Actually you did the best on this. Here's an even better reward for you what they saw Was productivity kind of went up energy Went up There was a change Some of the folks that had done really well on the first day weren't doing as well But people that were kind of in the middle on that first day started to really ascend right and started to really do Well at this stuff, so then they took away the rewards to see what would happen people quit People didn't want to play anymore at all Those that were still you know still actually working on the problem still working on these challenges Weren't doing nearly as well So we can look at this and we could say okay Well, this is super easy then you just have to just have to reward people You just have to keep giving them rewards and they'll do really well so Easy management one-on-one stuff right give people bonuses and whatnot and and everything's good. It turns out that's not really true All right It turns out that even though there were people that actually Elevated because of the rewards if you looked at the overall average There was actually a slight decline in that second day And if we actually continue what we'd see over time regardless of the rewards is that It would go into a steeper decline and I'm sure many of you are familiar with Daniel Pink's Book drive and of course there's a lot of really good solid scientific work. That's behind that and and We've seen this and shown this over and over and over again if the work is obvious When you give people those types of rewards, especially in the condition of hey if you do this really well I will give you this thing That's fine, but as soon as it becomes cognitive work in almost any capacity even compound work Where it just requires some analysis before you get into Possibly an obvious solution a simple solution Performance goes down and it continues to go down if you continue to do this So What do we do? Well, it turns out The choice incentives have the inverse effect Choice incentives are things like You can give up on this project if you feel like it can't be successful You have a certain amount of budget that you can spend in whatever way you deem necessary to keep this thing moving forward These choice incentives at the very beginning don't seem to have an impact on productivity but over time The team gets better and better more motivated part of that is because in the beginning We don't have a need to exercise those choice incentives So we don't see the benefit from them But as the project goes on we have needs to actually exercise those choice incentives to make decisions as a team or perhaps even individually and That motivation continues to increase so we talked about Each of these domains and authority going from central to distributed if we look at motivators As we move through these domains. They go from Extrinsic to intrinsic Right chaos total command Giving people you know a reward for doing exactly what you asked them to do in the obvious domain same kind of thing But as we move into into complicated work That starts to fail and it turns out that it's the intrinsic motivators that actually keep people moving until we get into the complex Where intrinsic is basically what you know what we need to be providing? So I mentioned pink right? Three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction autonomy mastery and purpose. I Like his stuff. I like the book. I agree with everything that's in there. I find it challenging in the context of work Here's why What he's talking about is better individual performance and personal satisfaction what motivates You as a separate individual from everyone else in the organization And we actually think about how we work we work in groups. Ideally we work in teams and Those teams work with other teams Collectively they comprise the enterprise So what we need to be looking at is Team and collective satisfaction. I think there's four factors there. So I agree autonomy is still there connection excellence and diversity And I don't think it's very hard to take a look at these four things and realize that the three Are folded in here Individual motivation is important. We need to be thinking about the larger picture We need to be thinking about the team the team of teams the organization, right? So I'm gonna go through these autonomy at Group on We had a mantra doers decide And what it basically means is if you are the one doing the work you need to be the one that makes the decision about it So we were pushing responsibility down to the people Authority down to the people who ultimately held the responsibility Not necessarily an easy thing to do Took time to actually kind of get that in you know get that ingrained and get that moving but the idea that You own This right or your team owns this You need simple rules and guidelines So especially in a complex domain when you're dealing with complexity the best way to deal with it is through simplicity It's not that you know 50 chapter thou shalt thou shalt not rule book that you see in so many organizations It's really simple guidelines and rules. What are your values? What are your principles? How are the ways that you agree that you're gonna actually interact with each other, right? What are your decision-making protocols? How decisions get how do decisions get made in this organization and? Which ones can you make on your own and which ones you need to make in group? Right and what does that look like but simple rules and guidelines Let people have the freedom within those to do what they need to do high fluidity So this is interesting for me because for a long time as an agile coach one of the things that I advocated for was long time standing teams because Tuckman's right Tuckman stages of team development, you know the we got Forming storming norming and performing It's difficult to get through a lot of teams never get out of storming into really norming even norming takes Some takes a while before they actually get to high performing. So why the hell would you break them up once you actually got them there? Now I agree with why would you break them up? but What I'm actually seeing what the science is showing is High fluidity giving people the opportunity to move From team to team from project to project It's actually increasing productivity. It's increasing longevity. So those The standing teams the challenge with us not Basically what we're rallying against we're saying you need standing teams is please stop Disbandling and reassembling teams every time something changes in the organization. What we're really rallying against is someone over here Deciding what this team is going to look like and then pushing it down, right? But fluidity your opportunity to actually move from the team you're on to the other team from the challenge You're on to the other challenge from the role that you're in to another role We see extreme examples of this places like valve Valve the way that their work is floors configured All of the desks roll there are central power centers all around and so basically I'm on project a I Went out last night with a couple of folks from work We had a couple of beers or we you know, whatever it is that we do when we go out and somebody mentioned project B that they're on And I went home that night and I told my wife about it. I was like, you know, this really sounds like a cool project So the next day when I come in take my desk Unplug it roll it over to project B. What's up guys and now I'm on team B. It's that easy Not all places have that When I was working with group on what we did was there was a process you had to go through to move but it went from It was never a question of if It was only a question of when so Previously you could go to your manager and say hey, I'm really interested in working on that team over there And your manager would say what now is not a good time What does that mean? That's forever But if you don't know when That's no, it's just I don't have enough guts to say no So when we switched it to it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when which means it is you your manager and the receiving team Collectively have a responsibility to figure out what does the plan look like? What do you need to finish over here before you can go over there? That was it The fear was that introducing this fluidity would mean that everyone would jump from the crappy projects Me maybe they maybe they would But why are you running crappy projects? Well, they're or they're all gonna leave this this manager Wait a minute. You're telling me you know that they'll leave that manager But that manager is still there. Yeah, so we you know high fluidity, right? And then you're actually accountable to the team that you're on connection So connection actually means a number of things Obviously autonomy maps to autonomy right Connection one of the things that it maps that it means is purpose right starting with why why do we exist? Why is this team here? Why are we on this project? What are we doing really knowing how what you're working on contributes to You know an end call an end goal a means that you actually care about right that's purpose Connection also means things like decentralized communication Now I say decentralized because a lot of organizations are large enough these days that Everyone sitting in the exact same spot at the exact same time is difficult to achieve Maybe you've got remote workers. Maybe you've got you know, there's a number of different possible combinations permutations, right? But high communication. I actually really like what rich was talking about this morning in terms of you know Their their communication tools right pretty simple. Look at someone and talk to them. It's still my favorite. I Find it to be the most effective But connection is about being able to communicate rapidly with one another so a quick story 1960s and the US is actually quite behind in the space race and Kennedy by the way didn't Really care to send anyone to the moon to begin with he allocated a very small amount of incremental increase in budget to it It was kind of like yeah, yeah I got other things to do but his advisors convinced him that maybe he should pay attention to this thing And of course then there was the famous speech and you know man on the moon within the decade and a lot more money Was put towards that. How did they achieve that one of these they did was? NASA was a pretty large organization at this point. There was a lot of hierarchy There are a lot of silos There was a lot of kind of separation in the organization and they brought in this radical organizational consultant He looked around and he said you know what we need to do is we need to get Some of this minutia out of here. We need to clean some of this stuff up and we need better communication So technology at that time they didn't necessarily have the internet right they didn't even have necessarily email They put in a radio system Every team Had a radio that had over a hundred channels on it your team was assigned a channel When you were not face-to-face you had your radios and you were communicating with each other on that channel So if I'm off in the lab and I'm working on this thing and I discover you know Hey, these two components don't quite fit together I can radio back immediately to the rest of the team and let them know that that's going on Not only that but I can sweep that dial and I can listen to what's going on on any other team in the Organization at any time that I want and they were pretty deliberate about teams that worked closely together were close together on the dial and every day at noon at lunchtime everyone went to center and Everybody was in the same channel Talking about what it was that their teams were doing sharing updates. So 1960s version of slack and it was through that and other changes they made in the organization that in fact They were able to get in nine years a man on the moon Then as we look at it Other organizational specialists came in and one of the first things they realized was and there's a lot of waste in this system We could make things a lot more efficient around here. In fact the hell are all these radios doing sitting around? Let's get rid of those and over time NASA got a little slower and slower And now we have companies like SpaceX, right? Easy access to information information radiators centralized information Nothing should be hidden everything should be open and obviously listening to the customer again really good talk this morning about Actually going out and having those conversations, right seeing yourself as an anthropologist excellence You've got to know what the goal is What are you headed towards? Right, and of course we've already covered that you should know why you're doing that thing And then you've got to actually be able to see progress towards that goal This is a very key motivator for individuals, especially when we're working on something large The longer it takes to get any kind of a tada We kind of lose the enthusiasm But if we can get progress as we go along can actually see how we're doing towards these things right and our ability to Actually measure and assess Are we moving there fast enough? Are we even headed in the right direction and people do need to be adequately challenged some of this Some of this is where fluidity fits back in Your ability to say you know what actually I've been coding for, you know, 20 some years And I really want to learn more about What happens in design or what happens in product or what happens in accounting and your ability to actually move into that other Role right to continue to challenge yourself in new and interesting ways staying in that role and Actively elevating the things that you're working on and doing and creating a learning organization Diversity this is a really hot topic in our industry right now, and I think that there's There's a challenge here Oftentimes when we talk about diversity What we're talking about is increasing visible differentiators We need more people Who identify with this gender we need need more people who look like this or who look like that? Those are seeable They're measurable, but it turns out what you need in a complex domain To be successful is diversity of thought You need different perspectives different backgrounds different world views You actually need to create an environment That is somewhat conducive to conflict And I'm not talking about fighting in battles, etc. We need to learn how to actually have healthy Deliberation and debate, but that is where the best ideas come from that is where the innovation Actually comes from now. I truly truly believe that if we focus on diversity of thought Really rethinking what does it mean to hire for culture fit? Right culture fit has become kind of this catch-all for I'm comfortable with that person But it justifies my prejudice Right if we can figure out how to really do this we will see the visible differentiators on those teams and in those organizations We can actually achieve the visible differentiators and not achieve diversity of thought I Can have a team that looks Like it meets the criteria But because I interviewed all of them and I like All of them because they make me feel comfortable They all happen to be into craft beers and World of Warcraft Right, I'm not getting that diversity of thought that I need Cross-discipline teams. This isn't this is a duh for most of us in agile at this point Parallel thinking so this is where I'm getting into parallel thinking We've got that diversity right now. How do we actually? Engage in conversation in a way that we can move things forward and it's not all competitive Parallel thinking is a subset of lateral thinking Edward De Bono 1950s actually have done the research behind this and parallel thinking is something that I use quite a bit teach two teams on how to actually come together and you know Everyone is contributing We're getting to answers and solutions that are different from what any one of us would have come up with and they're not Compromise it's not that each of us has given up a little piece so that You know all of us can be equally unhappy It's that we've actually elevated to a different a different level And we talked a little bit about being able to actually define culture fit The other thing I don't have because of this is my timer, so I don't know how I'm doing on time. I apologize So I'm hoping there's time to actually have Q&A. I have a feeling there's not 10 minutes good. All right. All right So that's the four comments questions I really kind of like this is one where I like to have a little discussion rather than just keep talking. Oh, I'm over Okay. All right All right, I will be around For the remainder of the conference If you're really interested in the parallel thinking stuff I'm actually doing a workshop as well on collaborative tools and collaborative decision-making Apologize to the technical difficulties. Thank you very much