A high-resilience org chart
If ya know how to do it, stick with the bureaucracy. If you’re building software, it’s always new — you need a generative org with a resilient structure.
teams
Those pesky pull request reviews
No one wants to review pull requests. This is a sign of a deeper problem than “people aren’t following the process”
Grow to where we’re going
“Plants are movers…. Plants grow to where they’re going.” Frazier, P. & Jamone, Lorenzo & Althoefer, Kaspar & Calvo, Paco. (2020). Plant Bioinspired Ecological Robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7. 10.3389/frobt.2020.00079. This is a keynote written originally for a private company. I’ll do it at conferences, including YOW! in September 2020. Short bite: In … Read moreGrow to where we’re going
Define roles by what each person increasingly knows
Say you’re aiming for outcome-based product teams that write and operate software. Maybe you hire for roles in these teams like Software Developer, Product Owner, Designer, Tester. How do you define each role? We usually ask, what does each person do? A typical job description includes: what does the person do? What are they responsible … Read moreDefine roles by what each person increasingly knows
The visible lines of division are not the meaningful ones
Imagine you’ve never cut open a human body before. Nor seen a diagram drawn by someone who has. Back before anatomy textbooks, the organs and systems of the human body would not have been obvious. I imagine asking, what are the parts that make up a person? and getting: head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest, … Read moreThe visible lines of division are not the meaningful ones
Software development is like geriatrics
Caring for software takes more knowledge than a single person can acquire. There’s the business knowledge that makes it useful, plus the languages and runtimes and infrastructure and deployment. Then there’s security, accessibility, user experience, each interface, availability, observability, scaling, performance, data modeling, testing, networking, etc etc. Every change to the software hits several of … Read moreSoftware development is like geriatrics
Understanding, inside and out
Every company, every team is its own system and works in its own ways. There are universal abstractions, but these are only useful when someone can translate them into the particular context of one company or team. Corporate anthropologists do this. First, they adopt the role of “participant observer.” They get deep into the context … Read moreUnderstanding, inside and out
Generativity
Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this … Read moreGenerativity
Knowledge resides in teams
The magic of a gelled team is that they know how to work together, and together, they know how to do particular work. The members don’t know how to work together; the team does. These learnings don’t reside in the members individually, the learnings are in the interrelations. A shared know-how is jointly constructed between … Read moreKnowledge resides in teams
Teams are like bread
Maybe when companies make you do “team-building” activities, what they’re looking for is a phase transition into a gelled team. Because it is a sudden, magical thing, right? When a group of people turns into a team. Once you get there, to that feeling of team, it’s self-reinforcing. You trust each other, so y0u don’t … Read moreTeams are like bread