Weeknotes 439
I did:
No work
…but lots of thinking about work, including:
- How product managers might get practice opportunities to do product-y things they aren’t doing in their day-to-day work.
- What the steps to truly cross-functional teams that can influence all six aspects of the socio-technical organisation (goals, people, processes, structures, technology and products/services) might be.
- How Daniel Pink’s work on motivation (autonomy, mastery, purpose) could form the basis for a framework for delivery management.
Timeline
Added to the timeline of digital work. I’m being a bit haphazard at the moment and adding things as I think of them (books, regulations, etc.), but eventually I’d like to be able to follow threads of ideas to show how thinking changed over time. An example might be ‘how teams work’ which include Andy Grove’s work on OKR’s in the 1970’s, the adoption of open plan offices in the 1960’s, and the Tavistock Institute’s research in the 1950’s.
Introduction to Responsible AI
Signed up for BABL’s Introduction to Responsible AI course.
I read:
Signals to the system
Ben Holliday wrote about small bets for digital transformation, and how they can be “smaller experiments and pockets of innovation to create momentum and progress… Then you can distribute, share and scale what works”.
I’m a big believer in using experiments to validate learning. As I may have mentioned before, ‘expertiment, then optimise, and only then standardise’.
Bets
Started reading Thinking in bets by Annie Duke. Within the first few pages she blew my mind by separating good and bad decisions from good and bad outcomes, so I think I’m really going to enjoy it.
Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it’s useful to act like it does)
This is a thought-provoking article that calls into question what we think we know about how to predict the future (which is what product management is kind of about).
Bill Campbell’s guide for bringing out the best in others and coaching teams
When looking for influential people for my timeline of digital work, I came across Bill Campbell who is referred to as “the coach of Silicon Valley” because he coached many start-up founders. He never wrote a book but some of his coachees did to try to capture some of his wisdom.
I thought about:
Moral philosophy knows why your agile transformation failed
You can’t be utilitarian with your principles, and deontological with your practices. It has to be the other way round.
This is my current conclusion about how organisations use principles and frameworks and why that fails to deliver much real change.
Organisations are flexible about principles. But it’s too easy for principles to be so vague as to be meaningless and so optional as be nothing more than nice ideas. Deontologically speaking, principles provide hard and fast boundaries that are universally applicable. Thou shall not kill is a principle. If don’t adhere to the principle, you have to suffer the consequences.
So, can you have optional principles? Probably not if you want them to be anything more than just talk. You only actually have principles if they change people’s behaviour.
At the other end of the scale, organisations tend to enforce the use of certain frameworks. But instead, they should apply a utilitarianist approach where the ends justify the means, or to put it another way, the right framework and practices are chosen for the right situation.
This gives the people doing the work empowerment in the right places. It gives them opportunities to try different ways of working or stick to what they know.
Obviously, agile and other types of transformation fail for lots of complicated reasons, but enforcing principles and being flexible about frameworks might be a useful step for helping them succeed.