Here's the slide-deck on pair-programming I recently presented for a client.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
beyond culture
The investigation of out-of-awareness culture can be accomplished only by actual observation of real events in normal settings and contexts.
Research with business groups, athletic teams, and even armies around the world has revealed there is an ideal size for a working group. The ideal size is between eight and twelve individuals.
All theoretical models are incomplete. By definition, they are abstractions and therfore leave things out. What they leave out is as important as, if not more important that what they do not, because it is what is left out that gives structure and form to the system.
Paradoxically, studying the models that men create to explain nature tells you more about the men than about the part of nature being studied.
All bureaucracies are oriented inward, but P-type are especially so.
High context actions are by definition rooted in the past, slow to change, and highly stable.
High context communications are frequently used as art forms. They act as a unifying, cohesive force, are long-lived, and are slow to change. Low context communications do not unify; however, they can be changed easily and rapidly.
Nothing happens in the world of human beings that is not deeply affected by linguistic forms.
If there is anything that can change the character of life, it is how time is handled.
M-time emphasizes schedules, segmentation, and promptness. P-time systems are characterized by several things happening at once. They stress involvement of people and completion of transactions rather than adherence to preset schedules.
By scheduling, we compartmentalize; this makes it possible to concentrate on one thing at a time, but it also denies us context.
In many forms, culture designates what we pay attention to and what we ignore.
The natural act of thinking is greatly modified by culture.
Low-context cultures seem to resist self-examination.
Alfred Korzybski and Wendell Johnson, founders of semantics, identified the Extention Transference factor in the use of words and published extensively on the profound effects of mistaking the symbol for the thing symbolized while endowing the symbol with properties it does not possess.
Environments are not behaviorally neutral.
For some reason, people reared in the European tradition feel more comfortable if they have a rule to fall back on, even if it doesn't fit.
Taiichi Ohno's workplace management
When I was a middle school student in the old system, we studied the Chinese classics, and during this class we learned from the Analects of Confucius. In these writings Confucious says, "The wise will mend their ways" and "The wise man should not hesitate to correct themselves."... Confucius was saying that we should change gracefully... I think his words mean that in the end it is not good if you hold onto your ideas too strongly and try stubbornly to justify them.
When we said we would set up a centralized grinding operation, one experienced worker said, "No, we tried that during the war, but it failed. That's why we do it the way we do now." [I said] "I did not see it fail during the war. Show me again how it fails. If I am persuaded by this, I will let you continue doing it the way you do it now."
If you asked me, "What is the most important part of production control?" I would say it is to limit overproduction.
The kanban was a slip that indicated how many pieces they were coming to get, so that if they were going to take ten parts this became a production instruction slip directing the production line to make ten pieces.
When lot sizes are small, you need to do changeovers more frequently.
Stopping the line causes a great loss, so this forces us to think, "How do we keep them from stopping the line?" and this results in more and more quality kaizen.
You can only really tell what is better based on results.
Accounting cannot do any cost reduction... The shop floor reduces inventory. This money goes to the bank... Instead, accounting thinks it just needs to allocate cost savings targets.
There is something called standard work, but standards should be changing constantly. Instead, if you think of the standard as the best you can do, it's all over. The standard is only a baseline for doing further kaizen. It is kaiaku if things get worse than now, and it is kaizen if things get better than now. Standards are set arbitrarily by humans so how can they not change?
You must create a standard for comparison.
Drop a nut once and pick it up. Working at the average time is like trying to catch the nut halfway because letting it drop all the way down takes too long... There is no such thing as average value in this world.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the old masters, seek instead what these masters sought. [Matsu Basho 1644-1694]
Once he asked me how the terms kaizen and kairyo (reform) were differentiated in the West. I said that while kaizen means to make improvements by using brains, kairyo means to make improvements by using money, and that in the West, most managers only think of improvement in terms of money. [Massaki Imai]
Let the flow manage the processes, and not let management manage the flow.
The aim of kanban is to make troubles come to the surface and link them to kaizen activity. I tell people, "Let idle people play rather than do unnecessary work."
The production line that never stops is either excellent or terrible.
Costs exist to be reduced, not to be calculated.
driving in India
What Thompson insisted on was that every form is basically the end result of a certain growth process. ... Thompson was saying that everything is the way it is today because it is the result of a certain history - which of course includes how it got made. At the time I read this I did not really understand it very well; whereas I now realize that he is completely right.I'll use an example to try and illustrate this idea of, as Jerry Weinberg puts it, things being the way they are because they got that way. The example is driving in India.
The most obvious thing that strikes me when I visit Bangalore or Chennai is the almost constant horn tooting. Is tooting your horn a formally taught behaviour, or is it learned behaviour I wondered. I asked some friends who live in India. They said it is not something you're taught. It is learned behaviour. I find this fascinating. It could mean that at some point in past tooting was common, but not endemic, and that for some reason or reasons it reached a tipping point and became endemic. What are those reasons? Why did they prevail? Do those reasons apply to all Indian cities or are some quieter than others? Do the reasons shed any light on whether endemic horn tooting will or won't ever go away?
A pattern I started to sense during my most recent trip is when a slow vehicle is stuck behind an even slower vehicle (a bus for example) and toots the horn as if to say "move over". The bus slowly moves over, the first vehicle passes it, and as it goes by toots twice, the first toot to say "thank" and the second toot to say "you". I never got the sense the tooting was overtly aggressive. I think drivers are tooting mostly to tell other drivers where they are. Considering the apparent chaos everyone is remarkably relaxed! The tooting has become part of a system of communication.
Naturally, once certain behaviours get a foothold, other behaviours adapt to them, helping to reinforce the co-evolving system. Drivers of slow vehicles start to rely on other drivers tooting them if they want to pass. They politely ask people to toot them by painting "Blow horn" signs on the backs and sides of their trucks. Artistic individuals spot an opportunity and, for a small fee, offer to paint ever more elaborate "Horn please" signs. Before you know it Volkswagen pre-fits cars it sells in India with slightly louder electromechanical horns. Now some truck drivers don't move over unless they're tooted and you have to toot if you want to pass. Viola. A co-evolving, intertwingled, history. Things are the way they are because they've got that way.
Large potholes in the road are common. Roads in India don't really have left lanes and right lanes so much as worse lanes and better lanes. I certainly don't recall seeing any white-line lane-dividers. What looks like total lane switching "indiscipline" is again simply sensible adaptive driving.
If traffic moved very fast the frequent lane switching would be downright dangerous. But traffic doesn't move fast. One reason is simply that lots of the traffic is old. Driving a new car in a sea of old cars could be quite dangerous (because of the brakes). Perhaps that's partly why the roads are regularly punctuated with pretty severe speed-bumps (actual ones as well as the pot holes). The speed-bumps keep your speed low even if you have a new car. So why buy a more expensive new car? Things are the way they are because they've got that way.
The traffic is also very varied. There are trucks, buses, masses of 3 wheeler took-tooks, huge numbers of motorbikes, push-bikes, push-trikes, pedestrians, carts, cows, you name it. As the traffic constantly switches lanes spaces of varying sizes constantly appear. No matter what the size of the space, there is always some form of road user just the right size to fill it. The variety encourages lane switching and the lane switching encourages variety. It gets that way.
Another reason traffic crawls is sheer numbers. More than a billion people Iive in India. There's a lot of traffic because there's a lot of people. And a lot of those people are young people. According to Wikipedia more than 50% of the Indian population is below the age of 25! The average middle-class home in a city such as Chennai is about 20 times the average middle class salary. Combine that with 10%+ interest rates and it's easy to see that a lot of people cannot afford to live in the city where they work. With so many young people, a hot climate, and a urban army of forced commuters it's no wonder there are so many motorbikes and buses, and increasingly, small cars. Things are the way they are because they got that way.
And a system that has got a certain way will, all things being equal, want to stay that way. A system will resist change. That's virtually a definition of a system. Only by resisting does it sit still long enough to be recognisable as something at all!
an ecology of mind
Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true of all communication... [Gregory Bateson]
A role is a half-arsed relationship. It's one end of a relationship. You cannot study only one end of a relationship and make any sense. What you will make is disaster. [Gregory Bateson]
I've been bothered a little bit the past few days by people who say, "What do you mean 'ecology of mind'". And approximately what I mean is that the various sorts of 'stuff' that goes on in ones heads and in ones behaviour, and dealing with other people and walking up and down mountains, and getting sick and getting well and all that. That all that stuff interlocks, and in fact constitutes a network, and you've got the sort of complicated, living, partly struggling, partly co-operating, tangle, that you find on the side of any of these mountains with the trees and various plant and animals that live there. In fact an ecology. [Gregory Bateson]
The division of things into parts tends to be a device of convenience, and that's all. [Gregory Bateson]
Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them. [William Blake]
Madmen see outlines and therefore they draw them. [William Blake]
If a fool should persist in his folly, he would become wise [William Blake]
The difference that makes a difference is a way in which to define something in terms of its relationships, using contrast and context, instead of isolating it with a name. [Nora Bateson]
Krishnamurti said something like "You might think you're thinking your own thoughts. You're not. You're thinking your culture's thoughts." [Nora Bateson]
I guess I've been reading too much Alice. [Gregory Bateson]
The double-bind is a creative imperative. Its the moment when, because this doesn't work and that doesn't work, something else is going to have to be improvised. A creative impulse is necessary at that moment, to get out of the situation, to take it up a level. [Nora Bateson]
The combination of theme with variation immediately points you to something behind it. A formative principle. [Terrence Deacon]
He was often accused of talking in riddles and never coming to the point. The question he posed "What is the pattern that connects?" was never meant to be answered, because the patterns are changing. It was the act of questioning that he was pushing for. Knowing that the eyes behind that curiosity will be the most apt to give the patterns of connection room to wiggle as they perpetually self correct. And to see the beauty in that process. [Nora Bateson]
When you see process you see constant change. That's why Gregory was constantly quoting Heraclitus "no man can step into the same river twice". Because it's flowing. [Mary Bateson]
Only by the creation of change can I perceive something. [Gregory Bateson]
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance. [Gregory Bateson]
He asked the question "What is there about our way of perceiving that makes us not see the delicate interdependencies in an ecological system, that give it its integrity." We don't see them, and therefore we break them. [Mary Bateson]
Any kind of aesthetic response is a response to relationships. [Mary Bateson]
I hope it may have done something to set you free from thinking in material and logical terms, when you are, in fact, trying to think about living things. [Gregory Bateson]
the right stuff
In the military they always said "flight test" and not "test flying".
Once the theorem and the corollary was understood, the Navy's statistics about one in every four Navy aviators dying meant nothing. The figures were averages, and averages applied to those with the average stuff.
What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events. Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system, such as jet or rocket engines.
Conrad stares at the piece of [blank] paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: "But it's upside down."
This obsession with active control, it was argued, would only tend to cause problems on Mercury flights. What was required was a man whose main talent was for doing nothing under stress.
The boys' response, however, had not been resignation or anything close to it. No, the engineers now looked on, eyebrows arched, as the guinea pigs set about altering the experiment.
The esprit throughout NASA was tremendous... Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get to see anybody else about any problem that came up.
They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. ... Sometimes people would get out and grab a handful of grass from your lawn. They'd get back on the bus with their miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic.
Herein the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not.
XP and culture change
From Kent Beck:
Because culture embodies perception and action together, changing culture is difficult and prone to backsliding.
Is it easier to change your perception or go back to designing the old way?
From Laurent Bossavit:
A process change will always involve a cultural change.
We were also a culture of Conviviality, which you could easily mistake (as I did at first) for a culture of Communication... In Conviviality what is valued is the act of sharing information in a group setting - rather than the nature, quantity, or quality of the information thus shared.
Culture is what remains when you have forgotten everything else.
From Mary Poppendieck and Ron Moriscato:
If there were one thing that Ron's team would do differently next time, it would be to do more refactoring.
XP is a process that doesn't feel like a process.
The theory of punctuated equilibrium holds that biological species are not likely to change over a long period of time because mutations are usually swamped by the genes of the existing population. If a mutation occurs in an isolated spot away from the main population, it has a greater chance of surviving.
From Ken Schwaber:
Agile process management represents a profound shift in the development of products and software. Agile is based on an intuitive feel of what is right, springs from a completely different theoretical basis than traditional development processes, and is in sum a wholly different approach to building products in complex situations.
From Matt Simons and Chaitanya Nadkarny
A fixed-bid contract changes the very nature of the relationship between customer and vendor from collaborative to "contentious". "Embrace change" undergoes a fatal transformation into "outlaw change."
There is no way to pretend everything is fine when you have to deliver software to your customer every few weeks.
From Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Ron Moriscato:
The advantages of pair programming hit you hard and fast. As you explain an area of code to your partner, you get a deeper understanding of how it fits into the current architecture. You're your own peer reviewer!
After pair programming for a while, we found ourselves in a situation where the entire team had worked somewhere in the module in the recent past. Code reviews became exciting idea-exchanging periods where refactoring tasks were discussed and planned.
With schedule pressure, there is a huge temptation to put off refactoring, and we did too much of that.
It's not enough for the code to work; it also has to serve as a solid base for the next wave of features that will be added.
All through the project, a frequent cause was that unit testing wasn't thorough enough.
the teachings of don juan
is an excellent book by Carlos Castaneda (isbn 978-0140192384). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages
By experiencing other worlds, then, we see our own for what it is and are thereby enabled also to see fleetingly what the real world, the one between our own cultural construct and those other worlds, must in fact be like.
There is nothing wrong with being afraid. When you fear, you see things in a different way.
Fear is the first natural enemy a man must overcome on his path to knowledge.
You dwell upon yourself too much. That's the trouble. And that produces a terrible fatigue.
Are you angry at me don Juan? I asked when he returned.
He seemed surprised at my question.
No! I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.
What will happen to the man if he runs away in fear?
Nothing happens to him except that he will never learn.
He will never become a man of knowledge. He will perhaps be a bully or a harmless, scared man, at any rate, he will be a defeated man. His first enemy will have put an end to his cravings.
And what must he do to overcome fear?
The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task. When this joyous moment comes, the man can say without hesitation that he had defeated his first natural enemy.
Does it happen at once, don Juan, or little by little?
It happens little by little, and yet the fear is vanquished suddenly and fast. But won't the man be afraid again if something new happens to him? No. Once a man has vanquished fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of fear, he has acquired clarity - a clarity of mind which erases fear. By then a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can anticipate the new steps of learning, and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. The man feels that nothing is concealed.
The freedom to choose a path imparted a sense of direction through the expression of personal inclinations.
Exertion entailed not only drama, but also the need of efficacy. Exertion had to be effective; it had to possess the quality of being properly channelled, of being suitable.
To become a man of knowledge was a task that could not be fully achieved; rather, it was an unceasing process comprising (1) the idea that one had to renew the quest of becoming a man of knowledge; (2) the idea of one's impermanency; and (3) the idea that one had to follow the path with heart.
Slack
is the title of an excellent book by Tom DeMarco.
This second snippet
(here's the first)
continues my tactic of rereading good books several times.
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Talented managers are ... all sense organ, constantly attuned to the effect their leadership is having on their people ... Managers without such talent find themselves relying on formulas and "principles" of management. They reason, "This thing I'm trying to do should work; the fact that it isn't working probably suggests that I'm doing it half-heartedly." And so they do more of whatever they've been doing.
When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier.
In my experience, standard processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center.
The power you've granted is the power to err. If that person messes up, you take the consequences. Looked at from the opposite perspective, it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.
When there is neither time nor staff to cope with work that runs more slowly than expected, then the cost of lateness is paid out of quality. There is no other degree of freedom.
... voluminous documentation of everything that will hold still for it.
Successful change can only come about in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for... the organization's culture... If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.
Losing my virginity
During January and February 1966, Jonny and I began to talk about how to change the school rules. We were fifteen years old, but we believed that we could make a difference. My parents had brought me up to think that we could change the world, so when I looked at how Stowe was run I felt sure that I could do it better.
Above all, you want to create something you are proud of.
Life in the basement was the kind of all-embracing glorious chaos in which I thrived and have thrived ever since.
Hearing others' stories made me realise how lucky I was in my relationships with my own parents. They had never judged me, and always supported me, always praised the good things rather than criticised the bad things.
Look, she said, I wouldn't lend you the money if I didn't want to. What's money for anyway? It's to make things happen.
I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics. This might be because, due to my dyslexia, I distrust numbers, which I feel can be twisted to prove anything.
Another man had to hand over his three-year-old daughter to his nanny and say goodbye to her. I just hugged him. There was nothing else I could do. We both had tears in our eyes. I was a father too.
It was clear that Lord King treated me with a contempt that would rub off on how everyone at British Airways felt they could treat Virgin Atlantic.
Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I've done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin's success.
Even though I'm often asked to define my 'business philosophy', I generally won't do so, because I don't believe it can be taught as if it were a recipe.
My vision for Virgin has never been rigid and changes constantly, like the company itself.
Our priorities are the opposite of our large competitors'. Convention dictates that a company should look after its shareholders first, its customers next, and last of all worry about its employees. Virgin does the opposite. For us, our employees matter the most. It just seems common sense to me that, if you start off with a happy, well-motivated workforce, you're much more likely to have happy customers. And in due course the resulting profits will make your shareholders happy.
It is my belief that most 'necessary evils' are far more evil than necessary.
It's just a matter of scale, but first you have to believe you can make it happen.
kanban
The essence of starting with Kanban is to change as little as possible.
Failure to make a delivery on a promised date gets noticed much more than the specific content of a given delivery does.
Counter-intuitively, most bottleneck management happens away from the bottleneck.
Speed is most useful if it is in the right direction… If your priority is to find and reduce the constraint you are often solving the wrong problem... The dramatic success of the Toyota Production System (TPS) had nothing to do with finding and eliminating bottlenecks. Toyota's performance gains came from using batch-size reduction and variability reduction to reduce work-in-progress inventory [Don Reinersten]
Kan-ban is a Japanese word that literally means "signal card" in English. In a manufacturing environment, this card is used as a signal to tell an upstream step in a process to produce more work. The workers at each step in the process are not allowed to do work unless they are signalled with a kanban from a downstream step.
Trust is a hard thing to define. Sociologists call it social capital. What they've learned is that trust is event driven and that small, frequent gestures or events enhance trust more than large gestures made only occasionally.
High-trust cultures tend to have flatter structures than lower-trust cultures.
The traditional approach to forming a commitment around scope, schedule, and budget is indicative of a one-off transaction. It implies that there is no ongoing relationship; it implies a low level of trust.
The more groups involved, the longer the meeting is likely to take. The longer the meeting, the less frequently you are likely to hold it…
Buffers and queues add WIP to your system and their effect is to lengthen lead time. However, buffers and queues smooth flow and improve predictability of that lead time. By smoothing flow, they increase throughput, so more work is delivered through the kanban system. Buffers also ensure that people are kept working and provide for greater utilisation. There needs to be a balance, and buffers help maintain it. In many instances you are seeking business agility through shorter lead times, and higher quality partly through lower work-in-progress. However, do not sacrifice predictability in order to achieve agility or quality. If your queue and buffer sizes are too small and your system suffers from a lot of stop-go behaviour due to variability, your lead times will be unpredictable, with a wide spread of variability. The key to choosing a WIP limit for a buffer is that it must be large enough to ensure smooth flow in the system and avoid idle time in the bottleneck.
The first principles of Kanban are to limit work-in-progress and to pull work using a visual signalling system.
You need slack to enable continuous improvement… In order to have slack, you must have an unbalanced value stream with a bottleneck resource.
The width of a bottle's neck controls the flow of liquid into and out of the bottle. We can pour quickly from a wide neck, but often with a greater risk of spillage. With a narrow neck, the flow is slower but it can be more precise… In general, a bottleneck in a process flow is anywhere that a backlog of work builds up waiting to be processed.
As we all know, there really is no such thing are multi-tasking in the office; what we do is frequent task switching.
certain to win
is an excellent book by Chet Richards (isbn 1-4134-5376-7).
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Man is the child of custom, not the child of his ancestors. [Ibn Khaldun, 1377 A.D.]
Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics.
Since what you're looking for is mistakes, a general rule is that bad news is the only kind that will do you any good.
A similar effect, a breakdown in the quality of energy, is well known to students of physics as "entropy". The energy is still there, but it isn't available for doing work. The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down.
The more you try to control people, the less control you get.
If a just-in-time production line had to wait for a formal decision process to work, it would hardly move at all, and it would never improve.
Complex methodologies can turn the attention of the company inwards.
We polish individual techniques and also train as a group.
It is not a matter of "getting it", it's a matter of doing it.
Mutual trust comes from mutual experience.
Most readers are familiar with the dualities that seem to inhabit everything oriental, the best known being the yin / yang. Yin signifies such things as endurance and the maintenance of the present states, while yang represents vitality and change. In the Taoist cosmology that underlies eastern strategy, neither can exist without the other, and the familiar symbol shows each depending on and containing the seed of the other.
the mind of war
…in order to determine the consistency of any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it… One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.
he was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.
In dozens of interviews, conducted for this book, the most consistent theme and nearly universal comment was that John Boyd was the essence of an honourable man and incorruptible.
Oral, not written, communication and conviction, not accuracy, still rule in military culture.
Boyd liked putting things together (synthesis) better than analysis (taking things apart)...
He also came to appreciate the routine practice and repetition that was required to become really good at something and to overcome the boredom by focusing on minute improvements.
He observed very carefully.
Boyd could go from 500 knots to stall speed, practically stopping the plane in midair, which would force any aircraft on his tail to overshoot him and thus gain the advantage for Boyd. In another trick, he would stand the F-100 on its tail and slide down the pillar of its own exhaust. Fire would come out of the intake in the nose of the aircraft and the tailpipe simultaneously. A seemingly impossible feat, it was challenged by others. Boyd when to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where NASA had two fully instrumented F-100 aircraft, and demonstrated it and other techniques to a series of nonbelievers. The test pilot at Edwards who challenged him at the time was a fellow by the name of Neil Armstrong.
Boyd had never designed an airplane before, but as he told Colonel Ricci and Gen. Casey Dempsey, "I could fuck up and do better than this."
The rule of thumb in the Air Force is that a plane will gain a pound of weight a day for the life of the aircraft.
High entropy implies a low potential for doing work, a low capacity for taking action or a high degree of confusion or disorder… The tendency is for entropy to increase in a system that is closed or cannot communicate with the external systems or environments.
A natural teacher, he understood that if he told you something, he robbed you of the opportunity to ever truly know it for yourself.
We are never deceived. We only deceive ourselves. [Goethe]
Boyd's dictum: "Ask for my loyalty and I'll give you my honesty. Ask for my honesty and you'll have my loyalty."
Quality Software Management
Vol 4. Anticipating Change
is an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-32-3).
This is the second (or is it third?) snippet review for this book (here's the first). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Ultimately what helps you most in managing system size is courage and realism.
Without action things will only get less visible over time.
Human systems don't change unless the individuals change, one at a time.
Growth is always non linear.
... the incidence of test failures is directly proportional to the square of the size of the crowd multiplied by the rank of the senior observing official [Augustine's Laws]
The dynamic behind this law is simple: A large crowd of high dignitaries means that the event is planned according to external, not internal, events.
It is easy to look at this diagram and believe that you're seeing a defined process. You're not. What you're seeing is an optical illusion.
"model" is just another name for a guide to anticipating the future.
Cultural changes have a much greater potential impact than process changes because one cultural change - such as driving fear out of the workplace - can affect hundreds of process changes.
Feedback works on continuity. The pieces in the model cannot be too large (or response will be slow), and they must be stable (or response will not be predictable).
Error prone modules are born error prone and stay error prone.
the silent language
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
Interaction has its basis in the underlying irritability of all living substance.
Culture is saturated with both emotion and intelligence.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, the great human geneticist, once observed that life was the result of neither design nor chance but the dynamic interaction of living substance with itself. He meant that life, in a changing environment, places such strains on the organism to adapt that, if this does not take place constantly, the organism as a species dies out.
Different cultures are analogous to different species in the sense that some of them survive whilst others perish. Some are more adaptive than others. The study of change, therefore, is the study of survival.
An often noted characteristic of culture change is that an idea or a practice will hold on very persistently, apparently resisting all efforts to move it, and then, suddenly, without notice, it will collapse.
The idea of looking at culture as communication has been profitable in that it has raised problems which had not been thought of before and provided solutions which might not otherwise have been possible.
We say, "I'll see you in an hour." The Arab says, "What do you mean, 'in an hour'? Is the hour like a room, that you can go in an out of it?" To him his own system makes sense: "I'll see you before one hour," or "I'll see you after one week." We go out in in the rain. The Arab goes under the rain.
...we all hold an illusion about talking, an illusion that talking is quite untrammeled and spontaneous and merely 'expresses' whatever we wish to have it express. This illusory appearance results from the fact that the obligatory phenomena within apparently free flow of talk are so completely autocratic that the speaker and the listener are bound unconsciously as though in the grip of a law of nature. [Benjamin Whorf, Linguistics as an Exact Science]
Complete lack of congruence occurs when everything is so out of phase that no member of a culture could possibly conceive of himself creating such a mess.
Many artists... are credited with "creating" new patterns. Yet most artists know that what greatness they have lies in being able to make meaningful statements about what is going on around them. They say what others have tried to say but say it more simply, more directly, and more accurately, more incisively and with greater insight.
Talking about them... changes our relation with them. We move into an active and understanding correspondence with those aspects of our existence which are all too frequently taken for granted or which sometimes weigh heavily on us. Talking about them frees us from their restraint.
The evolution of useful things
is an excellent book by Henry Petroski (isbn 0-679-74039-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Can any single theory explain the shape of a Western saw, which cuts on the push stroke, as readily as an Eastern one, which cuts on the pull?
A French book of advice to students recognised the implicit threat involved in using a weapon at the table, and instructed its readers to place the sharp edge of their knife facing towards themselves… Such actions, coupled with the growing widespread use of forks, gave the table knife its now familiar blunt-tipped blade.
Round chopsticks would tend to twist in the fingers and roll off the table, and so squaring one end eliminated two annoyances in what is certainly a brilliant design.
The stories associated with knives, forks, and spoons also illustrate well how interrelated are technology and culture generally.
Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention.
The very properties of the material that make it possible to be shaped into a useful object also limit its use.
Engineering is invention institutionalised, and engineers engaged in design are inventors who are daily looking for ways to overcome the limitations of what already works.
It is not the form follows function but, rather, that the form of one thing follows from the failure of another thing to function as we would like.
When sewn into a garment, a piece of thread can be thought of as a continuous and flexible ghost of a needle.
It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".
The Vizzini school of bad management
- Am I going mad or did the word "think" escape your lips?
- Hurry up
- Inconceivable
- Faster!
- You know what a hurry we're in
- I'm waiting!
- Catch up with us quickly
- I do not accept excuses
- Did I make it clear that your job is on the line?
- There will be no one to hear you scream
- Stop doing that. We can relax, it's almost over
sprints, time-boxing, and capacity
A team is doing Scrum with 3 week sprints. Suppose at the end of a sprint they've got nothing to done. What should they do? There's a strong temptation to ask for more time. To make this sprint a 4 week sprint. Most of the work in progress is 90% done, they say. Another week and things will have got to done, they say. It seems reasonable.
Trying to run systems beyond their capacity is not a good idea. In this situation Scrum's fixed-duration time-box constraint has served it's purpose admirably. The problem is not the choice of 3 weeks. Changing 3 weeks into 4 weeks is not addressing the problem. The problem is the team planned to pull in an amount of work and get it to done in 3 weeks. But they're not yet in control of their process - they don't know what their capacity is. They pulled in more than 3 weeks worth of work. Probably a lot more. But we just don't know!
In The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker writes:
Taiichi Ohno considered the fundamental waste to be overproduction, since it causes most of the other wastes.
Advice from a genius with a lifetime's experience. Toyota manufactures cars. It makes cars. Its production line is an actual line. If manufacturers are prone to overproduction imagine how much more prone software developers are! The things we make are not even physical things. In software, things are mostly invisible. It's difficult to manage what you can't see. In Quality Software Management volume 2, First-Order Measurement, Jerry Weinberg writes:
Without visibility, control is not possible.
If you can't see, you can't steer.
Rather than asking for another week, the team should really be thinking about addressing their real problem. Their real problem is that they're pulling in too much work. They have to somehow learn to pull in less work. So they can start to be in control of their process rather than their process being in control of them.
culture
Back to quotes table-of-contents
From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First Order Measurement
From The Toyota Way
From XP and Culture Change
From Quality Software Management: Vol 3. Congruent Action
From Beating the System
From Freedom from Command and Control
From Leverage points
From John Seddon
From Notes on the Synthesis of Form
From Slack
From The Hidden Dimension
From The Silent Language
From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First Order Measurement
Culture makes its presence known through patterns that persist over time.
One of the most sensitive measures of the cultural pattern of any organization is how quickly it finds and removes problems.
From The Toyota Way
Building a culture takes years of applying a consistent approach with consistent principles.
From XP and Culture Change
A process change will always involve a cultural change.
Because culture embodies perception and action together, changing culture is difficult and prone to backsliding.
From Quality Software Management: Vol 3. Congruent Action
Culture makes language, then language makes culture.
From Beating the System
Culture is what we do when we do not consciously decide what to do.
From Freedom from Command and Control
Consultants who see culture change as something distinct from the work and, as a corollary, something that can be the subject of an intervention, miss the point. When you change the way work is designed and managed, and make those who do the work the central part of the intervention, the culture changes dramatically as a consequence.
From Leverage points
One aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture.
From John Seddon
Culture change is free [because] it's a product of the system.
From Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Culture is changing faster than it has ever changed before...what once took many generations of gradual development is now attempted by a single individual.
From Slack
Successful change can only come about in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for... the organization's culture... If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.
From The Hidden Dimension
As Freud and his followers observed, our own culture tends to stress that which can be controlled and to deny that which cannot.
From The Silent Language
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
An often noted characteristic of culture change is that an idea or a practice will hold on very persistently, apparently resisting all efforts to move it, and then, suddenly, without notice, it will collapse.
Smoking cigarettes, eating sweets, dropping litter, and drinking coffee
I was speaking to Olaf Lewitz at the awesome Oslo coach camp last week. We were discussing why drinking coffee doesn't create the same social dynamic as smoking cigarettes. I chatted with Geir Amdal too and quite by chance he mentioned he's given up smoking. And how approaching a work colleague and asking if they want to go outside for a smoke is not the same as asking if they want to go outside for a talk.
Then I remembered something Olve Maudal said to me recently. He said that kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays was not really about kids being allowed to eat sweets on Sundays at all. It was really about kids not being allowed to eat sweets on any day except Sunday. Similarly, apparently in the USA when you're driving along you sometimes see a big sign at the side of the road saying "Litter here" and then another sign a mile or so later saying "Stop littering". These signs are also not really about littering. They're about not littering in the places outside the designated littering zones.
There's a crucial difference between smoking and drinking coffee. Smokers tend to smoke in groups in designated areas because smoking is not allowed except in those areas. Coffee is different. Drinking coffee is, by default, allowed everywhere. When you want a coffee you walk to the coffee machine and make a cup of coffee. There's often no one else at the coffee machine so you take your cup of coffee back to your work desk. It is precisely this take-it-back-to-your-desk default which is why there is only rarely someone else at the coffee machine. It is a self-fulfilling dynamic.
If you want to encourage more social interaction between your team members here's what you might do:
- Buy machines that make really good coffee.
- Put them in a nice area with lots of space to congregate in.
- Ban drinking coffee at work-desks.
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