Week 48’22 Insight Pills – and one (still) more thing...
What’s called my attention and might be insightful for you too…
A quick recap in case this is the first time you read this…
My plan for the weekly insight pills is rather simple: to make a weekly consolidation of stuff that called my attention, relates to the overarching theme of this blog/newsletter, and share it across over here. With a few comments of my own on top.
This time around, I couldn’t help to notice how each insight nicely leads or at least relates to the next – and I promise it wasn’t premeditated, it just emerged, I only took advantage of it for the flow and the order they come about.
I hope you enjoy it!
Watch out for bias against certain characteristics of teams
John Cutler is becoming a frequent here… No surprise, as I do think he is responsible for some of most thoughtful stuff I see on a weekly basis across my references.
This time it was thought-provoking text in his ‘The Beautiful Mess’ newsletter, a great reminder on how certain characteristics of teams face additional challenges, an ‘uphill battle’, to use his own words, on proving value and getting properly funded.
It did resonate a lot with me as I spent a fair bit of my career leading teams with those characteristics, even on an accumulated fashion – like a new team, smaller and shared, all together! All of that in a context of a bigger unit which was too a shared service to product units across the organization.
The challenge is real, and I have experienced some of the patterns he mentioned. I have often felt like we were sort of ‘second-guessed’ on the value we were generating, teams we served tried to work around us, and much more. It is a pity how still so often organizations don’t fully get the simplicity and power of that African proverb (at least I am told that’s where it comes from…) which says:
“To go fast, go alone; To go far, go together”.
What about an example of how shared teams can help – or in general how to get farer…
And speaking about getting far(er), one fundamental dynamic on choices in software development (or perhaps broader than that, in general for any kind of work, potentially) relates to how much should you invest directly into new features or functionalities versus things that help to be more efficient or at least to keep efficiency in check?
This is very nicely, even in a gamified fashion, illustrated and explained by Daniel Mescheder in his latest blog post.
In case you need me to spell that out, in many contexts that might come about by means of relying more upon another (shared) team. And in fact, I would also claim it relates to my perspective on the recent massive tech layoffs as previously posted. In the sense that, part of that dynamics of missing the basics of added complexity and the role of project management, as a discipline, is to risk getting wrong exactly that balance of your portfolio of investment of efforts.
So, we need some portfolio management – how could that look like in a dynamic complex context?
Morten Elvang took a stab at combining the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden with Lean Portfolio Management, for practical guidance in what he described as a kind of a dance. I thought it was intriguing and I like that is not very prescriptive as a practice, and rather trusting on the power of discipline and learning.
I would imagine it requires a fair amount of trust upfront, so that challenges can indeed happen, as expected, so that it doesn’t risk derailing as yet another form of report out only. And I absolutely agree with Morten that is of utmost importance to have clear sponsoring so that it can be insisted upon, as it is necessary being a practice based fundamentally on reflection, learning, and getting better at it incrementally.
And to get any initiative right, don’t underestimate the need for having the right style to lead
Would you take your burger from a pizza joint? Dave Aron doesn’t recommend it. Both, in a literal as well as metaphorical matter. Look at this thoughtful LinkedIn post:
It is a good reminder that being set to success goes beyond having the necessary skills or experience. The other side of the coin is what is needed, what does it take in the context and that is more a matter of style.
What is your style, have you thought about that? Let’s take the simple motivation model that Dave exemplified:
Are you more like a Samurai or a Ninja? Are you getting into the right roles and challenges according to that?
In case you wonder it – surely I am more like a Ninja than a Samurai. And I am happy to be able to reflect that some of my recent career decisions are likely putting me on a path that is going to be a better fit of that with my skills and experience, as well as interests. 😊
One more thing – do you mind helping me to get better at this?
It has been a bit more than a month since I started this initiative of The Conceptual Leader blog/newsletter. Trying to keep it true to my overarching continuous improvement mindset as well as my customer-orientation, I would like to kindly ask some structured feedback.
If you are up for it, please fill up this survey and help me to turn this more fit-for-(your-)purpose! It shouldn’t take you long.
So… it’s a wrap for this week…
And I hope you found this insightful. I would love to ‘hear’ if you have any feedback or even some suggestion on what I am doing here.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact