On Tuesdays, I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came via email from Pavel Pavia [43 votes]:

Are engineers more creative than designers?

Both answers (“Yes they are!” and  “No they are not!”) are naive. It’s foolish to compare massive groups of people against each other especially around a sloppy word like creativity. Assuming you work in the making of products of some kind, we all likely know some engineers who are very creative and some who are not. We also know some designers who are very creative and some who are not. I can’t even imagine trying to average them out into two neat little piles and have the resulting comparison be of much use. But what then? Why can’t we have some fun? ok – FINE. Here we go.

Let’s start by ditching the word creative. It’s a romantic word and the wrong one. When someone hires an engineer or a designer they want a problem to be solved. The creative ability we’re talking about is to develop ideas that solve problems into working solutions. Do good engineers and designers both do this? YES. They might be different kinds of problems, and they may use different tools, but both show up at work with the intent to problem solve, not “problem create’ or “problem multiply” (although such people do seem to exist, unfortunately).

The first argument is usually an anecdote about how “all the designers/engineers I’ve worked with suck” and to that I say you might be right. You’ve probably never worked in a healthy, successful organization that respected both roles and hired talented people to play them. But they’ve always existed – look at the teams that made the best products you admire and I bet there was a team of both excellent engineers and designers working together. Until recently it was only in elite companies that these investments were made, but that’s changing.

The next argument is often someone pointing out that designers are really just planners, since they can’t actually build their plans themselves. They need an engineer to go and built them. But so what? Why is the ability to build something necessarily superior to the ability to conceive the plan? It might be superior, but it might be inferior. I don’t think Beethoven could play the trombone, but he could write the plan for what they (and dozens of other instruments) should do, and that’s why we know his name and not his trombone player.

But I’m not taking sides here. Not really. To succeed at solving problems you need both the plan and the ability to build it.  The hard part is that depending on what the problem is, it can be either conceiving the plan or the ability to build it that is more difficult. And people are bad at recognizing when the most important challenge is in a domain that isn’t theirs (“If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”). Engineers are notorious for dismissing designers because of their own ignorance of what the customer’s true situation is (and the related potency of the designer’s plans), and designers are notorious for dismissing engineers because of their own ignorance of what the engineering constraints truly are.

The running sardonic joke in all this is designers and engineers tend to share more personality traits than not. Which include:

Which means many of the conflicts between designers and engineers are about bad management, the lack of a leader providing shared goals that unify these traits towards a common cause. Both trades are about problem-solving and when motivated can help each other with their individual tasks. Framed properly, and properly motivated, designers can have insights that help solve engineering problems and vice versa. All that’s required is some respect, shared goals and a curiosity to discover other ways to approach solving problems.

It’s useful to go back to a time when the distinction between designing something and engineering something didn’t exist. For most of the history of invention, people did it all themselves. When Archimedes or Archytas  invented the screw (which is a mind-boggling act of genius), was he designing or engineering? Would anyone at the time have cared in the slightest what label was given? John Roebling, the architect of the Brooklyn Bridge, knew that to make something great required both great engineering and great design. He couldn’t build a beautiful, functional, enduring bridge without them both. He and his team would switch between thinking more like designers and more like engineers whenever necessary, as they were unconstrained by the strict delineations we’ve created for ourselves in modern times, and we should all consider doing the same.

Related:

[Note: Pavel’s actual question was “What is the reason for which we believe that the people who dedicate to the arts are more creative than the engineers?” but as I wrote an answer it morphed into a simpler question.]

A reader asked recently (see the archive):

I have a new boss who I don’t trust yet. How can I make sure they’re looking out for me?

The term set up to succeed means a person has been given most of what they need to do their job well. A good boss does more than just set goals and give assignments: they see themselves as responsible for ensuring good work happens (See: Lefferts’ Law of Management).

First, they think through the steps that need to happen for someone to do a project and where the challenges are going to be and discuss them with you. Second, they invest their own time, in coordination with you, clearing a path for those tasks to go more easily, or to become possible at all. A good boss builds a runway for you so that you can smoothly take off and checks in while you’re in the air, making adjustments behind the scenes, so you and your projects will land safely too. But taken too far this becomes micromanagement, which is the inverse way to set up someone to fail because the manager is far too involved. A good manager finds the sweet spot for each person and situation.

You know you’re being set up to fail if you’re assigned a project that:

When there are major hidden obstacles on the runway, people telling you the runway is theirs and you’re not allowed, or there’s no runway at all, your manager is setting you up to fail. You are being managed poorly.

One exception is that they have clearly warned you about these conditions before you agreed to take them on (perhaps you’re a secret agent), or made clear they themselves have little knowledge of the landscape and part of your task is to map it and report back, they are either incompetent, indifferent or see more benefits in your failure than your success.

The checklist for assessing your situation

Here’s a simple list of questions to discuss with your boss (or at least with yourself) to assess if you are being set up to succeed or not. They can be used to structure a conversation with your boss about what you need and why.

  1. Do I have the right skills? If you’re told to pilot a Boeing 747 but you have never even flown a paper airplane, whose fault is it if you fail? What training and mentoring is provided to help close skill gaps? Does your boss understand what you can and can not do and how that stacks up against what the project requires?
  2. Do I have the right allies? Who has the power you need to do your job and are they on your side? Will they prioritize your requests? Invite you in to decisions early enough to be effective? A good boss will talk to other important people in the organization about your goals and create an agreement for how you all will work together. Or at least call out the roadblocks they can’t resolve so at least you know they are there.
  3. Do I have the right resources (power, budget, staff, time)? You may have the right skills and allies, but if you don’t have enough power, time or money to do the work, you’ll likely fail anyway. The goals of the project might need to change if the available resources can’t.
  4. Are there clear goals (and non-goals)? Clarity on desired outcomes is one of the most important things a leader provides. Does everyone understand and agree on how you’ll know when the work is done and that it was done right? Listing non-goals, things easily assumed to be goals, but are really distractions, can be just as important to discuss.
  5. Are senior management’s goals aligned with the ones you have been given? If not your success will depend on you working against the grain of the organization and you are likely to fail. A good boss has made sure the right senior staff know about your projects and that all the goals line up.
  6. What roadblocks are in your way that you do not have the power or skills to resolve? Who has been made aware of them? Who has the power you need to resolve them? Has your boss worked with you on a plan? Have you warned the right people of what may happen if the roadblock is not cleared? Have they at least agreed you are on a high risk mission and even a small amount of success will be an acceptable win?

Incompetent managers often unintentionally set up their employees to fail. They don’t realize they are giving conflicting goals, poorly allocating resources or that they’re asking people to take on work that is politically sensitive and possibly damaging to their reputation. This means you have to advocate for yourself, first by thinking through the challenges you’re going to face and second by involving your boss in helping you clear them out of your way. If you are continually set up to fail and don’t feel you are getting the proper amount of support, you have a bad manager. You should find a new one if you can.

Of course, depending on the job you have, and how senior your role is, you may be expected to identify and solve many hard problems on your own. It may be possible for you to create your own runway through influence, persuasion, relationship building and negotiation. These are valuable skills and are often necessary even if you have a good manager, but become critical if you are working for a bad one.

Some organizations call this “Dealing with Ambiguity” or “Organizational Agility.” While it’s true more senior staff should be able to handle more challenges on their own, there are limits. The expectation of all good managers is that as the boss they have more responsibility and power for making good work happen and if they fail to use it to help everyone on their team they are simply not doing their job.

What else can someone do to help in these situations? Leave a comment.

Related:

On Tuesdays I write about the top voted question on Ask Berkun (see the lovely archive). This week’s question came from J.R. [via email]:

What is a favorite theory that you wish more people understood?

A favorite theory I wish was more well known is the Satir Change Model. It’s popular in some circles, but often when I mention it in talks at events few have seen it before.  Virginia Satir was a family therapist who studied how families behave, and in particular, how they respond to change. Her ideas have been successfully applied to organizations and groups of people.

We like to believe change and progress are predictable, especially if we’re applying an idea we’ve used before or that is widely accepted. But according to her research (based on family behavior), and her model, even when we’re making the right change, at the right time, confusion and fear are likely.

The Satir Change Model is simple and has 5 parts (image by Jurgen Appello):

  1. Late Status Quo – this is the present, where things are stable, at least in the sense that they’ve been the same way for some time.
  2. Foreign element – This is Satir’s term for any change that is introduced, which could be something deliberate (a new healthy diet) or something surprising (new neighbors move in next door). It could be a new idea, process, team member or anything. Often people resist foreign elements, even if they come with the promise of solving a problem. People often prefer to keep doing what they have been doing (status quo), even if there are things they don’t like about the status quo, especially if they don’t have much trust in their leader or their coworkers.
  3. Chaos – (IMO this is the central idea of the model). Even if you are doing everything right, and the change is the right one, volatility will rise for a time. Average performance will drop as people experiment with adjustments to incorporate the new idea. Hidden assumptions, and emotions, will be revealed, which can be painful at first. A new idea may require new conversations, redistribution of responsibilities and more. What makes this phase challenging is it’s hard to predict how long it will take or if the path is the right one (e.g. “do we need to keep going, or is this direction a mistake?”)
  4. Transforming Idea – The job of a leader is to help a team work through the chaos phase until they reach clarity. This is challenging as each person might require different coaching, advice, support or training to adopt the new idea. And the team as a whole may need to reform, with different roles and responsibilities. Someone with leadership skills might correctly identify a new direction, but it takes someone with people management skills to help them through the transitions that the new direction demands.
  5. Practice and Integration – Once the new idea is understood and adopted, finally the expected gains can be seen and progress becomes predictable. And eventually stabilizes again as the new status quo.

The model isn’t predictive. It doesn’t tell you how much chaos a particular idea will generate, if any at all. It can’t tell you how long it will take before you find the “transforming idea”. It also can’t tell you whether the new idea you’re introducing is the right or wrong one (e.g. the chaos will never end, or performance will never recover). It’s simply a useful framework for thinking about the psychological patterns likely to arise when something changes.

Inexperienced people often confuse the chaos phase as a failure in their choice. And if they quit early, assuming “chaos” means they made a mistake, and revert back to the old ways of doing things, they likely will never have the confidence to try something that bold again. They now confuse the chaos phase with failure. This is a kind of self inflicted learned helplessness, where the necessary cost to improve and grow is now too psychologically expensive. People and organizations can become paralyzed here, as they’ve become extremely resistant to any threat of a “foreign element”, even though that’s exactly what’s needed to grow.

Some foolish people dismiss Satir’s work based on the question what do families have to do with workplaces or individual adult choices? But workplaces are based on relationships, and we learn our models for how to relate to other people from… our families! Your favorite, and least favorite, coworkers learned many of their patterns of behavior from their early relationship with their parents and siblings. How we define trust, love, collaboration, friendship and teamwork all come from our experience with the first and primary tribe in our lives.

Anuradha Gajanayaka compares the Satir model to Kanter’s Law, which states that “Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” She suggested that we “Recognize the struggle of middles, give it some time, and a successful end could be in sight.“

And that is a key takeaway from the Satir model. Even if you’re doing everything right in your life, or as a leader, when you try to change something be prepared for surprises. Plan time for “chaos” in response to the change, where it’s normal for performance to drop and for experimentation to happen until the new idea is understood, incorporated and refined.

[This is an excerpt from chapter 12, of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation]

The Simple Plan

If you want to make progress happen, or be someone who brings good ideas into the world, this is for you. It’s the simplest, easiest, most straightforward way to convert your ambition into action. When I’m asked to give advice about managing creativity or how to make an organization “innovative” this is what I share.

  1. Forget the word innovation: focus on solving a problem. Most products out in the world are not very good. You rarely need a breakthrough to improve things, to beat the competition, or to help people suffering from a problem. If you carefully study the problem you’re trying to solve, you will discover many clear ways, some forgotten or executed poorly, to make it better. That’s the best place to start. If you solve a problem for a customer that makes them happy enough to pay for it, do you really think they will care if it’s “innovative” or a “breakthrough”? They just want their problems solved. If you cured cancer conventionally, would the patients refuse, saying “but it’s not innovative.” Of course not. Often it’s the combination of many conventional solutions, the combination obscuring how old some of the ideas were, that is called an innovation afterwards by people ignorant of the history of those ideas. So don’t worry. Sometimes small ideas, applied well, matter more than big ideas. Try to use workmanlike language: problem, prototype, experiment, customer, design, and solution, instead of the jargon of breakthrough, radical, game-changing and innovative. This keeps you low to the ground, and prevents your ego from distracting you away from simply making good things.
  2. If you work with others, you need leadership and trust. There’s no point worrying about which creativity or management method you’re using, or how much budget you’re going to spend, if people don’t trust each other. It’s the leader’s job to create an environment of trust so ideas move freely and can grow. Developing new ideas is scary and demands vulnerability and if people don’t trust each other their talents will never be revealed. It’s also the leader’s role to use their superior power to take risks, and protect the team from the dangers of those risks. This sounds obvious, but look around. It’s rare. Many people do not trust their teams, nor work for leaders who are willing to stake their reputations on the risks of a new idea. It’s uncommon to find someone in power who is willing to take the blame for problems, but also willing to give credit to subordinates as rewards for their efforts. If you’re a leader, the burden is on you. If you’re not, and you don’t work for someone who creates trust and is willing to take risks, good work will not happen where you are. Either move, find the courage to take a bet and force the issue, or accept the status quo.
  3. If you work with others, and things are not going well, make the team smaller. There is a reason great things often happen in small organizations. With fewer people, there are fewer cooks and fewer egos. In many large organizations there are too many people involved for anything interesting to happen. The first advice I give teams when things are not going well is to make the team smaller. If you’re the boss, and the politics are too complex, volunteer yourself to leave. Do whatever is necessary to reduce the number of people involved in developing ideas, and/or making decisions. The dynamic of getting 3 people to agree to take a risk together is much simpler than getting 30 people to do the same. Three people can achieve an intellectual intimacy faster, and be fully invested and passionate about a decision in ways thirty people can’t be. Another solution is to pick one creative leader, and give them more power. A film director is the singular creative leader on a movie. Yet most corporate or academic projects divide up leadership across committees, diffusing authority, which always makes decisions more conservative, the opposite of what you want.
  4. Be happy about interesting ‘mistakes’. If you are doing something new, it can not go well on the first, second, or possibly 50th time. This is OK. Your mindset has to be, ‘This did not go how I expected, but I expected that! What can I learn so the next attempt improves? (or teaches more interesting lessons)” The more interesting the lesson, the better. It’s the mind of an experimenter (see Chapter 3) that you want to cultivate, asking questions about everything you make, and using the answers to those questions to fuel the next attempt and the next. Many people quit on their 2nd or 3rd try at something, for reasons that have nothing to do with the history of innovation. There was not a story in this book where any of the brilliant minds mentioned succeeded on such a small number of tries. Perseverance, as simple a concept as it is, is rare. The more ambitious the problem you’re trying to solve, the more experiments and attempts you will need to get it right.
  5. Pick a project and start doing something. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking big results always need big plans. Often big plans come only from what’s learned from small samples and prototypes. Write a draft. Draw a sketch. Make a prototype. Have a small ambition you can manifest quickly so the stakes are low, and the pace is fast. The temptation is to have a grand idea, but don’t wait too long to find one. That can come later. Think of drafts as scouting for ideas. Before you can build a city, you must thoughtfully scout and map the landscape. Having a thing, even a napkin drawing, to look at improves the quality of conversations about the possible ideas. And if you can’t find a way to start a project at work, do it on weekends – history is full of creative heroes who never had approval from anyone to do it. There is always a way to start, just pick something small enough you can do yourself in an afternoon, or with a friend, and get to work.

It’s easy to discount these 5 basic notions as they seem so simple, but that’s the trap.  I’m convinced ones that don’t overlook these have the highest odds of producing good work, in a healthy culture, with results the team and the customers are proud of. The challenge is commitment as it’s natural to dream of an easier way, and hope for a trick or formula or magical method to avoid the work and the risks. You will find many consultants and experts who promise you things that do not exist based on stories not supported by history. But I hope that the true stories you read earlier in this book will anchor your confidence, defend you against the many myths, and help this simple view stay with you.

Related:

[This is an excerpt from chapter 12, of The Myths of Innovation]

[This is an excerpt from The Year Without Pants, An Amazon.com best book of the year]

Chapter 4: Why Culture Always Wins

YWP-sidebarA great fallacy born from the failure to study culture is the assumption that you can take a practice from one culture and simply jam it into another and expect similar results. Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works. Much like the frustrated moron who slaps the side of a TV when it stops working, taking action without understanding the system rarely helps.

A favorite example of this tragic management habit is how in 1999 the famous design firm IDEO was featured on ABC’s popular Nightline TV show. They demonstrated an idea development technique they used called a “deep dive” to redesign a shopping cart in just five days. Soon hundreds of companies were doing their own half-baked versions of deep dives, and, surprise, the results were disappointing. Somehow, despite how dedicated some were to following all the steps and all the rules, an element was missing, and they couldn’t match the results they’d seen on the show. The missing ingredient was, of course, the primary one: the people involved. Watchers of Nightline worked at places with employees who were not as talented in design as IDEO’s. But beyond their talent, IDEO employees shared values and attitudes that were not explicitly captured in the deep dive method despite how essential those things were for the method to work. In anthropology terms this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods airplanes had delivered to return.

Every year new trends in work become popular in spite of their futility for most organizations that try them. These trends are often touted as revolutions and frequently are identified with a high-profile company of the day. Concepts like casual Fridays, brainstorming sessions, Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, matrixed organizations, or even 20 percent time (Google’s policy of supporting pet projects) are management ideas that became popular in huge waves, heralded as silver bullets for workplaces. The promise of a trend is grand, but the result never is. Rarely do the consultants championing, and profiting from, these ideas disclose how superficial the results will be unless they’re placed in a culture healthy enough to support them. No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.

The best approach, perhaps the only approach, is an honest examination of culture. But culture is harder to understand than a meeting technique or a creativity method. And culture is scary because unlike techniques, which are all about logic, culture is based on emotion. Few people have the skills to evaluate, much less change, a culture, even if they have the courage to try. It’s far safer to simply wait for the next trend to come along and rally behind it, hoping the excitement for the new method distracts everyone from noticing how little impact the previous method had.

In my story so far at WordPress.com, every employee I met was smart, funny, and helpful. They’d invested heavily in tools and systems but put the onus on employees, even new ones like me, to decide how, when, and where to do their work. These attributes of culture didn’t arrive by some technique sprinkled around the company years after it started. How did it happen, then?

Read the rest of the chapter 4 in the free PDF or read the entire first chapter.

Praise for The Year Without Pants, an Amazon.com best book of 2013, includes:

“The Year Without Pants is one the most original and important books about what work is really like, and what it takes to do it well, that has ever been written.”
—Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss

“The underlying concept—an ‘expert’ putting himself on the line as an employee— is just fantastic. And then the book gets better from there! I wish I had the balls to do this.”
—Guy Kawaski, author, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and former chief evangelist, Apple

“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”
—Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek

Read more than 140 amazon reviews and consider buying the book.

I enjoyed Brian Chesky’s recent post Don’t Fuck Up The Culture, where he proclaims to the employees of Airbnb the importance of culture in everything they do. I like Airbnb and it’s nice to see a founder emphasize culture.

But there’s sloppy thinking at work here (see: mistakes of writing about culture). The first problem is there is a field of study of culture: it’s called anthropology. When business and technologists sling the word culture around as if they invented it they get themselves into trouble. Modern start-ups are worthy of cultural study, but to use that small sample in ignorance of a broader view of culture is myopic.

Chesky wrote:

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

No. That’s certainly a nice sentiment but it’s not a definition of culture. A proper definition is something like: culture is the willing behaviors and beliefs of a group of people. Many cultures are not passionate, or certainly not passionate primarily about work. It’s implied that these behaviors and beliefs are things people practice by choice, but that’s a mild denial of the role of hierarchy in culture. Most human cultures depend on leaders to define, modify and reinforce the behaviors and beliefs of the group.

This means a CEO or founder has tremendous power regarding culture. They are the only person who can:

And with those 4 powers, every CEO is in fact a Chief Cultural Officer. The terrifying thing is it’s the CEO’s actual behavior, not their speeches or the list of values they have put up on posters, that defines what the culture is. Without these four powers any employee at the company is along for the ride in a culture driven by someone more powerful than they are. By the time the first handful of employees are hired, the culture already exists whether anyone realizes it or not. The people with the most power to fuck up the culture are simply the ones with the most power.

And of course the most vocal challengers to most cultures are the first to be shown the door. It’s in human nature to want to eliminate the most disruptive people. And it’s also human nature to want to bring in more people that fit in well. Repeat these two behaviors over time and culture becomes homogeny, even if everyone still believes the culture values diversity. Is the culture still the same at that point? Everyone still there might believe so, but the people who left because of the culture don’t get asked their opinion.

Of course a democratically inclined leader will delegate the above powers in thoughtful ways, and invite more people to play leadership roles, including people who are disruptive in positive ways. But unless the CEO can be elected out of CEOship, the entire culture is at best a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy where the culture of power can be changed. How power is distributed has a primary role in defining culture, and that distribution must inevitably change as a company grows.

The thing that will endure for 100 years, the way it has for most 100 year companies, is the culture.

There is no company that has the same culture today that it did 10, 20 or 100 years ago. Cultures often change dramatically as they shift from birth, to immature success, to full maturity (and of course the vast majority of companies die before they even hit adolescence). Study the history of HP, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, or even Google and Facebook, and this observation is revealed. You have to do careful study to filter out which cultural values remained immutable over time, if any at all. Ask the first ten employees to leave a successful company why they left, and many will answer “the company changed.” Which is fine: it probably needed to change to continue its success.

The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation.

This is partially true, and partially a denial that it’s also culture that eventually becomes the single biggest resistance to innovation (and any kind of change). Any tradition, no matter how noble in its inception, eventually becomes the primary force of resistance against new ideas. Again, study the failure of any once great company: often its the powerful defenders or the status quo, under the guise of culture, that accelerated their demise (“that’s not how we do things here”). That is why culture is tricky, as you want pride in the past, but want it tempered so it doesn’t hold you back from progress. The champions of the last war may not be the best leaders in the next one, but who decides who the leaders are? Only the leaders from the past have that power.

Our next team meeting is dedicated to Core Values, which are essential to building our culture… After we closed our Series C with Peter Thiel in 2012, we invited him to our office. This was late last year, and we were in the Berlin room showing him various metrics. Midway through the conversation, I asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us. He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

Thiel is right, but his observation isn’t particularly helpful. Nearly every organization ruins its culture in some ways, even if it does amazingly well. It depends on what culture you prefer: risk taking or stability? scrappy or luxurious? When an entire company fits in a van it has one vibe, when it barely fits in a stadium, it has another. And more importantly we’re talking about corporations, not orphanages. Once a major profit source is found the goal is to exploit that profit for as long as possible. Thiel’s quote doesn’t acknowledge the presumption that shifting from discovering how to profit, to maximizing (or at least increasing) profit is what a corporation is built for. That shift demands dramatic changes to the culture. Even a simple thing like significantly improving the wealth of employees changes the culture.

The very notion of Core Values, a declaration of cultural philosophy for an organization, is a standard move from the corporate playbook. The existence of a list of values has limited bearing on how often they’re practiced (e.g. the ten commandments). As mentioned above, the behavior of leaders defines culture more than anything else. I’m sure Enron and WorldCom had the same basic values handbook most corporations do, describing how angelic, smart, collaborative and honorable everyone is supposed to be. Platitudes are cheap to produce and put on posters in hallways. What’s missing from these handbooks is a test. How do you know your Core Values are actually being practiced?

How To Test The Value of Core Values:

Try to imagine it. Would a cultural value from your corporate handbook ever be used in making an actual decision about actual work? If the answer is no, then the values are platitudes, or were written so generically that they’re easily overlooked or easily manipulated to justify just about anything (depending on your opinion, Google’s don’t be evil is either a good example or a bad one).

Culture is critically important and I’m glad Chesky is bringing it up. If he’s a good leader and manager he’ll invite his staff to challenge him on the values he defines, and how the proclaimed values are tested.

But there is a presumption among many executives that culture is an asset created and managed like technological resources, which is a mistake. Culture is emotional. It is based on trust and even (platonic) love between people. It is hard to describe culture rationally or in the same easily measurable terms the business world operates on, which explains why so many attempts by business leaders to control and scale culture ultimately fail.

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Powerful people often become conservative. Once they’re in charge, it’s easy to feel that the knowledge that helped them rise into power is all they will ever need. This means that despite the platitudes about wanting new ideas, many bosses are hard to convince to try new things.  They have more to lose now, so their preference for the status quo increases.

We read books, take courses and go to events, often with the support of our bosses, under the pretense change is possible. But often they find ways to kill ideas, gently or passively, and not much happens. It often takes a different way of approaching the problem to get a powerful person to do something new.

Here’s a quick guide for how to convince your boss:

  1. Have a great reputation. The best leverage you have with any boss is your performance. They’re more likely to consider suggestions from the highest performing person on the team than the lowest. Before you present the grand revolutions you want them to lead, make sure you’re in good standing. Be patient. Match the size of your suggestion to the quality of your reputation.
  2. Consider what problems your boss needs to solve. Don’t start with your problems or what things you want to try. Instead think about the world from the perspective of your boss. What are their goals? What do they need to do to succeed? What achievements are they striving for? What will get them promoted? A good pitch is based on the catcher.
  3. Match what you want to try to their goals. Frame anything you want to try in terms of how it might help your boss. Will it have a chance of helping reach their sales quota? Will it help them get better clients? Will it save them budget? At minimum, think about your own productivity and morale: why should your boss care about improving these things? Consider that and make it part of your pitch. You may discover that there are far better things to suggest than the idea you originally had.
  4. Get support from respected coworkers. If your idea is good you should be able to get a coworker or two to also want to try it. Provided the boss respects their opinion, their interest helps support you. In some cases it might even be better if someone other than you makes the pitch. If you have a good relationship with the peers of your boss, especially peers they respect, consider trying to get them involved.
  5. Look for books and respected organizations that support the thing you want to try. Find companies your boss respects that already use the practice you have in mind. There are often books and papers that can help support your case. Of course getting your boss to read them is another matter, but your consumption of them will better inform you of answers to questions your boss is likely to have, and most importantly, refine your own thinking about the realities of the thing you want to try. Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Or perhaps there is a different way of thinking about the problem that’s more useful.
  6. Plan for a trial. Minimize their sense of risk by suggesting you try the new thing on a trial basis: a week or a month. Also propose a list of criteria for how to evaluate if the new thing was successful after the trial is over. If you’ve never pitched your boss on anything before, pick the smallest simplest version of the thing you want to try. Minimize the risks and earn some trust for the next time you have something you want them to try. Pick a safe and small project that has the fewest risks, or that is only of moderate importance.
  7. Make the pitch. Remember that most people in power respond differently to pitches when they are in front of a group vs. when they are by themselves. Find a situation that provides the best opportunity, based on when your boss is most responsive to suggestions (email? in your performance discussions? at coffee?) Define the problem (in terms the boss relates to), offer the solution, define the (trial) terms, and reference what other companies already participate. Observe how other people pitch your boss and what tactics work best (See: How To Pitch An Idea).
  8. Work very hard to make the trial work. Your future reputation is on the line in the trial. If the trial goes well, and they agree to the change, you’ll be in higher standing for the next recommendation you make and convincing them again will be far easier. If you fail, and fail badly, it will be harder to earn their trust next time. Do everything in your power to make sure that failing all else some useful lessons are learned, enabling the argument that doing trials, even if they fail, have minimal risk and provide new lessons for the organization. Including the discovery of new trials to do that might have better results.

In the end, it shouldn’t be all that hard to convince a smart, wise, progressive boss to try new things on a trial basis. If you realize that your boss is impossible to convince, the thing you might need to try is looking for a new boss to work for.

Related:

 

One of the many surprises from The Year Without Pants is that Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, doesn’t pay employees more when them become a team leader. They consider being a leader a role, not a job. One of the fun experiments this enabled for me while I worked there was to step down as lead and report to someone who used to report to me, something I’ve rarely seen done gracefully before.

If managers don’t get paid more, this dramatically changes several dynamics about management and leadership:

In many organizations getting promoted into management is the only promotion path. The result is many people ill suited and even uninterested in leading groups take on those roles, with negative consequences across the organization. If you know of managers who clearly don’t like managing, you and they have been victimized by an organization that has misplaced how and why it rewards people.

During my 20 months working at WordPress.com the people in lead roles were mostly stable, and many people had been in a leadership role for two years or more. But the clarity around leadership being a role changed how leads behaved. It made leaders far less territorial, for they knew, much like being a Senator or a representative, that they were part of a larger system. Leadership as a role was one of many cultural attributes at Automattic that are unusual for corporations, and it’s their culture that allowed them do to so many things we’d all love in our own workplaces.

Of course management and leadership are not precisely the same things, and a manager in one organization has differently responsibilities than in others. But the question remains: would changing how managers are rewarded lead to people better suited for the task being interested and better performance in the position?

[Update 1/29/15] The concept of dual ladders is one way to officially support a path for increased rewards without having to become a manager.

Vivek Haldar wrote this thoughtful review of The Year Without Pants. His primary critique is there wasn’t enough focus on tactics and methods. In his review he asked a few good questions which I’m answering here.

Regarding his primary critique, I offered this:

Many people wanted me to write a pure “how to run a distributed company” book, centered on advice and techniques. I was certain this was a mistake, or at least a squandering of the opportunity I had. WordPress and Automattic  are so interesting, and such an important example, in so many ways (a leading web platform, open source, no email, distributed work, etc.) that I knew as a writer I had to focus on their story, and the story of my experience as an outsider trying to become a leader in their culture.

I was given no restrictions about what I could write about or how to write it. A general manual for leadership, or distributed work, felt underwhelming given that this will likely be the only book ever written about WordPress.com. Honest insider accounts are rare, certainly written by workers involved in a project, rather than a journalist who had to trade honesty for access. Naming the book “The Year Without Pants” was meant to suggest it was about a year, rather than a manifesto for a particular kind of work, but perhaps that wasn’t clear enough.

The book was published so what I think it of it matters little now. Each reader, like Vivek, will decided for themselves if they got what they wanted, or expected, from the book or not.

Q. How can an existing company either accommodate or make the transition to being distributed?

For general advice see the FAQ for Year Without Pants,  How To Change A Company and How To Convince Your Boss to Try New Things.

Chapter 15 of the book, titled The Future of Work Part 2, offers advice on the general way it happens: one person at a time. A worker has to say to their boss “hey, I can be just as, or more, productive if you let me work remotely. Let’s try it and see.” And then the boss has to say, “Yes, lets try that and see what happens”. If that experiment goes well, it will be repeated by others. This is the primary way change happens anywhere: two smart people agreeing to try something and then, if it works, agreeing to do it more. There’s no magic: just two open minded people.

It will usually be the youngest managers, on the youngest teams, at the youngest companies, that are willing to try new things first. They have fewer preconceptions and fewer things to fear. It’s no surprise most of the 100% distributed companies I’ve found are young software companies. But do consider that most remote workers on the planet are at large corporations (Aetna, American Express, IBM, etc.) where the financial payoffs of remote work have outweighed their fears. Someone at each of those companies had to be first to pitch the argument for experimenting with remote workers.

Of course a team leader, or an executive, can accelerate change if they have control over policies. But typically people with control over policies are conservative: they’ll wait for the existence of a highly productive and vocal minority with enough influence before even considering changing policy. If YOU, reading this, want to work remotely, it starts with you pitching your boss to give it a try. If they see it as a win for you to win by working remotely, they’ll naturally promote the idea.

If you want to see a post purely about how to do that pitch, leave a comment, or submit the question here. (Also: My general advice on pitching ideas).

Q. How can distributed work scale? 

Automattic is currently about 200 250 300 people. I could easily see the company reach 1000 people, with 5 product units each with about 200 people in them. Everything within those units would be much the same as it is now. Continuous deployment is part of how Automattic works and it helps with scale: since new ideas launch regularly you rarely have large dependencies between teams. The challenge with scale is for leaders of each unit, assuming they existed (and the units were not self-organizing collectives as some people theorize as ideal), to avoid the traps of middle-management, and maintain the same employee driven autonomy the company has now, while keeping the company lined up well on strategy.

The history of work is useful here too. Read about the U.S. civil war or WWII or the Peloponnesian War. Armed forces in the grand wars of the past were intensely distributed, with thousands of soldiers working on what was supposed to be a singular strategy, separated by enormous distances. Messages were sent by runners and horses: ridiculously slow compared to Skype or SMS. My point is that there are plenty of examples of large scale distributed work if you look for them.  My success and failures described in The Year Without Pants rarely hinged on my team being distributed or not.

Of course most companies fail. Most projects fail. We give a disproportionate amount of attention to absurdly successful things. If WordPress or Automattic fails in some significant way my first thought would not be to question the fact that they’re distributed, and the book does critique other elements of the company and the culture appropriately.

Q. Learn from the Linux kernel. To me, the most successful large distributed team ever is the one that builds the Linux kernel.

Linux, and open source project management in general, is well documented. Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software is excellent and examines many of the common challenges, with good advice for solving them. Although he doesn’t explicitly take on distributed work, most open source projects are highly distributed. WordPress and Linux share many parallels, with one strong founder as leader, a small number of lieutenants, and hundreds of individual contributors. The gate keeper role played by the founder and lieutenants is the key part of the story: it’s not as if any random contributor can make critical decisions on their own. It’s a hierarchy in the classic sense of the word, just with soft and open community based rules for how to become part of it.

I read Torvold’s book Just for Fun, and found it fascinatingly humble. He didn’t set out with the plan to create a phenomenon, an irony lost on all of the people who seek to merely copy what he has done with the hopes of replicating the outcome. I attribute much of his, and Mullenweg’s, success to CULTURE, which is why all of chapter 3 in The Year Without Pants is an examination of how the WordPress culture was created. Few technical founders pay sufficient respect  to culture and it shows in how their organizations fall apart.

BusinessWeek asked me to use my experience at WordPress.com to offer advice to the future CEO of Microsoft:

Recently, I spoke with 300 smart and passionate Microsoft (MSFT) employees. Are you as open to change as they are? If yes, read on. I was invited to your company because of my book, The Year Without Pants, which tells my story as a former Microsoft manager who worked for a year at the eighth most popular website in the U.S.: WordPress.com, which is more popular than any Microsoft website, including Bing. These two companies are very different, yet one is on the rise and one is not. As a unique traveler between both cultures, here’s my advice:

Read the full article here / read it as one page.

It was a hard article to write, given how much history I have with the company. They asked me to take an angle that focused on WordPress.com, which forced me to leave out many stories and insights that came simply from working there for a decade and seeing what’s happened since I left. If anyone’s interested, happy to share more thoughts, just ask.

 

My latest post for Harvard Business is about why consultants should return to traditional full-time work now and then:

I challenge all consultants to spend some time — at least a year — back in a “real” job, working shoulder to shoulder with the same kinds of people who pay for their advice. So few authors and experts are willing to do this, because they’re afraid. They know it’s much harder to be accountable for a real team, in a real company, for a real project, than it is to critique and advise from the safety of the sidelines.

In 2010, I decided I was guilty of this shortcoming myself. Though I had written three books, a decade had gone by since I’d managed a team or built a product. I had reached the point where no matter how many companies I visited or books I wrote, I couldn’t be sure how much of my advice was good anymore.

Read the full post here.

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here).  With 40 votes, this week’s winner was “How a manager can facilitate communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders” submitted by Grant Landram.

Any tips for how a manager can “level the communication playing field” between technical and non-technical stakeholders within project teams so the team can better communicate and “get stuff done”?

It’s fun to get a project management question. Its been awhile. It used to be these were the only questions I ever got.

The existence of multiple people who hold the stakes (meaning money, not stakes that go in the ground , nor the ones that are tasty to eat) means every major decision is more complex, not less. Even if you love all of your stakeholders the addition of each one makes progress slower, not faster.

The specific rub in this scenario is translation. If one stakeholder spoke only German and the other only Esperanto it’d be obvious you need to find one person who can speak both fluently before you’d attempt anything. But with domain differences like technical or business knowledge, we presume basic English is sufficient. It isn’t.

Good project leaders, and consultants, are versed in many domains. They can translate between the designer, the engineer, the business analyst and the executive, each of which demands a different frame of thinking. They also see how tradeoffs between domains are required for the project to succeed. Perhaps most importantly they known their limitations: sometimes they need a better translation, or translator, and will pause the proceedings until one is found.

You need four things when dealing with diverse stakeholders:

  1. A shared goal. It takes effort to translate. If all the stakeholders can’t see the goal they all share, they’ll defend their turf and their biases, tanking the project. At the beginning any project leader must spend time defining shared goals that everyone will benefit from achieving. Then when things get frustrating, you can remind everyone of the goals they share and why it’s worth the effort. If there is no single shared goal among stakeholders success is improbable. 
  2. Empathy means wanting to understand what the other person is trying to say and helping them clarify it, even if it’s inconvenient. It takes empathy to admit that simply because the other person know’s less than you about writing code or closing deals, it doesn’t mean they’re any less smart or their ideas are any worse. It’s up to the leader to demonstrate the value of all the different perspectives.
  3. Patience is what you must offer, even to people who know less than you, about your expertise. In life, the smarter you are, the more time you will spend with people who know less than you, therefore it’s wise to develop patience. If you are a genius who is continually surprised by how stupid everyone is, how smart can you be? Often in a career you will work for people, bosses or clients, who know far less than you and how you deal with that gap will define your success or failure.
  4. Prevention/Recovery from communication breakdowns. Good teams prevent and recover from communication mistakes. They avoid the temptations of wishful thinking, or pretending not to notice someone else’s wishful thinking. Get in the habit of asking clarifying questions like “I think you mean X. is that right? Or did you mean Y?” It’s a godsend. As is the companion of reflection: “I think I understand. Let me explain the whole thing and you tell me if I have it right.” In a room full of good communicators you’ll hear people clarifying and reflecting often. It’s a sign everyone sees the traps and wants everyone to avoid them.

Do you wrestle with many stakes, and their holders? What say you?

 

Yesterday I was working on a complex project and found myself stuck. I was out of time and had to make a tough decision. I’d been thinking it over and over in my mind for days but was still unsure. Then I remembered: I’ve done all this before. In my book Making Things Happen I wrote an entire chapter about how to make good decisions as a project manager. And to write that chapter I’d read dozens of books on decision making and overcoming project challenges. Even writers forget the things they’ve written.

In Chapter 8 of Making Things Happen, there’s this list, perfect for a quick skim when stuck on a big choice:

And I’d add:

If you liked this, get the book Making Things Happen, my bestseller on leading project teams. You can read a free chapter on the amazon page.

 

I wrote the popular essay How To Manage Smart People years ago, and often heard the feedback: “advice on smart people is easy. Tell us how to work with stupid people.” I hoped to get to it eventually, but Jason Crawford beat me to it. And he wrote about it in much the way I would have:

 Unless you’re a world-class genius (statistically unlikely), you are probably mis-diagnosing people as stupid.

His post is as a series of questions, almost a checklist, for challenging assumptions. If by chance the person you’re working with is a moron, walking through his post will show you how to think more clearly about whatever it is you’re working on and find a better way to deal with it.

Do you fully understand what they’re saying? Or are you talking past each other?
Are you answering the same question? Maybe each of you is answering a different angle on the question (e.g., “what’s our next step?” vs. “what’s the long-term solution?”)
Are you using terms in the same way? Sometimes disagreements come from differing definitions and terminology.
Are you talking completely in abstractions? Give examples, and ask them for examples, to get clear and concrete

Read the whole post. It’s worth reading once a year, and gift for new leaders and managers.

From Monday’s pile of questions reader Ev Larsen asked:

Assumptions have an unnerving way of becoming facts and received wisdom over time. How do you build some functional assumption-checking into a project team, a process that generates useful feedback and moves the team effort forward?

The best answer to questions of culture is you hire for it. Culture change is slow, much slower than technological change. This mystifies technocrats, as it should. People are much more challenging and powerful than machines will ever be.

Want more creative teams? Hire creative people. Want more risk-taking? Hire for it. No single act defines an organization’s culture more than who is hired and why. If you want to shift a culture the most effective way to do it is to change who you hire. Yes, you can try to lead your current staff in a new direction, but if you’ve hired people in the past primarily for being polite and staying in their lane, the shift to preferring debate and challenging assumptions won’t be an easy one.

The reason is simple: people are stubborn. By the time we’re 25 many of our personality traits, desires and habits are well defined and unlikely to change (it’s certainly possible but odds are against it). The primary point of leverage then is who a manager hires (and fires) and why. It’s far easier to hire for traits you need than to try to transform a person who doesn’t have them into someone that does. Even if transformation is the goal, we are social creatures and learn best from the examples around us. The more people in an organization that successfully demonstrate a trait, the easier it is for others to emulate and adopt it.

One weakness of managers is their faith in the omnipotence of management.  There is the belief, reinforced by management consultants and business books, that simply by decreeing “be innovative” or “work smarter” magic forces that transcend the limits of sociology will transform conservative or stupid people into being otherwise on your behalf. The ability of a manager to achieve something depends heavily on whether the people on staff are even capable of doing that thing. You couldn’t convert the local bakery into a nuclear physics research lab simply by changing the manager or the management philosophy, but that doesn’t stop executives from trying. The current trend of organizations built for decades around core values of conservatism and rule-following magically transforming into entrepreneurial risk taking powerhouses simply because the CEO tells them to is a classic example of this hubris.

A related challenge is for a leader to embody the change in their own behavior. Anthropology teaches us that people respond best to leaders who model behavior, rather than those who simply dictate it. But this requires a leader who is self-aware enough of their own tendencies and who is willing to embody the shift they want in their organisation in their own behavior.

My broad ranting aside, to answer the specific question some people are instinctively better at challenging assumptions than others. They ask more questions, have more doubts, and are willing to act on them. I don’t know why they are this way, but I know these people exist. If you want more assumption checking, hire for it. If you don’t have the power to hire, provide a new way for them to make themselves visible. Then promote and reward people who exercise these traits, as that’s a way to signify to others what is valued and what is not.

These people are harder to manage since they naturally challenge authority, but if you want assumptions challenged that includes the assumption of hierarchy. Diversity is a natural way to bring more questions into an organization as people with different experiences naturally question each other when they get together to build something. Age difference is one of the most useful kinds of diversity as new graduates and old veterans have many different assumptions, and if healthy debate is encouraged the results will be the best synthesis of those perspectives.

The second part is how you as the manager respond to having your assumptions challenged. If you continually demonstrate that you, the person in charge, is comfortable being challenged, or yielding your idea to a superior one suggested by a colleague or subordinate, everyone who works for you will emulate that behavior. Alternatively, if you dismiss challenges, or yell at people who challenge you, the culture of fear your behavior creates will dominate no matter who you hire or how great you proclaim it is to challenge assumptions.

The platitude “there are no sacred cows” is very easy to say, but I’ve rarely heard it said by someone who didn’t really mean “only my sacred cows are sacred.” It takes great confidence as a leader to keep an open mind as the size of their empire grows.

The third part is behaving in ways that separate people from their ideas. Healthy debate is easy if no one is taking the results personally. Most heated debates involve people who have trouble separating their opinions from their identity (the lack of ability to find any humor in a debate is a good sign that someone is taking the issue too seriously). If I draw what turns out to be a bad idea on a whiteboard, in a healthy culture it’s reinforced that the idea is lame, but I’m not. I can still be smart and valuable. Perhaps my lame idea will help lead to a great one. This trust in coworkers is what allows ideas to be debated, attacked, torn down, twisted, reused and improved without any fear of offending anyone. Most successful creative cultures in history were based on this separation. It’s another set of behaviors that leaders must demonstrate regularly. Many talented organizations produce little of merit because of how sensitive people are of criticism, and the fear of offending people or being offended trumps everything else.

There are definitely techniques that encourage the challenge of assumptions but they only work if the above factors are true. My favorites include:

What do you think? Are there other methods to encourage a culture of questioning assumptions?

From Monday’s question pile an anonymous reader asked:

After five years of consulting I accepted a full time job with a startup. My hiring manager is someone with whom I’ve worked as a consultant: I knew he had a temper, which is why I declined his first few invitations to work for him. After a full-court press (by him, his CTO, and the founder) I signed on.

The salary is amazing, the work is interesting. And he promised to control his temper. It’s been two months and he had his second nuclear meltdown all over me last week – a total ambush. He’s an out-of-control bully behind closed doors, and rules by fear and intimidation. He’s lost friends and employees as a result of this character trait.

The job I signed on for isn’t the job I’m doing. The players have changed; a new clique-team of developers have been put in charge. They are disinclined to work with folks they didn’t hire. They’re jockeying for control conducting political power plays, micromanaging me (and I’m a Director), and trying to slice my position into being marginally useful instead of being integral to the team and product.

What to do in this situation? I’m really at a loss on how to improve the situation, aside from walking away.

Walk away, walk away, walk away. Run if you can. Crawl if you must. But leave.

Damage to your health, mental or otherwise, is something no salary or perk can compensate you for. Ever.

If you were starving or were unable to afford new shoes for your kids I’d understand working in a hostile workplace, but otherwise it’s a sign of lack of self-respect. The existence of someone with his problems in a managerial role means his boss has problems too. It always runs deeper than just one bad seed: it takes at least one other bad seed to overlook the need to fire the first bad seed.

It is never your job to fix another person’s psychological problems. If a job requires this for you to succeed you are set up to fail. You should have never believed in his commitment to change as most people don’t possess the ability to make those changes, certainly not as quickly as he promised. Your years of working with him told you more about what to expect than anything he could ever say.

Startups are chaotic places. It’s not surprising that things have changed. But every major change is an invitation to you to change your employer. Take that invitation as a gift. Get out now, on your terms, with your sanity and self-respect intact.

Also see: How to Survive a Bad Manager

The most helpful action when feeling overwhelmed is to make a list. Lists do many good things for our psychology, memory and camaraderie if working with others. Any kind of list will do, but writing them by hand is often best. In all cases, it’s worth remembering the adage: Make a List. When in doubt, just start one. Sit down, shut up and start writing. Perhaps you need a list of questions, a list of problems or a to-do list. Maybe you need a list of lists! The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll realize how many lists you need.

Many projects, despite how complex they seem, simply need someone to stand up, go to the whiteboard, and make a list of what’s wrong, what’s missing, what remains to be done, or what the major problems are. We often allow ourselves to believe that we’re so sophisticated that if we’re having trouble, it must require a complex method to save us, but that’s often not true. A well written list is often the fastest way out of many problematic situations in work or in life (remember, everything in life is a project) .

Without a list:

1. The first task is write a flat, unordered list

Writing things down is powerful. When thoughts are written down you can move them around, compare them, combine them, or divide them as your thinking progresses. There is psychological relief in manifesting something in your head into the world. You can walk away and it’s still there even if you aren’t thinking about it or forget it.

Lists force you to come up with a language to describe tasks, which is helpful when you are working with others:

No matter how big the list is, everyone feels better once the list exists. Hey! You made something! Change of mood starts with small things.

2. Now Thinking Begins

Once there is a list, pivotal questions can be asked: what should be done first? what’s hardest to do? Which thing isn’t understood well enough to know what to do with it?

The list can also be put into order by priority (or cost, or time to finish, or a dozen attributes):

  1. Build Space Rocket
  2. Build Lander Module
  3. Land on Moon
  4. Invent triple warp drive
  5. Make spaceship crash proof
  6. Design tasty food to eat in space
  7. Craft space uniforms that make everyone look hot

It can take hours to debate which things are more important than other things, but once you have a prioritized list you get magic powers: simply by always working from the top down you are guaranteed to always be working on the most important thing, no matter how much work you get done, or how long your list becomes. This means you can stop worrying about the bottom of your list, or how long the list is.

3. Priority 1 and 2

With an ordered list, you can divide between things that must be done (Priority 1) and things that are good, but you can survive without (Priority 2). It can take much thinking to divide a list this way, but once you do, you have clarity. You give yourself the power to say NO to many things, creating space for the priority 1 things to be done well. You know you should not be working on Priority 2 items until all of the Priority 1 items are finished.

  1. Build Space Rocket
  2. Build Lander Module
  3. Land on Moon
    —————————————–
  4. Invent triple warp drive
  5. Make spaceship crash proof
  6. Design tasty food to eat in space
  7. Craft pretty uniforms that make everyone look hot

4. The Big Lesson

When in doubt, make a list. You’ll feel better, I promise.

[Inspired by Linda S.]

References

Every organization has a ratio of idiots to non-idiots. This is the idiot ratio.

This is a harsh, shallow, unfair way of looking at people, but everyone, no matter how offended they are by the premise, can come up with a number in their mind quickly. It’s an easy way to measure the talent pool in any organization. If for every 10 people you work with 3 are incompetent, your ratio is 3:10. Maybe you work somewhere that hires well, and it’s 9:10.

How to use it:  when two people meet to compare their workplaces, both parties think through the people they have to work with regularly and assess how many are incompetent or ineffective. The resulting ratio, 1 in 5, or 1 in 20, is the idiot ratio. Or more optimistically, the talent ratio. With the ratio two people can quickly compare their assessments of their teams.

As mean as this ratio sounds, it might be more honest than when executives say “we have the smartest people in the world”, which is likely self-serving politeness. There is no executive that would ever openly say “our talent sucks” or “we are mostly idiots” even if they believed that.

Limitations:

[This idea is from Rachelle Uberecken, a Senior Software Developer at a place with a pleasantly low idiot ratio]

If you think everyone you work with is an idiot, then the idiot might be you.

Stacey Hanke asked on twitter:

Why is it that when I ask for feedback, it’s never constructive. It’s always vague “good job, nice work.” What does it take to get thorough feedback?

Giving feedback is risky. Most people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. They’ve learned many people are just fishing for praise when they ask for feedback, so that’s what they provide.

Some people are more honest with feedback than others. Seek them out. And it’s up to you to cultivate trust with someone to get to the point where they feel safe enough to give you honest criticism. Consider the cliche “do I look good in this bathing suit?” who answers this with complete honesty? It’s typically people who know you well enough to know that you want to hear the truth and will appreciate it. It takes time for that kind of relationship to develop.

There are five ways to improve the quality of feedback you get:

Also see:

 

One theme of my book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work, is questioning aging work practices. Particularly ones followed our of tradition without evidence they contribute to quality of work.

Here’s a list of work practices that should be reconsidered: is there any evidence these contribute to work performance in any way?

This list was generated from replies to two twitter posts .

While I’m happy to hear gripes about practices done poorly, ideally I’m looking for practices that have no value no matter how well they’re done.

What work traditions do you think need to go away?