Category: Organization

Problems, messes, and stories

A good chunk of my early career was spent writing code. In COBOL no less (one more proof that I am indeed an old fart). Someone had developed pretty detailed specifications and my task was to translate those specs into working code. Much like doing math homework, I spent my days solving problems.

One cliched criticism from clients footing the bill for this work ran along the lines of

“what do you really know? You’ve never had to worry about making payroll”

In reality, neither had any of my critics but that was no impediment to the critique.

Unlike those critics, however, there came a time when I did, indeed, have to worry about making payroll. In 1994, I left a secure job with an established company to start a consulting firm with nine other partners and an initial staff of fifteen. We each invested from our savings and took about half our pay as deferred compensation to be paid if and when we were successfully established. We got stock options that might be worth something in a few years if we succeeded.

In our first year of business we did $12 million in revenue. We did close to $26 million in our second year and hired another 30 people. My partners and I were indeed getting a first hand education in “making payroll.” When we weren’t fretting about where the next client or check would come from, we were working to build an organization out of a collection of people who were learning each other’s names.

Two things were going on as we made plans for our third year of business. One, we were making a bet on how much business we could do in the coming year. Two, we were looking to hire the people to do the work we had sold and hoped to sell. We set our revenue goal to double again, this time to $52 million.

Meanwhile, we were on business school and top tier college campuses looking for talent. We were basically complete unknowns competing against established firms ranging from McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group to Accenture and Deloitte. If you know the industry, these names tell you a lot. If you don’t, think of us as a club ice hockey team thinking it could compete at the Olympics.

Come April 1st, we had a budget and offers out to about twenty five students set to join us come the summer. If we were an unknown to prospective clients, we were a complete unknown on campuses. We had a good story for students looking for something a bit less safe than signing on with a name firm. Recruiting offices on campus were skeptical but tolerant. We were making investments for the longer term.

Two weeks later our largest client, representing half of our revenue, was acquired by another company who immediately shut down all active consulting projects. We were faced with the question of do we withdraw our outstanding job offers? How would we ever recruit at any top tier school if we did? Meeting payroll now seemed such a simple problem.

Some immediate decisions were straightforward. The budgeted bonus pool for the partners was zeroed out. So was our future deferred compensation. The risks that come with being an entrepreneur.

What happened next was the interesting story. We elected to lay out the entire situation to our staff. Their very first question was why did we still have a line item for staff bonuses. There was also universal support for maintaining the outstanding job offers and signing bonuses for incoming recruits.

We weathered the storm, although we didn’t hit our revenue target. We did do $36 million by year’s end. We continued to recruit on those campuses and others. Those graduates who stayed with us became partners. Others moved on to C-level roles elsewhere.

The late Russell Ackoff was a student of organization and complex systems. One of his core lessons was that organizations rarely get simple problems to solve. They are routinely challenged with amorphous, ill-defined messes that must be managed.

Mess is the default state of human organizations. Keeping the level of mess to a manageable level is the lot of anyone who aspires to rise within them.

What could possibly go wrong

My MacBook is now five years old and in need of a new battery. Which meant a trip to the local Apple store for diagnostics. I’ll need to let them have the machine for several days so they can ship it off to a repair center. That will require a bit of juggling to figure out when I can be without one of my primary tools.

I do keep regular backups for this machine which reminded me of a story from my consulting days. Appropriately enough I suppose, it was the same project I wrote about when I kicked off this effort; giving the state of New York a new accounting system (Addressing the Mess - McGee’s Musings).

We were at the point of cutting over from the old system to the new after two years of development work and extensive training for all the users of the system across the state. One of the critical steps in the conversion was to map all the appropriations and budgets from the old system to the new system. My team had worked out a clever way to do the cutover given that we were talking about several hundred agencies and state departments identified in the 1,500 page state budget.

The results existed on six computer tapes. Each tape was on a reel about a foot in diameter containing several thousand feet of magnetic tape. Today all of this would likely fit on a thumb drive. The tapes were stored and managed in the State Comptroller’s Office computer room on the ground floor. The computer center manager assured us that the data was safe but I was skeptical. I asked Mitch, one of my analysts, to make absolutely certain that no one could touch our tapes. I had requested that we take possession of the tapes for the duration and deliver then to the data center when needed. I was overruled by their manager. He assured me that his systems were reliable until the night that one of the operators tried to use the tapes to run their nightly backups.

The only thing that prevented the data center operators from grabbing our tapes was Mitch. He had secured our tapes in the data center with a chain and a bicycle lock. The data center director was torn between being mad at me for bypassing his system and embarrassed that his staff had nearly wiped out months of work.

Mitch got a nice write up in his performance review and a story about just how trustworthy systems can be when you’ve got people in the loop. I got one about putting faith in your people.

Sucked into the theater

I arrived at Princeton in the early days of coeducation there. After 200+ years as an all-male institution, women were now fellow students rather than weekend visitors. About 28% of my 1,000 odd classmates were women.

I had spent the previous six years at an all boys high school. Which meant minimal experience or skill at interacting with the opposite sex. I had, however, learned one odd thing I was able to take advantage of. Theater productions generally called for a pretty even mix of men and women on stage and that tended to hold true for the rest of the production as well. In high school that meant partnering with sister schools to stage shows.

At Princeton that meant finding my way to McCarter Theater during orientation week to see the Princeton Triangle Club perform some of their greatest hits. The pretty blond handing out flyers at the entrance suggested my hypothesis was correct.

It was.

While I was smitten with a particular redhead in a skit satirizing “The Dating Game”, so was every other heterosexual male in the audience. Turns out she was also a senior but that didn’t stop me from signing up to work backstage on future shows.

Over the next four years that included building sets, hanging lights, stage managing multiple shows, and going on three tours. Eventually I had possession of an unauthorized master key to the theater. I even rode the fire escape slide from the seven-story tower that housed the dressing rooms.

Some weeks I spent more time in McCarter than all of my classes combined. After one late dress rehearsal that ended shortly after midnight, the very first note from the director was to deputize two cast members to escort me back to my dorm room and put me to bed. A bed I hadn’t seen in the past 120 hours.

The theater is a place of myth and tradition. It’s knowledge that you absorb rather than study. It’s also a realm of large, and often fragile, egos. Which made it an extraordinary environment for me to learn how to navigate and operate inside complex, human, organizations. Which evolved into my life’s work.

All because I wanted to get better at talking to girls.

Simple Questions that aren’t so Simple

“Where did you go to school?”

It’s an innocuous cocktail party question that pops up fairly early. You would think that the answers would be simple. Not necessarily.

In St.Louis, where I grew up, this is actually a question about where you went to high school, not university. The answer slots you pretty precisely along political, religious, and socio-economic dimensions. 

Elsewhere in the U.S. this is, in fact, a question about your university affiliation. For most people, in most situations, the answers are simple; “Michigan”, “MIT”, “Notre Dame.” There are two seemingly evasive answers that I am qualified to and sometimes do use; “in New Jersey” and “in Boston.” These are code phrases for “Princeton” and “Harvard.”

Why dodge a direct answer? Because a straight answer might not provoke a straight reaction. The explicit conversation isn’t always the most relevant conversation underway. What appears to be a simple inquiry and a simple, factual, response may be heavily freighted with hidden assumptions and expectations. 

This layering of conversations is present in most settings. My history may make me a bit more attuned to that. 

Which turns out to be of increasing importance and relevance in knowledge intensive settings. Organizations want to pretend that they are simple, straightforward, places. While I am open to a debate about whether that might once have been true, I wouldn’t operate on any of those assumptions today. 

The complexity is there. You can ignore it or you can accept it and factor it in.

Out of place: finding a place to stand

Cannon Green Princeton University“Where did you prep?”

A simple question posed by another freshman taking in the sight of a thousand other freshmen (3/4s of them men) scattered about Cannon Green on the campus of Princeton University.

Four simple words, yet I wasn’t able to process them.

“Where did I prep?” Prep for what? This get acquainted picnic among a thousand strangers? This college experience I was setting off on?

It dawns on me that the question was about which exclusive prep school I had attended on my way to gracing the ivied halls of one of the best universities in the world. For my questioner, there were only a handful of correct answers; any other point of origin marked me as irrelevant in his universe.

A few days into my college experience and I was irrelevant.

Until that point, I thought I was defined by what I had done. Now I discovered there were a host of external markers defining me in the eyes of others. What town did I live in? What subdivision? What street was my house on?

Classic ways of differentiating people; all new to me. So much for being a valedictorian; I was profoundly ignorant of things that apparently mattered. I’m in a new place, a thousand miles from home, and feel profoundly out of place. Have I been out of place all along and only come to see that now?

I’d never thought about myself as a kid from the Midwest until I was among people to whom the middle class Midwest was a foreign land. It was disorienting. I had grown accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. Now, I was in rooms where everyone was as smart or smarter. And smart wasn’t the pertinent metric. There were entire realms of competition and measurement I couldn’t see even as I fell short.

Working out the implications of this has mostly involved time with various therapists. Not terribly interesting in this context. But coping with disorientation turns out to be a good way to prep for the future we live in now. Unpacking a question like “where did you prep?” turns you into an anthropologist in your own environment.

There’s a line in Shaw’s Caesar And Cleopatra that’s relevant here;

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature

I was a barbarian forced to recognize customs as simply that. This put me on a path to make sense out of institutions and organizations and the people inside them.

Organizations are ostensibly about what you do. But what you do is filtered and interpreted by where your office is located; how big it is; what you hang on the walls; where you sit in the pecking order. Over the course of a career, you learn to send, receive, and interpret these signals. You learn your place. You learn to establish your place.

The past year has accelerated a long simmering trend toward shifting work from physical space to virtual. For teams and groups that have a working history to draw on this transition is mildly disruptive. For newly assembled teams, however, all the cues and clues that were readily available to work with in a physical encounter aren’t available in the virtual. If we want these virtual groups to succeed and flourish we now have to think about things that were just there in the background.

When you foreground these things they create different effects than in the background. Making an explicit point that you went to Princeton or Harvard is quite different than a diploma on the wall or a discrete reference/object on a shelf in the corner that might trigger a question or open up a conversational gambit. There’s no easy conversation opener about someone’s Starbucks order or lunch. No reference to some object of interest in the place where you are interacting.

One of the reasons we’re finding ourselves exhausted in this new virtual world is that we are now having to do the work that our places did for us.

 

 

Working in the boundaries – making the pieces fit together

“Specialization is for insects” Robert A. Heinlein

Between can be a difficult location. Cast or crew. Analog or digital. Quant or sales. Worker bee or management. Head or heart.

If you choose to reject the standard either/or logic and opt to stake out territory at a boundary or junction, the most likely result is ridicule and rejection. No matter how continuous reality may be, we insist on carving it up.

When I first moved out of the tech crew and into the stage manager’s shoes, I thought I was taking a small step. What I was doing was choosing to live in a DMZ. I became the referee when the lighting director and the choreographer both wanted the stage at the same time.

There was a time in one especially difficult production when I had had it with both the Producer and the Director. I can’t even remember what the argument was about. I left a note in the office that I was going back to school and they could finish the show without me.

A friend in the cast found me ten hours later in the one place I figured no one would think to look. I was in the third subbasement of the university library. Probably the first time I had set foot there since September and it was now March. I was coaxed into going back to the production, after apologies from the Producer and Director.

This was the earliest incident I can recall working to reconcile conflicting perspectives and demands to pull off a vision. Carpenters wanted to build, electricians wanted to light, dancers wanted to stretch, and actors wanted to run lines. All of it had to come together for the curtain to go up on opening night.

Over time, my interests have migrated to how to balance technology opportunities and organizational limits. But the reluctance of most to look outside the boundaries of their playgrounds remains. My head likes the challenge of figuring out the differing sets of details and their interactions.

Most players pick a side. They choose to belong to one organizational clan or the other. They commit to being management or to being a machine learning expert. Fewer choose to work as simultaneous translators; to learning the language and theories of new technology and of deep strategy.

Our systems are built around slotting people into speciality roles. What often gets lost is that someone has to work at being the glue fitting key elements together.

Picking an organizational stack

I suspect my early experiences with organizations were similar to most. Most of what we encountered was pretty simple to see and understand. We were students in a classroom, there was a teacher in the front of the room and a principal down the hall. Add a librarian, a school nurse, and the cafeteria ladies and you pretty much had it all.

At the other extreme, we tried to get the phone company or the Department of Motor Vehicles to help with a simple problem and encountered bewildering complexity. Why organizations looked the way they do wasn’t a question that occupied much of my attention.

My path to organization change and design was by way of programming and information systems design. What I learned in systems design was that complexity was the enemy. You had to understand the complexity of the problem you wanted to solve for there to be any hope of crafting a solution. The biggest mistake you could make was to miss some essential element of the complexity. The second biggest mistake was to add complexity by accident with your solution.

My technology training and experience tackled complexity with notions of designed modularity and looking for the natural places to carve the overarching system into discrete pieces.  There’s a rich assortment of models for thinking about problems of organizational design. I’ve taught them and I’ve used them. What I’m working through now is whether I can articulate a stack of organizational ideas that might help keep the complexity under control when looking at a new problem.

One organizational stack that intrigues me is

  • Purpose
  • Power
  • Process
  • Practice
  • People

I like the alliteration and I think the layers are largely self-defining/self-explanatory. I can see how I might map what I observe onto layers and how I might navigate up or down the stack while exploring a design question.

I’m now curious whether this cursory perspective is enough to generate some reaction.

Turtles all the way done: hijacking stories to your own ends

Turtles all the way down
Terrapin stack

There’s an old parable that I first remember encountering in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It often surfaces in explorations of the collision between science and myth. In Hawking’s retelling, the story goes like this:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

With the recent resurgence in adherents to belief in a Flat Earth, this tale is offered as a cautionary reminder of the power of compelling myth in the face of plain old evidence. That’s an important reminder in a world buffeted by change. Whatever your commitment to reason and evidence, you only replace a story with a better story.

I want to see if I can hijack the turtles metaphor to my rational ends.

My interests are in connecting technology and organizational realities. I’ve used the obvious image of building bridges but that may be too simplistic to be helpful after everyone nods that a bridge would be nice to have. Perhaps a stack of turtles can help us navigate the space between.

The realm of computing and communications technology is still a relative newcomer in organizational settings. Learning to wrestle the complexity to the ground is a key task in developing comfort and proficiency with technology. One of the principal methods of getting technology under conceptual control is the notion of a stack; of discrete layers of technology the interact with one another in sharply constrained ways.

There is a well known observation about dealing with technology first offered by computer scientist David Wheeler that:

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection

When things become too complex, we hide the complexity underneath a new layer of abstraction. Tim Berners-Lee invents a scheme, the url, that hides the details of reaching out to another computer and grabbing a file or document. Pretty soon, we’re watching reruns of I Love Lucy in our web browsers.

The number of layers you might traverse in  any given technology environment can become quite deep. The design challenge in new technology often revolves around how cleanly you can define and navigate the stack of layers.

Which brings me back to my turtles. What if we extend the stack upwards from the technology into the organization? Don’t think of the process as a single step across one bridge. Think in terms of what new layers (or turtles) make sense to cross the span. Now your problem is one of working out how to move up or down a layer at a time.

You can’t win. Play anyway

Holloman AFB F-4 Phantom II

One of the first office jobs I held was the summer after my freshman year in college. I worked for McDonnell Aircraft Company. as a material accounting cost clerk. MDAC was a defense contractor that made F-4 Phantom Jets and the Gemini space capsule among other things. Today it is part of Boeing.

I was a very lowly cog in a large complex system. My job was to write up the accounting entries to make sure that the inventory systems were in sync with the actual inventory. Some auditor would go out on the factory floor and count how many left-handed wing tips were sitting somewhere along the assembly line. My entire job was to compare the auditors count of actual inventory with the number recorded in the accounting system and then write out the journal entry to adjust the number in the accounting system to match the number that the auditor had found on the factory floor.

It was as mind numbing as you might imagine. I wrote the entries by hand onto paper forms that had to be reviewed and approved by my supervisor and then sent off elsewhere to be punched onto punch cards and fed into the computer located three buildings away.

There is one entry that sticks in my head. The auditors reported that they had counted three Pratt and Whitney jet engines on the floor. The accounting system thought there were four. How do you lose a 16-foot jet engine? Not my problem and no one else seemed terribly concerned. I wrote up the journal entry and it happily flowed off into the system.

You don’t design and build fighter jets with a handful of smart people. You need a complex system of people and processes and technology working together to pull it off. People, process, and technology is one of those cliches that gets thrown around a lot in organizations. I didn’t know the cliche at the time, but I was living in the middle of its reality.

This was when I began to grasp the complexity baked into large organizations. There are two choices for how to play in this environment. One is to be content with occupying a particular niche in the greater whole. The other is to wonder how it all fits together. Clearly, I opted for door number two.

I chose the word “play” intentionally. There is another lesson that I found in my time as a clerk. You have to accept that systems don’t always match reality. You have to build in mechanisms for correcting when systems and reality fall out of sync. And those mechanisms have their own weaknesses. Complexity and perfection are not reconcilable. Order is always battling chaos.

When I was learning physics, we learned about the second law of thermodynamics and the notion of entropy. There was some nasty math involved but our teacher summed things up this way:

Life is a game. You can’t win. You’re going to lose. You can’t get out of the game.

That leaves you with the option of playing simply for the sake of playing. A good lesson for all seasons.

Ritual by design

My first experience with ritual was as an altar boy when being a boy was a prerequisite and you had to memorize the responses in Latin. Others may have thought about the ritual aspects; I was mostly concerned with not tripping on my alb.

Ritual, and superstition, was a major component of life in the theater. Learning to say “break a leg” instead of “good luck” as an actor took the stage. Discovering what the “Scottish Play” was. Remembering to leave the ghost light on when you were the last one out at the end of the night.

As a techie, I did these things because that was what you did even if they seemed silly to my fiercely rational side. Fitting in and being part of the company was far more important than pointing out the essential illogic of these rituals.

Despite my fundamental skepticism I found myself drawn to organizations and settings that valued rituals. I started my professional career at Arthur Andersen & Co, part of what was once the Big 8 accounting firms. Gray suits and white shirts were the uniform of most days. Andersen was one of the professional service firms that invested heavily in training. I spent many days at their training center outside of Chicago as both student and faculty.

The activities that happened after classes wrapped up each day gradually chipped away at my skepticism. Andersen’s training facility had previously been a small Catholic college campus. It was far outside of Chicago proper. We were pretty much prisoners during the week but Andersen was shrewd enough to invest in its own liquor license to keep the natives from rioting. Classes were filled with practical lessons. Evenings were devoted to knitting people into the culture.

Smack me over the head enough times and I eventually catch on. Perhaps the “soft side” of organization is worth paying attention to. An MBA and a Ph.D. later and I finally grasp that it’s more effective to look at organizations as socio-technical systems. Which is an ornate way to say that both the people and the machines matter.

At the outset I viewed this through the lens of an anthropologist. Organizational culture and the methods and rituals that bound people together were objects of study. They were aspects of the organizational environment and had come into existence through the passage of time. You could nudge things at the margins if you worked hard enough at change management.

I had an odd lesson on organizational stability and flexibility early in my career. The theater group that occupied all of my free time and a good bit of my class time in college was about 90 years old at the time. Shortly after I graduated I was asked to serve as a trustee of the group. Instead of the four years that most people spent connected, I spent an additional ten. I saw a curious thing about history vs. tradition. For students, whatever had happened during their few years in the club was all of history. Traditions just sort of existed; they were only loosely connected to the longer history in students minds.

That came back into play when I was part of the founding group of a consulting firm. We had no history but came from places where history and tradition was a key element of success. We understood that we were not simply growing a new business, we were laying down the experiences and stories that would become our traditions and our rituals. We could be intentional about what stories we chose to celebrate or to ignore.

One example comes to mind. We spent most of our time on the road at client sites. We had virtually no infrastructure of offices to hang out in between assignments. Fortunately for our economics, we also had little down time between assignments. You worked with your team during the week and you went out with your team after work in whatever city you happened to be in. But you might not meet your colleagues on other teams for months. They would only be an email address or a disembodied voice on a conference call.

We were smart enough to invest in monthly All Hands Meetings where we flew everyone into Chicago for a meeting to talk about the business and our work. While there was always a formal agenda, we were more interested in providing space for conversations between and after the official meeting. And we were always on the look out for stories to share.

But the clever thing that happened was an end of the day ritual that took place after work at client sites. There was an online trivia game available in many sports bars at the time. It had a leader board that showed who doing well and it showed the leaders across all the bars and restaurants playing the game that night. The game allowed six characters for a name. Our project teams would agree on a time to play (adjusting for multiple timezones) and they would choose a team name that was “GEM” (short for Diamond, which was the firm’s name) plus the airport code for the client city. So the team working in Wichita would be GEMICT and the team on Wall Street would be GEMLGA. We had pretty smart people on our teams and the goal was to see how many slots on the leader board would belong to GEMXXX teams. If your team grabbed the top spot for the night, we picked up the bar tab. Small outlay, but important bragging rights for the next All Hands Meeting.

The final observation I would make is that we learned not to force these things. Instead, we looked for ideas from the field that we could amplify. Learning to discern what could be amplified versus what would be rejected took time.