Damian Golding

Craftsman and Contract Managers

Prepare yourself for a huge sweeping generalisation- In large organisations people tend to fall into one of two categories: Craftsman or Contract Managers.

Craftsman* create and build things. They take some raw materials and do some work to make something more valuable.  In today’s corporate world  this is not necessarily about building furniture or pottery because the raw material is most likely to be information. All large companies today rely on information technology and therefore depend on craftsman to be creative with it.

When an organisation doesn’t have the right type of craftsmen internally, they contract the work out and employ contract managers make sure they get what they want within the time frames required. For the purposes of this post I want to extend this definition to say that contract managers are essentially “craftsman wranglers” whether they be internal or external.

“A” is a good example of a craftsman. “A”’s job title is a “Web Analyst” and what she does is look at website logs etc to measure how many people are viewing the company website and what they are doing while they are there.  She is a quiet genius when it comes to this task and is able to identify interesting usage patterns and predict how many visitors the website is going to get in any given month with amazing accuracy. Without her, the company would be flying blind regarding how their website is working.

“B” is a good example of a contract manager.  He leads a cross functional team that includes some craftsmen types like graphic designers and copywriters. While not being a designer or writer himself he is also very good at his job and makes sure the work is done on time and meets quality standards. He is exceptionally organised and excels at planning ahead to make sure his team is run well. He is making sure all the contracts are being fulfilled whether they be internal or external.

While both “A” and “B” both are good at their jobs and take pride in their work, there is a one thing that makes a significant difference: “A”’s work is not scalable while “B”’s is.  “A” can only do so much in a day while “B” can start managing other contract managers ie. A promotion means applying the same skills. “A” can also get promoted but this will mean wholly or partly turning into a contract manager which is not attractive at all to her She loves what she does and is not prepared to give it up.

What this all means is that in large organisations, people like “B” who are good, get promoted while people like “A” who are also good, seem to have limited progression opportunities.

This leads to an unfortunate outcome where companies are run by non-craftsman and think that their particular skills are the ones that are important and increase shareholder value. After a certain point corporate leaders have no idea how their company really operates and find themselves managing a black box that makes money but they are not really sure how. They choose to outsource as much as they can looking for cheaper ways to run the black box without realising that they are outsourcing the creativity which forms the real fundamentals of the company.

The real value of a business lies with the craftsman working there but this value cannot be fully realised unless you have good contract managers organising things and respecting the the work the craftsman do.

*(or “craftsperson” if you like but I assure you that even though I used the non-PC term here I mean it inclusively) 

Avoid Crowds

There is safety in numbers.

From a pure survival standpoint you are better off being part of the herd than going off by yourself. Birds have worked this out as have fish and there is strong evidence to suggest that cyclists can benefit from being part of the pack. But aiming for survival is a fairly modest goal and it is not going to take you anywhere special.

Moving on from basic survival, it seems that whatever you do in life, there seems to be an advantage in avoiding the crowds. A good basic strategy, whether you are catching public transport, applying for a new job or even setting up a new business is being different to everyone else.

Here are a couple of trivial examples that demonstrate what I am talking about:

After we got married, my wife and I lived in the central business district and she found that she no longer had traffic problems. Since her office was outside of the city, her commute was always opposite to everyone else. In the morning and evenings she had empty lanes while there was traffic jams as far as the eye could see on the other side.

Now that we have kids, we have moved to a suburban home and I catch the train to work.

There are two trains that arrive at my local station within about 3 minutes of each other. The first is the express and it only stops at 4 stations on its way to the city. The express gets into the city faster but there is standing room only when it arrives and quickly becomes so packed that there is no room at all. It is uncomfortable and annoying.

The second train stops at all 15 stations and arrives hard on the heels of the express. It is always almost empty and I can take my pick of seats. However it takes another 15mins to do the trip. I have made a choice to sacrifice the 15min in favour of a more comfortable journey. I am more relaxed, less stressed and happier as a result. It leaves me in a much better frame of mind to face the day.

However there is always inherent risk in being different, having lunch before or after the rush time is something I have tried and not had much success with. The system is not set up to cater for diners in odd hours. Holidaying in the off season is also fraught with danger, it may be less crowded but everything is closed.

I think the best policy is to always try to be a little different. Experiment with convention and see what happens. It takes a bit of courage sometimes and initially feels a little uncomfortable but my experience ha been that choosing not to be a sheep is very empowering. However, there was one occasion where this got the better of me.

I had decided to go to the gym at 3pm in the afternoon during the week. Not in the peak times like before or after work or at lunch but at a time when everyone else would be in the office. I suddenly had easy access to all of the equipment and no one causing me grief. The downside was the guilt factor.

Even though was was making up the time by working later, I could not get comfortable with the feeling of being away at that time or the idea that people “might” be looking for me. These problems were largely imagined and largely due to my personality and probably something I need to work on.

The myth of data driven decisions.

In a previous blog post “Rolling them down the hill” I was making the point that people’s decision making tends follow a path of an instantaneously formed opinion based on aesthetics followed by a process of looking for evidence to support this initial choice. In retrospect I may have over simplified it but there is still something there that I believe is largely true.

What made me think of it again was this quote that came up in one of my RSS feeds:

“When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you, but because, in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for.” Minimal

There has been a lot of work done in the field of decision making from examining established techniques to complicated medical investigations looking at things like the “ventromedial prefrontal cortex” and its probably worth mentioning that I have studied none of it. Even so I have a theory that much of the practical techniques are pretty much for show and that ultimately, good decisions makers rely on intuition & courage more than anything else.  This is quite similar to what Malcolm Gladwell was writing about in Blink but the distinction I am making is that the process of decision making is a delaying tactic while the decision maker tries to work out how they “feel” about it in order to choose. They will do what feels right.

I know that  people like to think they have an open mind and gather evidence before making a decision but in my experience the data collected rarely gives a  purely positive or purely negative result. You are going to get pros an cons either way and ultimately you are going to have to make a “feel” call in the end.

“In the end” means you run out of time and are forced to make a call theoretically based on on what ever data you have gathered to that point. Your decision that may be better because you have had some time to think about it a little more or read something that changed your perspective slightly. But not really evidence.

In agile software development there is a saying that the best possible outcome is making the right decision and the worst possible outcome is not making a decision. The wrong decisions sits somewhere between the two. The sooner you make a wrong decision the sooner you discover that you where wrong. If you don’t make a decision then you are not making progress at all, you have stopped moving and probably stalled everyone working with you. You make not realised this at first but eventually you will find your loyal troops have moved on to other work.

What this means to me is that to get the best out of our teams and ourselves its probably best to stop pretending that we go through a decision making process and have more courage to make intuitive decisions.

The Placebo Effect

Last year there was an article in Wired Magazine and  NPR news talking about how drug companies are really struggling to get new products released because the drugs cannot be shown to be any more effective than sugar pills in clinical trials. The noteworthy thing here is the new drugs are not necessarily ineffective, its just that sugar pills seem to be working just as well.

If a patient believes or has an reasonable expectation that they are getting treatment, then in a lot of cases they do get better even though there is no medication involved. This is so common it has a name “the placebo effect”. However the scale on which it is occurring now seems to be at a historical high.  You could infer then that the more convinced people are about the power of modern medicine the higher the incidence of the effect.

The whole situation indicates that medicine is not really as advanced as we think and there is some psycho-biological effects that still need to be understood. It also may explain why alternative medicine is still very popular despite the lack of recognized science behind it. You can probably get positive results as long as the patient buys into the whole thing.

Of course your are wondering why I am mentioning all this here and what relevance it has to with getting things done in large organisations?  Well I know a work place version of the placebo effect and they are called “consultants”.

I believe that consultants trade to a large degree on the clients belief that an external group can come in and make things better because the have some sort of special abilities that the client does not have. Even if they don’t have special abilities, as long as the client believes it then positive change can happen. Its very much like alternative medicine in that regard I guess.

Here is a more interesting connection: Lenore Jacobson was a school principal who partnered with a psychologist called  Robert Rosenthal to study the the effect of teachers’ expectations on students in the 60s. They found that if teachers were told that certain children were more advanced than the rest of the class then these kids tended to perform better regardless if this was true or not. ie. If you treat people as high performers then they behave as high performers. Strictly speaking this is known as the Pygmalion effect not the Placebo effect but they are very similar.

In the work place it would be like a manager extracting great performance out of a team purely on the basis that she/he treats them like high performers. I can totally see how this would work. If someone had the genuine expectation of being a star it frees them up from having to prove it and allows them to focus completely on doing great work.

Unfortunately, this strategy seems to most often take the form of a leaders setting unrealistic goals for their teams not in the sense that “you are a great team you can achieve this” but more as “a great team could achieve this, show me what kind of team you are” of course this doesn’t work.

Just like a patient getting better on the strength of belief and expectation, knowledge workers can work better based on the same ingredients.

Organizational anti-patterns

I was link hopping my way around Wikipedia.org recently when I came across the article for “Anti-Pattern“.

I was familiar with the idea of design patterns in the context of software development and I knew them to be reusable approaches to solve common problems. They are  not necessarily the exact answer to your problem, it’s just a template that you start with and adapt to suit. So rather than starting from scratch, you get a head start by using a proven approach that has worked well in the past.

If you are not a developer don’t bother looking these up because they are quite boring and have names like “the adaptor” or” the bridge”. The problems they  are solving are common programming issues not day to day human problems.

So it follows that an anti-pattern is the opposite of a pattern or as wikipedia says “Some repeated pattern of action, process or structure that initially appears to be beneficial, but ultimately produces more bad consequences than beneficial results”. The key thing here is that anti-patterns are not obviously “bad” at the start. They seem just as good as anything else but they have been shown to end up doing more harm than good despite seeming like workable solutions to begin with.

Now I am fine with this definition but here is the thing about the wikipedia article for anti-pattern: While the examples given for patterns are rather abstract, the examples given for anti-patterns are of a very human scale that is easy to relate to. The list of recognised anti-patterns kicked off with examples around organisational behaviours including

• Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
• Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
• Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
• Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
• Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
• Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
• Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
• Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organisational communication
• Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component^[4]

Now, being wikipedia you need to take this with a grain of salt and I am not sure these are true anti-patterns. Even so these examples had a huge impact on me, not because I can cite recent personal experience of most these but because of the idea that these can be grouped together to form a kind of organisational playbook. God I would love one of those.  I wonder what the good organisational patterns would look like?

There is only one good organisational pattern that I can think of right now and that is the 3 horizon model suggested in The Alchemy of Growth. I would buy a book that sets out these ideas in the same way as software pattens are used in software engineering.

Context Free Questions

One of my favourite work related books is “Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design by Donald Gause & Gerald Weinberg”.

Their basic premise is that you tend to get what you ask for and if you don’t  explain (or understand) your needs very clearly, then you run a high risk of not getting what you want. The book goes through a number of methods and tools to remove ambiguity and clarify what you want before you start writing requirements and designing solutions. This is what they mean by quality before design.

This idea really resonated with me because I firmly believe that you can track most failed projects back to a lack of clarity or lack of understanding about what a project is trying to achieve in the first place. If you take the time to really be clear on your problem before getting into solution mode, then your chances of being successful are vastly increased. But that is really hard when everyone in the project just wants to “get started” and begin to build something.

While the book is mostly aimed at IT and Engineering disciplines, the authors say it applies equally to just about any activity where you need to define requirements and it is one of those brilliant books whose content seems transcend its subject to say something wider and more universally true. Although the book was written in 1989, I feel it is still as instructive and useful today in 2010. There is one particular aspect of the book that I have found incredibly useful and that is the concept of “context free questions”.

Context free questions are high level and general questions which can be asked at the beginning of a requirements process to establish the boundaries and the basic shape of the the design problem. They are independent of the subject so you can develop a standard list to use repeatedly.

Here is a copy of the sample list of context free questions provided by Gause & Weinberg.

• Who is the client?
• What is a highly successful solution really worth to this client?
• What is the real reason for wanting to solve this problem?
• Should we use a single design team, or more than one?
• Who should be on the team(s)?
• How much time do we have for this project?
• What is your trade-off between time and value?
• Where else can the solution to this problem be obtained?
• Can we copy something that already exists?
• What problems does this product solve?
• What problems could this product create?
• What environment is this product likely to encounter?
• What kind of precision is required or desired in the product?

Here are some that I have added myself:

• What metrics will be used to measure success?
• Is there one problem or multiple problems that we need to solve?
• What can’t change as a result of what we are going to do?
• Have we tried to solve this problem before?
• Are we going to solve all of this problem or only part of it?

I find that the trick is not to ask these questions one after the other but instead use one  and chase down any ideas coming out of it with further questions. It’s only when you run out of steam do you pick another one.

For example:

Mary: “What metrics will be used to measure success?”

John: “It will be visits to the web page.”

Mary: “OK, so as long as we get visits to the page we will be successful?”

John: “Well, yes but the customers need to fill out the forms as well.”

Mary: “OK, so maybe form submissions could be a better metric?”

John: “Hmm…partly. The bottom line is that we need to migrate calls away from the call centre and get our customers using the online resources more.”

Mary: “Ah OK. So who will be the client for this work?”

John: “Well its a marketing initiative but the call centre will need to realise the benefits.”

…and so on. You get the picture!

Gause & Weinberg also suggest you ask “meta-questions” too which means asking questions about the questions. For example “Am I asking to many questions?” or “Is there a question I should have asked?” Personally, I have never really got anything useful from these because the answers tend to be “yes” or “no” which doesn’t give you a lot to work with.

Anyway, context free questions are a great tool to use at that scary, uncertain initial phase of a project to help establish clarity and remove ambiguity. They have made a difference for me and I would love to hear about your experiences with them.

A Sporting Analogy

Imagine a football team that chooses its players by having a huge fight before the games. Obviously, this is not the best way of picking a team because: a) you are likely to get the best fighters not the best players, b) the team will probably not work together effectively  and c) they will be exhausted before they start.

Now this sounds ridiculous but it is exactly the process I see happening when large organisations try to do anything new.  In a corporate environment there are many people with overlapping roles and responsibilities which creates an atmosphere of intense competition around whose ideas see the light of day. The internal politics and manoeuvring that goes on soaks up the energy of those involved and tends to favour those adept at political warfare and debate rather than any inherent practical capability to do things. To me, this seems to explain why large organisations take so long to create new things and why the result are often so poor.

What we are seeing is the work of exhausted fighters.

Smaller organisations don’t have this problem because they are lucky if they have enough people for a team in the first place. You are much more likely to find someone covering two roles rather that competing for one which means that they can focus all their energy on the work itself. They don’t need to establish a mandate to do something new or convince anyone else that they are competent. Creating PowerPoint presentations with 50 slides are a distraction that they just don’t spend time on. Instead they are judged on real world results.

Small companies usually have the advantage of a leader who is close to the work and knows what roles need to be done and is able to spot duplication and inefficiency. I am sure most CEOs of big companies don’t really understand how their companies work and have to rely on what they hear which is usually managers big noting themselves or cutting others down. They spend most of their time dealing with the politics.

I need to be careful here and say that most of my comments relate to doing new things. There are large parts of organisations which don’t experience this and that’s because they do something that no one else wants to do. There is no competition for who is going to talk to customers on the phone.

Of course you are probably thinking that big corporates make big decisions about big things. Their actions affect large numbers of people and involve millions of dollars. They need to have all these check and balances. To which I reply “yes, thats true” but I am not seeing checks and balances, I am seeing chaotic in-fighting with little in the way of actual results.

So, here is the thing: Successful companies grow bigger and eventually get to a size where internal conflict arises about who is actually responsible for doing the interesting work. At this point a political environment is created where some people thrive and other people get pushed into corners. I am saying that the people adept creating and delivering good ideas are rarely the ones who are good at the politics. So what you end up with is a situation where everyone seems to be extremely busy but externally nothing appears to be happening.

For large organisations to succeed, every effort needs to be made to minimise the politics and make sure the best person for the job is actually doing “the job”.

Hollywood Expectations

At the start of every year I find myself involved in making plans for the next 12 months and every time I wonder about the relationship between plans and reality. Or more specifically: the fact that plans never work out and that no one ever gets anything right first time.

I was initially going to write this up as a corporate bullshit thing where leaders assumed that, since they were not doing any actual work, their staff we going to get it exactly right but this is not fair because everyone does it. Everyone makes plans with the expectation that chaos will suddenly be tamed.

Why is this?

My past experience tells me that the real world involves a whole lot of compromise, imperfect information and human error that immediately invalidates any plans no matter how well thought out.  But each time I start a new project I tend to assume that everything is going happen perfectly and commit to time lines that have no room to absorb problems and unforeseen issues.  Even though varying degree of failure would appear to be certain and unavoidable.

I have a semi-serious explanation for this…Hollywood.

We have all watched a lot of movies (and TV programs for that matter), which are designed to be entertaining and therefore avoid a lot of the tedious bits of life that are not going to keep an audience happy.  The hero always knows what to do next,   the villian has no redeeming features,  the plot is usually uncomplicated and everything comes to a neat, feel good conclusion in around 90mins.

Obviously, I am not talking about every movie here, just the mainstream popular stuff.

Even though it is entertainment, I think people still aspire to live like the characters they see in movies and TV.  Consciously or not, I think we absorb what we see and expect that this is how things should be  if we are living our lives well.  Movies mostly make us feel good and we want to feel good about ourselves so why shouldn’t our lives be like a movie?

Of course this is completely impossible. There is a massive amount of tedious and non-entertaining effort required to make movies ‘work’ effortlessly. Most of this effort is making sure “reality” is removed while still maintaining believability and thereby selling us this vision.

So what is this whole “reality” thing that Hollywood avoids but we need to deal with?

Uncertainty and doubt

The heroes of action movies always act with total conviction that they are doing the right thing and that the outcome of their actions is assured. Think about  Indiana Jones, James Bond and John McClane, they never have a moment of doubt about what they have to do or why.

I can think of quite a few things I have done  with where there was enormous amount of doubt and uncertainty all the way through.  i.e. Was this really the best solution to my problem? Are we sure it will do everything we want?

In the movies, the characters always know what to say and are always completely aware of their feelings and emotions. whereas I usually don’t really comprehend a situation or what  I feel about it until well after the event and much to late to deliver a good monologue.

Goodies and Baddies

Clear definition of right and wrong is a key part of fiction. In order for us to really like the heroes and really hate the villains it needs to be very polarised.

My real life heroes and villains tend to exchange roles quite often meaning that everyone is..well, they are just everyone really. All are capable of great things and all are capable of making your life a misery. Quite often a whole group of people are considered to be evil but individually they are not that bad. This makes it a victory over an enemy quite unrewarding.

Clean Problems

Real life problems have complexity. They are rarely about one dimensional situations like a bus that will explode if it goes under a certain speed or rescuing someone who has been kidnapped. Usually you have to work out what the problem is before you can even start solving it.

Clear Success

Problems often have no ideal solution anyway and to resolve them you have to make a hard decision to live with a lesser evil. Rarely will you get a good unambiguous victory that has no downside. Its grey all the way and maybe they never really get solved and you live with them from the rest of your life. This would be a whole lot less depressing if we didn’t dream of the move star lifestyle with no concerns or worries.

No Consequences

Also one thing you never really see in the movie is the aftermath. The people whose cars where wrecked in the car chase, mothers of the henchmen standing beside their sons graves or the sadness of the guy the leading lady left behind. That is really something that Hollywood is good at preventing you from seeing or sympathising with

Speed of Resolution

The last thing is that most movies are an hour and a half in duration. A long lunch break for you and I. They are broken into three acts. The set up, the middle and the conclusion. There is a story arc that the hero follows that is neatly resolved well before any toilet breaks are required. What most people don’t realise is that these movies take years to make. It takes this long because the movie makers need to deal with reality like you or I.

I will finish on a related but slightly tangential note. Sport has goodies and baddies, it has clean problems, clear success, typically no consequences and is over quickly. I wonder if the appeal of sport and movies are more closely related that we think.

On Why “Top Gear” Rocks.

I am completely taken with the TV series ‘Top Gear”.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, ‘Top Gear’ is a BBC car show presented by three blokes driving a lot of expensive super cars or competing in motoring challenges and I can’t get enough of it.

Until recently, I liked it because of the three presenters who are motoring journalists that speak their minds but they also have a engaging quality when they are out driving together which makes the show very appealing. They also have quite distinct personalties and seem to be teasing each other most of the time which is somehow refreshing compared to usual sugar coated TV shows we see..

The thing is…. they are into Series 10 now and are starting to repeat themselves quite a bit but I keep on watching and I now realise that it is not about the presenters anymore.

The defining thing for me now is production values displayed on this show. They are outstanding. Everything is high quality, every shot looks beautiful, every segment is interesting and every adventure makes you feel like a kid again. Every single episode is memorable for some reason.

Sure Jeremy, Richard and James are fun to watch but they are really only representing the average viewer in all of this. They actually spend very little time being journalists and are mostly just providing a way for us to vicariously live experience they are having. Who can afford a Bugatti Veyron anyway?

So while the presenters are a little like comfortable old friends now and I now know all their funny lines, the producer(s) are really the ones keeping me watching.

Since my current role includes the word ‘producer’ in the title here are some things I have learnt from the production of Top Gear regarding producing success.

1. It is rare to get it right first time so persevere.

Top Gear started in 1977 and has gone through many changes before finding the current combination. The format that they launched with was very different to today but they tried different things until they got it right.

2. Everything starts with good content.

The ideas that the Top Gear producers come up with each series are simply awesome. e.g. Taking the worlds fastest car to its top speed, driving to the north pole, driving across Africa, competing in real 24hr endurance race.

3. Know your audience.

Jeremy Clarkson is wholly or partly offensive most of the time but you still want to watch him. I am sure some people watch just to get really offended. (He makes this so easy to do). Personally, I watch him because he is so refreshingly politically incorrect it makes me really think if I agree with him or not. In any case the producers know their audience and know that Clarkson is pushing the right buttons for the audience segments they target.

Our goal is to earn more money…Well, duh!

Here is something that has always annoyed me about large organisations.: The only goals they ever seem to set are expressed in dollars or percentages.

I am not talking about mission statements here or a company vision or any of the noble ambitions that get set and ignored day to day. I am talking about the many times in my career when I have been told that our new inspirational objective is something like “grow by 23% the next financial year” or “to reach $1.3 million dollars in recognised revenue”.

“Yes. That is a goal I can really get behind. I am so motivated now.”
(NB. Read that line aloud in a monotone voice to get the full effect of the sarcasm.)

Seriously, who really does get off on these sorts of things?

I will tell you who…… It’s people who are so far removed from the actual business that they view it as just a money making machine where the inner workings and detail are invisible and irrelevant.

I guess it’s little like planning a holiday based on how many kilometres you travel.

A- How was your holiday?
B- Great, we did 2435kms as planned.
A – Really, where did you go?
B – I’m not sure but we really covered some ground!
A- Did the family have a good time?
B – Probably. You will have to ask them.
A – Right. So What are you planning to do next holiday?
B – Well….if we can squeeze another 5% out I will be happy.

I think the dollars and percentages should not be treated as goals in themselves.

If you want to lose weight. You are far better off setting a goal to go out for a walk every day rather than saying you are going to aim to lose 1.13kgs a week with no real understanding of how you are going to get there.
So in a business context we should be setting goals to do real, tangible things that people can relate to. Like making products better or improving service standards and communicate this to the staff rather that insipid financial porn.

You can still have the dollar and the percentage measures in the background if you want. I am sure they are important to the suits but realise that they are secondary measures and not the core of the matter.