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.

office by kirwilliam, on Flickr

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) 

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.

Fork in the road by MikeSchinkel, on Flickr

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.

Medicine by Leonid Mamchenkov, on Flickr

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 recognised 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.