Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 66, Reply G, by Phebe Chiong, Grant Head, and Hudi Cantrell Podolsky
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 96 17:24:55 -0800
I think Hudi addressed a very key point. If we were to ask people in my
age group (20/30 year olds) today about what their ideal job or career
looks like, the answer will focus on passion as Hudi describes, and the
feeling that they're contributing to the bottom line (ie affecting the
company in a tangible way, much like teachers see children's
development and learning).
Sometimes it is hard when one works at an application level in IT or
any other function/department to see how he/she is impacting the bottom
line. This leads to acceptance (not questioning) processes, low
motivation, low passion, etc... Not being able to tangibly see how one
impacts the business results is one reason many employees have left big
companies (like HP) and join smaller ones.
For the IT Business Process Consulting program (Joe's note: which Phebe
manages), a lot of the attendees are project leads and managers who
will have to motivate people (team members, sponsors, etc..), and
instill passion about the "projects" they're working on. Hudi's last
couple of paragraphs provide an interesting perspective.
How can we in IT who focus more on the technical processes and getting the
job done, better learn and nurture passion in ourselves, peers and others?
Phebe
(This is a response to Hudi's comments last week)
Thank you, Hudi!
First, what a wonderful set of examples! The importance of diversity;
the function and effect of passion; etc. You gave me more super
anecdotal stories to quote.
Secondly, however, my strongest emotional reaction was to your
suggestion that quality and passion are mutually exclusive. That's
contrary to my experience even in that realm in which you assume it:
variation removal in the interest of high quality. The highest
quality software that I've been associated with came out of the most
passionate team I've been associated with. It was a team that had no
qualms about making statements such as: "You know I wouldn't think of
criticizing your design, Head, but I just have to tell you that you
are full of s--- again." (It was our favorite quote from
whathisname's "Up the Organization" which applied frequently in our
team.)
All that was necessary to take a blah, normal, passionless, boring
team and to create a passionate, high morale, high productivity, high
quality team out of it was to establish a couple of rules:
1. Authors of documents to be reviewed must never defend themselves.
2. Reviewers must be extremely tactful and considerate.
And then to observe over (relatively little) time with daily reviews
that rule 1 was easy to keep and rule 2 was impossible. There was no
fighting. (It takes two to tango.) And people were able to express
themselves as strongly and passionately as they wanted to.
It didn't hurt for the team to learn that everyone takes turn being in
the muzzled hot seat and that everyone -- from the greenest greeny to
the most experienced veteran -- alternates between absolute genius and
blooming idiocy on consecutive days. This was recognized with
boisterous humor and became our motto.
Visitors to our reviews -- managers and/or marketing personnel -- were
shocked by the un-HP-like frankness with which opinions could be
expressed -- but they were all quick learners.
Defect density was orders of magnitude lower than normal (like no
defects at all found in integration or QA testing) and productivity
was high -- all things predicted by studies documented in literature.
All this supports your contention that a free-flow of ideas within a
divergent community improves all sorts of things: decision making,
passion, commitment....
Third, I'd like you to say more about how the shift in definition of
community opened a window and allowed the personal passion of an
effective first grade teacher to penetrate outside of her classroom.
You said you discovered it and I believe it, but I'm hungry to know
how and why.
Perhaps you are answering it partially in the statement, "Passion
requires a sense of connection and the connections need to change from
time to time to keep the passion alive." But I see here an emphasis
on organization of "community." Is that your intent? Or do you feel
that it is also possible to benefit from change in the quality and
character of individual connections? I.e., must reorganizations
always occur or can passion be facilitated within a static
organization? You seem to imply that reorganization must always
occur, and maybe that's right, but why?
Grant Head
(And this is Hudi's response to Grant's comments above)
Grant,
I definitely don't mean to imply that passion and quality are mutually
exclusive! In fact, I'd doubt that you ever get sustainable quality
without passion, and passion without quality conjures images of
violent messes. I'v had experiences like yours with groups that were
able to bring their individual passions together in a way that
produced quality none of them could have produced on their own, and if
I'm lucky, I'll have many more.
I think the problem comes only if we define quality too narrowly, as I
think ISO9000 does, for example. The goal of ISO9000 is to eliminate
variability, to protect the process from the person performing it.
ISO9000 invites you to only perform processes exactly as they are
documented... to leave your own heart and head out of your work. QMS,
on the other hand, invites you to bring your whole self to the work of
meeting the organization's goals. It invites you to always think
about what you are doing and whether it makes sense. It invites you
to continuously improve what you are doing. It ivites the creation of
community through leadership and participation, and the broadening of
community through constant reference to customers, competitors, and
environment. Where ISO9000 type quality might eliminate variation
from a process, it will also eliminate responsiveness (unless it is
approached with far greater wisdom than I've ever seen). As in the
natural world, we need variation to survive, to continuously respond
to changing conditions.
So you find defects by using a very flexible process, one based on
principals for human interaction rather than on rules for reading
code. You keep your eye on the large goal of good code, rather than
on some bureaucratic procedure for reviews. If I'm not making sense,
let me know.
As far as the connection between the change in definition of community
and the opportunity for passion to enter, here are some raw thoughts.
Maybe what happens is that when you change community you introduce a
whole slug of variability, and people suddenly find that the
environment rewards some of their behavior it had previously ignored
or punished, and punishes some of their behavior (like silence) that
it had previously ignored or rewarded. I don't think you need a reorg
to create this shift (although I think we often get our shifts that
way). A change in group process like the one you described in your
programming group could do it just as well. When the environment
responds to us in a new way, our passions are stirred, for better or
for worse. The change itself creates the opportunity for individual
passion, but then the nature of the change determines whether the
passion flourishes or dies. If the change is towards rigidity, adios
passion. If the change is towards increased
variability (the more diversity the better) then you can keep passion
present indefinitely.
I still have lots more thinking to do on this topic. Thanks for
pushing me to do a little of it today.
Hudi