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Giving consent

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

At the moment I’m working two days for Outlandish, a fellow member of CoTech. They’re big believers in, and practitioners of, Sociocracy.

When I wrote about Sociocracy in a previous post I neglected to use the word ‘consent’, but I’ve come to realise (partly through reading Many Voices One Song) just how fundamental it is to a harmonious workplace culture.

Consent is the default decision-making method in sociocracy.

[…]

By consent, a group can decide to do anything. We often jokingly say, you want a dictator for your organization? We can decide that by consent. (We recommend that the dictator role have a term end, however!) Groups can decide by consent to vote. Groups decide what their governance system looks like at all times. The only thing one cannot do is ignore reasoned objections.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.25-26

Many of the problems I’ve encountered in my career have been directly related the abuses of power that come with the ‘default operating system’ of hierarchy thoughtlessly adopted by most organisations.

Rather than the politics of the playground, Sociocracy is an grown-up approach to organisational power-sharing based on consent.

The assumption of sociocracy is that sharing power requires a plan. Power is everywhere all the time, and it does not appear or disappear – someone will be holding it. We have to be intentional about how we want to distribute it. Power is like water: it will go somewhere and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate more power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.17

The authors recognise the limits of the water metaphor, but continue with it to help make their point:

One can think of a sociocratic organization as a complicated irrigation system, empowering each team to have the agency and resources they need to flourish and contribute toward the organization’s mission. We avoid large clusters of power, and we make sure there is flow. Water that is allowed to flow will stay fresh and will reach all the places in the garden, nourishing each plant to flourish. Sociocratic organizations nourish and empower each team to have the agency to flourish and contribute toward the organization’s mission.

Ted J. Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, Many Voices One Song, p.17

Consent is a great place to start without having to commit to overhauling your entire organisation overnight. It will improve decision-making and make your workplace environment more harmonious. You can simple as using the following structure in your next meeting:

  1. Someone makes a proposal
  2. Whoever’s chairing/facilitating the meeting gasks for any clarifying questions (which are then answered by the proposer)
  3. The facilitator asks for a show of thumbs (up, down, sideways). If it’s all thumbs up, the proposal is passed, if not…
  4. Participants are asked by the facilitator for ‘critical concerns’ (i.e. not just preferences). These are noted down.
  5. The group address the critical concerns by trying to find a way that the proposal would be agreeable.
  6. A new proposal is made (and the process is repeated through several ’rounds’) until the proposal is accepted, or you run out of time to discuss it.

I will, of course, have simultaneously over-simplified this and made it sound more complex than it is in practice. For that, I apologise. However, it’s definitely worth thinking about consent within the context of your team and organisation.

I’m helping Outlandish with the productisation of their offerings around Sociocracy at the moment, so am probably biased, but you might want to check out their upcoming workshops to find out more if any of this interests you

This post is Day 29 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy: Problem Solving and Decision Making

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This is my fourth post on Laura Thomson’s excellent talk Minimum Viable Bureaucracy. In this one I’m focusing on the section she entitled ‘Practicalities’. All of the ideas in this post should be ascribed to Laura, apart from my random musings which I’ve tried to make obvious.

Posts in the series:

  1. Introduction
  2. Scale, Chaordic Systems & Trust
  3. Practicalities
  4. Problem Solving and Decision Making
  5. Goals, scheduling, shipping
  6. Minimum Viable Bureaucracy: Why have managers?

I chopped up the audio from Laura’s talk; you should find the part relating to this post below. Slides are here and it’s all backed up at the Internet Archive.

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Self-organising does not equal democracy. Just because no-one is in charge doesn’t mean everyone has an equal vote.

(Laura Thomson)

Decision Making

How do we solve problems in a chaordic environment? People coming from a traditional company might wonder how decisions can be made. The short answer is that subject matter experts emerge. People gravitate towards projects they’re passionate about and become experts in that subject.

The second part of this is that there shouldn’t be a single person who knows or can do everything – there should be a ‘failover’. You should actively fight against there only being one person who knows or does everything. After all, if that person gets headhunted by Facebook or hit by a truck then suddenly you’re left with something that nobody understands. Leaving it at this isn’t enough, however, as there are some things that nobody wants to do – e.g. running weekly team meeting. These things should be rotated so it’s not too much of a burden on any one person.

What do an OSS decision-making processes look like? Well, says Laura, they all tend to converge on a model that looks a lot like this:

This is a reasonable structure for decision-making in any context: have one person who knows everything with (more) other people knowing almost as much. Things get done this way.

Laura adds a note in parentheses to this: ‘self-organising’ does not equal democracy. Just because no-one is in charge doesn’t mean everyone has an equal vote. But then, on the other hand, nor does self-organising equal anarchy. Self-organising systems emerge and converge on a structure, but they are not structureless.

Problem solving

“You should never have all of your time filled with things that other people have made for you to do.”

(Laura Thomson)

Bike Shed

Many architectural problems are like bikesheds, says Laura: they’re the thing you talk about over beers with the team or every workweek – but you never get around to doing. People have many different, possibly divergent ideas and think it’s too hard to get to a solution. As a leader, therefore,  you should pick someone and give them a week to go away and have a go at it. Get them to see how far they get with making a prototype. The important thing to remember is not to leave them too long in isolation as they can go down “a hell of a rabbit hole”. It’s good to have a time box for this kind of thing.

Laura’s advice is that you that you should ‘come with code’ for bikeshedding problems. This means you can point to something and say “hey, I built this”. People who don’t like it will no doubt say that they would have done it differently but when it exists, it’s much easier to just agree with something. The problem then kind of goes away. Many of the hardest problems get to 80% by one person over a two-day marathon giving the project a proof-of-concept and some momentum. In turn, this gives other people motivation and clears the path.

The moral? Give people room to do this and be innovative.

Moving on, Laura says she sees some things that are “really toxic”. Things like having an innovation department  where all the ‘innovative’ work is done. This is “silly”. Another management anti-pattern is giving engineers a number of tickets without giving the engineer space to think about the product. It’s true they may not understand the users, but they understand the product pretty well.

Depending on the company, a portion of time has to be spent by the engineer doing the thing that they think is most important. It might be 100% of the time, or 60%, 40%, one day per week – but it should never be zero. “You should never have all of your time filled with things that other people have made for you to do,” says Laura. There are so many reasons for this. One of them is you miss out on some of the most innovative ways of doing things. The second is that it’s toxic for engineering morale. It will make people leave. It’s a ‘super-critical item’.

This is true not only for engineers but for anyone in an pretty much any kind of organisation. Spending all day just implementing other people’s ideas doesn’t lead to a sense of agency or happiness.

In summary, there are three things to remember about problem solving in a chaordic environment:

  1. Push responsibility to the edges
  2. Adopt open source models
  3. Give people freedom to innovate.

For the things that aren’t ‘bikesheds’ figure out where the interfaces are. Interface design is more critical than component design. For example, your API is more important than the implementation, every single time. This makes everything more modular, allowing you to drop innovative things in more easily.

In non-technical language, this is about looking at how ideas and projects connect. This is important as it helps the organisation communication well internally and externally, helping things move forward smoothly.

Laura’s architectural goals:

  • Decouple replaceable components
  • Have clear interfaces and APIs
  • Make sure you have good tests for each component

For operational problems within an open source environment, the same principles apply, with two additions:

  1. Evidence > guts
  2. Immerse yourself in problems

In other words, use evidence to make your decisions rather than gut feelings. And when you’ve got a problem, set aside time for you (or someone on your team) to be fully immersed in it and understand it.

You can follow Laura Thomson as @lxt on Twitter.

Images CC BY-SA Pierre-Yves Beaudouin & John Myers

Colin Day on leadership.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Colin Day

Colin Day is Group Chief Financial Officer and Director of Reckitt Benckiser, ‘a global force in household, health and personal care.’ He has worked for a number of organizations, including British Gas (when it was the ‘Gas Corporation’) from which he draws experiences and lessons in leadership.

The following is what I learned from watching his seven videos on the 50 Lessons website:

Most people like being led

Day believes that most people want to be led and that very few want to lead themselves. This is mainly due to the necessity of making tough decisions as a leader.

Love/hate reactions

Leaders need to movtiave staff and inspire them, otherwise organizations can end up with dissatisfied staff. Inspiring a love/hate dichotomy regarding leadership style within an organization is not necessarily a bad thing.

Good leadership comes from confidence

Leaders need to be preapred to make decisions and lead by example. You need to be seen to be technically competent, which can be demonstrated through motivation, enthusiasm and commitment. Allied to this, however, has to be confidence. If staff see that you have their best interests at heart, that you will not let them down and that you will support them, then they will follow your lead.

‘Open door’ policy

It can be quite an intimidating experience to go an see your boss, which is why an open door policy always some fears. Leaders should be available day or night and tell staff that ‘there’s no excuse for not contacting me.’ People need to be put at ease by not treating them as if they’re slaves to you or in any way second-class citizens. Leaders need to be open with people – which is difficult to do consistently and honestly all the time.

Don’t judge books by their covers

It’s easy and part of human nature to rush into perceptions of people or organizations. Forming judgements from other people’s opinions and the media is easy to do. Leaders need to find out for themselves and be open-minded. Find out the facts so you can form an educated opinion. Ask relevant questions when recruiting and allow them to do due dilgence on you. Day provides prospective employees with a list of people whom they can talk to about his leadership style and what to expect if they work under him.

Autocracy is a necessity

Organizations and the people within them have to accept a certain measure of ‘autocratic’ style as it gets results. Consensus management doesn’t work, according to Day: someone needs to ‘call the shots’ as otherwise nothing gets done. The only leadership style that really works is one where you give very clear direction about what you want and then clear messages about how that should be achieved.

According to Day, it’s all about focus. If you say something and stick to it enough you will find people take onboard what you say. As a leader, you need to make sure that everyone shares your focus. Don’t lead initiatives until the last minute – plan well in advance and provide clear direction from the top so that ‘everyone marches to the same tune.’

Detail

Leaders need to know how much detail is required in various situations and how much to demand of their workforce. Analysis and statistics is not important if the bigger picture is being ignored. In Day’s experience, people hide behind detail for confidence purposes, producing endless charts tables to try and make a simple point.

As a leader, demand people focus on the larger issue. Use instinct and experience as much as data. Make documents short and to the point; they should be 4-5 pages long or take 4-5 minutes to present. If a point cannot be made in that amount of space or time then there’s something wrong.

No ‘job for life’

There are no ‘jobs for life’ any more: don’t encourage staff to think in that way. Instead, encourage them to talk about their career options, taking them out of their comfort zone, preparing them to take  risks and look outside of the organization. Career-seekers are more motivated than ‘company’ people. Those who stay in one job for a long time stagnate.

Self-confidence

It’s not enough for leaders to be intellectually brilliant or extremely technically competent. You also have to have the confidence to pull things off even when wrong-footed. Confidence also needs to be built and nurtured in your staff as well. Give them responsibilities to deliver on important projects. They will feel like they are part of the decision-making process even if not making the final decision.

Confidence can only be grown, not ‘taught’. Day talks of a ‘rock of granite’ within people that others can chip away at but will nevertheless remain solid. Look for this ‘rock’ when hiring people.

PS You can get access to the 50 Lessons website through the National College for School Leadership’s Leadership Library

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