Monthly Archives: February 2017

Emergence: Babies and Bathwater, Plans and Planning

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blueprints

 

“Emergent” is a word that I run into from time to time. When I do run into it, I’m reminded of an exchange from the movie Gallipoli:

Archy Hamilton: I’ll see you when I see you.
Frank Dunne: Yeah. Not if I see you first.

The reason for my ambivalent relationship with the word is that it’s frequently used in a sense that doesn’t actually fit its definition. Dictionary.com defines it like this:

adjective

1. coming into view or notice; issuing.
2. emerging; rising from a liquid or other surrounding medium.
3. coming into existence, especially with political independence: the emergent nations of Africa.
4. arising casually or unexpectedly.
5. calling for immediate action; urgent.
6. Evolution. displaying emergence.

noun

7. Ecology. an aquatic plant having its stem, leaves, etc., extending above the surface of the water.

Most of the adjective definitions apply to planning and design (which I consider to be a specialized form of planning). Number 3 is somewhat tenuous for that sense and and 5 only applies sometimes, but 6 is dead on.

My problem, however, starts when it’s used as a euphemism for a directionless. The idea that a cohesive, coherent result will “emerge” from responding tactically (whether in software development or in managing a business) is, in my opinion, a dangerous one. I’ve never heard an explanation of how strategic success emerges from uncoordinated tactical excellence that doesn’t eventually come down to faith. It’s why I started tagging posts on the subject “Intentional vs Accidental Architecture”. Success that arises from lack of coordination is accidental rather than by design (not to mention ironic when the lack of intentional coordination or planning/design is intentional itself):

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

 

The problem, of course, is do you want to be at the “there” you wind up at? There’s also the issue of cost associated with a meandering path when a more direct route was available.

None of this, however, should be taken as a rejection of emergence. In fact, a dogmatic attachment to a plan in the face of emergent facts is as problematic as pursuing an accidental approach. Placing your faith in a plan that has been invalidated by circumstances is as blinkered an approach as refusing to plan at all. Neither extreme makes much sense.

We lack the ability to foresee everything that can occur, but that limit does not mean that we should ignore what we can foresee. A purely tactical focus can lead us down obvious blind alleys that will be more costly to back out of in the long run. Experience is an excellent teacher, but the tuition is expensive. In other words, learning from our mistakes is good, but learning from other’s mistakes is better.

Darwinian evolution can produce lead to some amazing things provided you can spare millions of years and lots of failed attempts. An intentional approach allows you to tip the scales in your favor.

Many thanks to Andrew Campbell and Adrian Campbell for the multi-day twitter conversation that spawned this post. Normally, I unplug from almost all social media on the weekends, but I enjoyed the discussion so much I bent the rules. Cheers gentlemen!

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Go-to People Considered Harmful

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Neck of Codd bottle

Okay, so the title’s a little derivative, but it’s both accurate and it fits in with the “organizations as systems” theme of recent posts. Just as dependency management is important for software systems, it’s likewise just as critical for social systems. Failures anywhere along the chain of execution can potentially bring the whole system to a halt if resilience isn’t considered in the design (and evolution) of the system.

Dependency issues in social systems can take a variety of forms. One that comes easily to mind is what is referred to as the “bus factor” – how badly the team is affected if a person is lost (e.g. hit by a bus). Roy Osherove’s post from today, “A Critical Chain of Bus Factors”, expands on this. Interlocking chains of dependencies can multiply the bus factor:

A chain of bus factors happens when you have bus factors depending on bus factors:

Your one developer who knows how to configure the pipeline can’t test the changes because the agent is down. The one guy in IT who has access to the agent needs to reboot it, but does not have access. The one person who has access to reboot it (in the Infra team) is sick, so now there are three people waiting, and there is nothing in this earth that can help that situation.

The “bus factor”, either individually or as a cascading chain, is only part of the problem, however. A column on CIO.com, “The hazards of go-to people”, identifies the potential negative impacts on the go-to person:

They may:

  • Resent that they shoulder so much of the burden for the entire group.
  • Feel underpaid.
  • Burn out from the stress of being on the never-ending-crisis treadmill.
  • Feel trapped and unable to progress in their careers since they are so important in the role that they are in.
  • Become arrogant and condescending to their peers, drunk with the glory of being important.

The same column also lists potential problems for those who are not the go-to person:

When they realize that they are not one of the go-to people they might:

  • Feel underappreciated and untrusted.
  • Lose the desire to work hard since they don’t feel that their work will be recognized or rewarded.
  • Miss out on the opportunities to work on exciting or important things, since they are not considered dedicated and capable.
  • Feel underappreciated and untrusted.

A particularly nasty effect of relying on go-to people is that it’s self-reinforcing if not recognized and actively worked against. People get used to relying on the specialist (which is, admittedly, very effective right up until the bus arrives) and neglect learning to do for themselves. Osherove suggests several methods to mitigate these problems: pairing, teaching, rotating positions, etc. The key idea being, spreading the knowledge around.

Having individuals with deep knowledge can be a good thing if they’re a reservoir supplying others and not a pipeline constraining the flow. Intentional management of dependencies is just as important in social systems as in software systems.

Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create

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I’ve mentioned before that the idea of looking at organizations as systems is one that I’ve been focusing on for quite a while now. From a top-down perspective, this makes sense – an organization is a system that works better when it’s component parts (both machine and human) intentionally work together.

It also works from the bottom up. For example, from a purely technical perspective, we have a system:

Generic System

However, without considering those who use the system, we have limited picture of the context the system operates within. The better we understand that context, the better we can shape the system to fit the context, otherwise we risk the square peg in a round hole situation:

Generic System with Users

Of course, the users who own the system are also only a part of the context. We have to consider the customers as well:

Generic System with Users and customers

Likewise, we need to consider that the customers of some systems can be internal to the organization while others are external. Some of the “customers” may not even be human. For that matter, sometimes the customer’s interface might be a human (user) rather than software. Things get complicated when we begin adding in the social systems:

Generic EITA with Users and customers

The situation is even more complicated than what’s seen above. We need to account for the team developing and operating the automated system:

Generic System with Users, customers, and IT team

And if that team is not a unified whole, then the picture gets a whole lot more interesting:

Generic System with Users, customers, and IT teams

Zoomed out to the enterprise level, that’s a lot of social systems. When multiplied by the number of automated systems involved, the number easily becomes staggering. What’s even more sobering is reflecting on whether those interactions have been intentionally structured or have grown organically over time. The interrelationship of social and software systems is under-appreciated. A series of tweets from Gregory Brown last week makes the same case:

A number of questions come to mind:

  • Is anyone aware of all the systems (social and software) in play?
  • Is anyone aware of all the interactions between these systems?
  • Are the relationships and interactions a result of intentional design or have they “just happened”?
  • Are you comfortable with the answers to the first three questions above?

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 430

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It’s time for another appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast.

This week’s episode, number 430, features Tom’s essay on product owners, Steve Tendon with more on TameFlow (in this episode, constraints), and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Leadership Anti-Patterns – The Thinker” (the third in a series on leadership).

The Thinker is a classic leadership anti-pattern hearkening back to Frederick Taylor. In essence, the leader does the thinking and the peons do the doing. What could go wrong? Tune in to hear Tom and I discuss all the problems this anti-pattern can bring.

You can find all my SPaMCast episodes using under the SPAMCast Appearances category on this blog. Enjoy!

Organizations as Systems and Innovation

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Portrait of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden

Over the last year or so, the concept of looking at organizations as systems has been a major theme for me. Enterprises, organizations and their ecosystems (context) are social systems composed of a fractal set of social and software systems. As such, enterprises have an architecture.

Another long-term theme for this site has been my conversation with Greger Wikstrand regarding innovation. This post is the thirty-fifth entry in that series.

So where do these two intersect? And why is there a picture of a Swedish king from four-hundred years ago up there?

Innovation, by its very nature (“…significant positive change”), does not happen in a vacuum. Greger’s last post, “Innovation arenas and outsourcing”, illustrates one aspect of this. Shepherding ideas into innovations is a deliberate activity requiring structural support. Being intentional doesn’t turn bad ideas into innovations, but lack of a system can cause an otherwise good idea to wither on the vine.

Another intersection, the one I’m focusing on here, can be found in the nature of innovation itself. It’s common to think of technological innovation, but innovation can also be found in changes to organizational structure and processes (e.g. Henry Ford and the assembly line). Organization, process, and technology are not only areas for innovation, but when coupled with people, form the primary elements of an enterprise architecture. It should be clear that the more these elements are intentionally coordinated towards a specific goal, the more cohesive the effort should be.

This brings us to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In his twenty years on the throne, he converted Sweden into a major power in Europe. Militarily, he upended the European status quo in a very short time (after intervening in the Thirty Years’ War in 1630, he was killed in battle in 1632) by marshaling organizational, procedural, technological innovations:

The Swedish army stood apart from its’ contemporaries through five characteristics. Its’ soldiers wore uniform and had a nucleus of native Swedes, raised from a surprisingly diplomatic system of conscription, at its’ core. The Swedish regiments were small in comparison to their opponents and were lightly equipped for speed. Each regiment had its’ own light and mobile field artillery guns called ‘leathern guns’ that were easy to handle and could be easily manoeuvred to meet sudden changes on the battlefield. The muskets carried by these soldiers were of a type superior to that in general use and allowed for much faster rates of fire. Swedish cavalry, instead of galloping up to the enemy, discharging their pistols and then turning around and galloping back to reload, ruthlessly charged with close quarter weapons once their initial shot had been expended. By analysing this paradigm it becomes apparent that the army under Gustavus emphasized speed and manoeuvrability above all – this greatly set him apart from his opponents.

By themselves, none of the innovations were original to Gustavus. Combining them together, however, was and European military practice was irrevocably changed. Inflection points can be dependent on multiple technologies catching up with one another (since the future is “…not very evenly distributed”), but in this case the pieces were all in place. The catalyst was someone with the vision to combine them, not random chance.

Emergence will be a factor in any complex system. That being said, the inevitability of those emergent events does not invalidate intentional design and planning. If anything, design and planning is more necessary to deal with the mundane, foreseeable things in order to leave more cognitive capacity to deal with that which can’t be foreseen.