An idea bigger than software development?
An idea bigger than software development?
I focus on thinking in terms of outcomes as it pertains to software product development leadership. Could this be an idea that's bigger than this domain?
I believe the key to building impactful products is to provide everyone involved with enough context to make great decisions about every aspect. But the hard question is what is enough context? And if there are some fundamental elements of what construes useful context — is this an idea that can be applied beyond software development? To tackle this ambitious topic I’d like to first share a pattern that appears to be emerging.
Focusing on outcomes starts with leadership
In the field of software product development, we are finding better ways to help everyone move in a common direction that is dynamic and course-correcting. This is not a boast, these are lessons learned in other fields before and lessons being learned once again. And tantalisingly these lessons may help us with problem spaces bigger than just our field.
One pernicious challenge in software development is where the solutions and activities overwhelm the goal. That’s when solutions precede understanding the context — organisations' desire to act can subvert their purpose. These are problems not just limited to making software products.
The consequence is the veritable building of a bridge to nowhere — building software lacking a complete, practical purpose. In the world of construction, it can be actual building actual bridges which don’t successfully convey you to a destination — something that’s frighteningly common.
Another manifestation can be when organisations strive so strongly to achieve one thing, other important parts fall by the wayside, undermining their overall purpose. Examples of this might be when important qualities are essential to the purpose of software such as performance for a search engine or security for services that store private data are under-prioritised relative to adding more features.
It’s an easy trap to fall into — actions are concrete and low on uncertainty. Leaders use actions in communication as a shortcut to achieve shallow alignment of understanding. And we are wired to accept this as adequate because this is what we are used to.
A universal problem?
A focus on actions divorced from their purpose seems to me to be a universal problem, bigger than software, one I suspect many industries learn and become more aware of and address as they evolve e.g. focus on efficacy and effectiveness in the medical field. Also in the evolution of business management in Drucker’s era.
Those same challenges seem to also appear in our socio-political landscape. For instance, politics seems to me to be mostly about proposed actions competing in poorly understood contexts. Politics is not my expertise so I am interested in other perspectives on this.
In leading people working on complicated problems during a time of rapid change, we’re learning rapidly and finding better ways to connect people with how to participate. And these ways might also be applicable in more universal contexts.
Maybe even ways to unpick thorny problems affecting the planet we humans seem to have become blocked on that important to our lives. Problems of global magnitude where debate seems to have become intractable such as food shortages, a heating planet, contention on resources such as oil & water, gun deaths, pandemics…
Now, in my mind’s ear, I can hear cries of “stay in your lane!” and that may be a fair comment; this is a well-earned caution with all the track record of tech bros and their tech-first approaches to the world’s problems.
How I intend to explore this big idea
I write about software development and my experience learning how to do this better over a long career in leading software development teams. I have some work to do to earn your trust if I am to draw a connection to those weighty topics, so let me address some things about myself and how I intend to address this topic:
I am not a technologist, I see technology as one of many tools. Software development is where my expertise is and where most of my experience is.
I have spent as much of my career working on how people work together successfully as I have spent working on technology challenges.
I will share what I have observed and experienced.
I will engage in the discussion with the desire to learn. I will leave it to you to judge if there’s anything there.
I won’t suggest actions to take, just ways of looking at problems and the pathway to solutions.
My ask of you is to challenge and engage me. I have more questions than answers — I am writing about something that is evolving and I am still trying to understand and explore. So anyway, I will start with sharing what I believe.
What I believe and how it connects
How we lead and support each other are in my belief the areas with the most leverage for helping improvement. The quality of the decisions we make is enabled by understanding what we are trying to achieve and why we are trying to achieve it.
So where can this go awry? As leaders, it’s an easy trap to see the failure to follow direction as failures of the people you seek to lead rather than an issue with leadership.
What I have learned over time is that the gap between direction and failure is more likely two related issues:
as a leader, my understanding of the context and the problem or
in the effectiveness in communicating the context.
So I tend to start to investigate these issues first.
When thinking about issue 1. if this is potentially the gap then working together to collectively expand our understanding. I find it helpful to validate that common understanding by having an approach to collaboratively documenting our understanding.
And for issue 2. it follows that if there’s a good understanding of the problem amongst leaders then it’s the investment of time and effort in communication i.e. allowing those you lead to see what you see and to feel a part of both understanding and solving the problem. To do this well involves communicating more than the actions we’d like them to take, more than just the HOW. It requires communicating the WHAT and WHY — and to be honest if you do a great job on the WHAT and WHY covering the HOW may not be as necessary.
Why have I historically written about OKRs and how does that fit?
I see evidence of growth in knowledge about how to plan complex change. One area I see is the growth in popularity of OKRs and the realisation that OKRs should represent outcomes i.e. the WHAT. In time OKRs will evolve or be replaced.
I’ve written about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) a bit historically over here at Focus on outcomes because OKRs can be an effective tool for communicating WHAT is to be achieved. And communicating the WHAT is a part of my larger thesis.
I’ve focused on OKRs not because it is the best tool, it’s not, OKRs are just currently the most popular outcome-oriented approach and the most accessible place to start because of their simple structure. But this is not about OKRs. The idea I am exploring is bigger.
What if there are more effective ways to communicate our strategy to solve a big problem? The context, the different WHATs we need to achieve and how they interrelate i.e. the WHY, our logic of why we believe what we do and how we will understand progress?
And what if doing this is a more effective way to engage and align people to work together to solve a big problem?
In this way ‘OKRs are a powerful yet incomplete idea’ and I have covered why in more detail before in this post:
Specifically in terms of helping people understand the context of their work more fully OKRs may communicate a WHAT but generally don’t communicate the WHY. Its also common for a team to be focused on a single WHAT without much awareness of other related business goals.
A more complete context needs to communicate and align with the organisation’s strategy. It needs to communicate the present set of goals and how they relate. It also needs to express the relationships between goals of different timescales.
What needs to be true (i.e. the outcome when a goal has been achieved) now so we are in a position to achieve our larger, long-term goal? How will we know we are making progress? What do we need to sustain elsewhere to ensure our progress is not destructive?
It is these relationships between different aspects of what we need to achieve collectively that provide useful context that aids decision-making.
For instance, teams knowing we need to achieve two goals to win within a time window can help them decide they need to cooperate rather than compete for resources.
Knowing a short-term goal is in aid of a longer-term goal may help a team select some options over other options which may otherwise have seemed equivalent.
The opportunity to improve how strategy is communicated
Communicating strategy, i.e. WHY we are doing WHAT we’ve set out to achieve and HOW we are currently trying to do that, is not new. But this is not yet an area where most organisations are great at translating the direction into action.
Its too often a point of disconnect between leaders or strategists and the rest of the organisation. There are a number of reasons for this:
Leaders and strategists are uncomfortable with communicating uncertainty.
The time and effort required to communicate a strategy such that it is understood by most are underestimated.
Doing this well is not something that is valued. It’s much easier to blame failure on a failure to execute.
That is not to say that some effort is made by most organisations to communicate strategy, there are. Most organisations have some version of townhalls, all-hands, strategy roadshows etc.
But rarely does it communicate all the context that’s required for understanding that supports good decision-making and buy-in. They avoid acknowledgement of uncertainty, are HOW-centric and may not connect the dots between WHAT is being done now to support WHAT in the future.
What is communicated is often boiled down to a focus on the HOW and wrapped in confidence because that’s what works in the boardroom. And when questions come back from the rest of the organisation it’s often seen as adversarial rather than a desire to understand.
So what is an improvement over this situation and how does this relate to big global problems?
Well, first I want to emphasise this is not new knowledge I am exploring here. It’s something that different fields and industries rediscover as they evolve and right now with the competitive pace of evolution in software development we are rediscovering it again too.
I am finding lots of the same ground has been covered before. But we also are amidst a period where the speed of communication is changing and where these ideas could be leveraged for broader effect.
One of the patterns I see currently starting to be deployed in software development and that has been deployed in other industrialised fields in history is the use of visualising the relationships between desirable outcomes.
There are examples in the Theory of Constraints (ToC). There are examples in more complete performance measurement frameworks such as PuMP. Many who teach positive ways of using OKRs oriented around outcomes introduce such a concept (albeit all slightly differently).
I am not referring to the very broad idea of mindmaps (although some examples appear very similar) as mindmaps are generally relationships between concepts.
What I am referring to is visual relationships between outcomes. Showing what might need to be achieved first, or also be true at the same time, what is more micro, what is more macro, what is for the current time window, what is for a future time window etc.
An example of the challenges of missing context in public policy and discourse
One recent challenge in public policy that seemed to illustrate my point about the importance of clarity of context was how we talked about covid. Different measures have been the focus of discourse. But often absent of context.
In the widest context, the goal was to minimise the spread to the degree that our health services were not overwhelmed. But in some contexts such as at the borders, the goal was to try to eliminate the possibility of containment being breached.
These are two quite different goals where the responses have different purposes. Yet the discourse is often being approached as if the context is the same.
Why masks being imperfect was adequate for the overall goal was lost from the conversation. An implicit part that is not directly addressed often enough to bridge the gap.
Even communicating one step up the causal chain of relationships is not adequate. For instance, something like this is useful:
But is still missing the context that the goal of encouraging masks is not to eliminate but to reduce (it’s implied strongly).
BTW, sidebar, I’ve personally found the pandemic devastating but with all painful things I try to find the lessons in them such as with this series of posts:
Our society is used to communicating above all, what the action is, what the policy is etc. And this IS important information but as we see with the polarization of society to the degree we are, it may be not enough.
Additionally, present approaches seem to lead to communication that in the desire to maintain confidence, actually destroys confidence. To stay with examples from the pandemic:
The lack of transparency for why there was a delay in recommending masks was a great example. The delay in acknowledging airborne transmission is another.
The former is due to not communicating an important intermediate goal of ensuring supply for medical use. The latter is presumably out of concern about what a change in our communicated understanding might mean for public confidence or professional standing.
Of course, it’s not enough to just communicate more or all solved by providing more context or answering more questions. These are ideas that work well with existing knowledge such as how to manage change and create inclusive environments.
That’s it for today — thanks for your patience with this more experimental format, longer form across multiple channels. For more depth in any of the threads I have begun, tug on one by engaging with your comments or questions.