Communication

Communication

Communication

An essential part of mapping is the anchor of user needs. Ideally you want to create an environment where your needs are achieved by meeting the needs of your users. Be mindful that these needs will evolve due to competition and in the uncharted space they are uncertain. Also, be aware that users may have different and competing needs and be prepared to balance the conflict.

Use multiple maps to help you remove duplication and bias within an organisation. You will often find in any large organisation that there are people custom building what is a commodity or rebuilding something that exists elsewhere. Remember, that they’re not doing this because they’re daft but because of pre-existing inertia or the lack of any effective communication mechanism i.e. they simply don’t know it exists elsewhere. Be warned, the level of duplication within most organisations vastly exceeds any expectations that they might have and you’re often treading on the toes of someone’s pet project. Large distributed companies often talk about duplication in the single digits e.g. we have six enterprise content management systems. They tend to react in horror when it is “discovered” that they have hundreds or even “thousands”. People can get very defensive in this space and want to shut you down.

Try to avoid the tyranny of one. Understand that there is no magic solution and that you have to use multiple methods (e.g. agile or lean or six sigma) as appropriate. In any large system, multiple methods may be used at the same time. Be mindful of ego here, tribes can form with almost religious fervour about the righteousness of their method. Have fortitude, you’ll often find you’re arguing against all these tribes at the same time.

Communication

Have a bias towards openness within your organisation. If you want to effectively learn about the landscape then you need to share your maps with others and allow them to add their wisdom and their challenge to the process. Building maps in secret in your organisations is a surefire way of having a future meeting where somebody points out the blindingly obvious thing you have missed.

There will always be edge cases or a way to make something more perfect but if what you’re building could use a component that already exists then try to avoid the urge to re-invent it. If you’re a taxi company then investing your funds into making that perfect tyre will not help your business. Always challenge when you depart from using something that already exists. The old adage of “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice” is relevant here.

(an imperfect plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow)

In any system there is risk. Use the maps where possible to help you understand failure modes, what can go wrong and what will be impacted if a component fails. Try where possible to mitigate risks by distributing systems, by designing for failure and by the constant introduction of failure (use of chaos engines such as Netflix’s chaos monkey). Avoid known failure modes such as building large scale (death star) like efforts.

Commit to the direction, be adaptive along the path

Listen to others, be selfless, have fortitude and be humble. Inspire others by who you are and what you do. There are many ways to manipulate the landscape e.g. with marketing by persuading others that what is a commodity is somehow different or that a product is unique to them. But these manipulations come with a cost not just externally but internally. We can start to believe our own hype, our own infallibility and our “right” to the market. Avoid this arrogance at all costs.

Try to find and grow the best people with the best aptitude and attitude for their roles. Invest in keeping them. Don’t force them into becoming something they’re not. It’s perfectly reasonable for a truly gifted systems tester who excels in a town planning world of massively complicated and automated systems to be paid more than the project manager. What you want to avoid is taking exceptional people out of their role and putting them into something they are not suited to simply because they think that is the only way to progress. Leadership, management and engineering are all aptitudes, they are all valuable and they have to work in concert. If the hierarchy of your organisation uniformly reflects your pay scales then you’re likely to be draining talent from where it should be and putting it into roles that it is not suited for. This is often done for arguments of “responsibility” or “managing bigger teams” (which also causes people to try and accumulate empires) or “spreading experience” or “career path” but there are alternative ways of achieving this. Taking a gifted engineer and turning them into a mediocre project manager is not wise. This is probably one of the most difficult areas as ego is quickly encountered.

There are many different forms of ecosystems and ways to exploit them. You can build powerful sensing engines (e.g. the ILC model) for future change, sources of co-operation with others, defensive and offensive alliances. But ecosystems need management, they need tending as a gardener tends a garden — sometimes you allow them to grow wild, sometime you harvest, sometimes you help direct or constrain them. These are particular skills that you can develop but most important is the principle — listen to them.

Understand that a company which plans for longevity needs to cope with not only the discovery of uncharted components but the use of the industrialised and the transition between these two extremes. You will need different attitudes. You will therefore create many cultures in your organisation e.g. pioneers, settlers and town planners have different cultures. This is not a negative and don’t try to grind everyone into a single bland culture. It will not make them happy.