Remoteness

Taking the moment to return to some basics

Remoteness

...we endlessly pass digital messages back and forth, taking breaks only to talk to each other about these messages over cramped video conference screens. Before the pandemic, the ritual of traveling to a physical office helped obfuscate the disembodied nature of most knowledge work. But when this element was stripped away, the intrinsic abstraction of our efforts became impossible to miss.
— Cal Newport

I spent the first 8 weeks of Coronavirus lockdown sequestered in a London attic. The virus was proving a threat to be sure. This time under the eaves, however, owed itself to the last piece of work sold from our London office before workplaces shut, homeschooling began, and Zoom joined the ranks of Google and Xerox with a brand name turned verb overnight. The RFP, from an online household-name, had asked for an authoritative POV and set of expertise to support the design and planned buildout of a new data platform. We had answered, and contracted a team of five to work alongside client team members in defining and documenting the next generation estate. Then, as England bloomed glorious while its residents hunkered, the mixed team went 100% virtual on an engagement that would prove to shine a focused light on group and workflow dynamics, and the new urgency we all confront in clearly articulating our ways of working along with the constraints that keep them sustainable.

Every working day from April through May I climbed the ladder to my home office newly-improvised from between Victorian-era crawl space timbers and put on headphones for the 8:45am check-in with my colleague team mates. On most days those first fifteen minutes were followed by multi-hour "workshops", sometimes more than one, where our core group would be joined by anywhere from five to ten client participants and the amalgam would work via pixelated video and virtual whiteboard toward shared vision of outcome or implementation. A larger, cross-organisation check-in complemented the morning edition at the end of each day. Fridays, a crowd numbering close to thirty and including client executives logged in for the weekly "Progress Review." In between and throughout, stakeholder sessions were scheduled on an ad hoc basis while team members had separate “breakout” sessions and messaged each other in email or on one of three chat clients (depending on whether the comms were inter- or intra-organisation). People dropped in and out. Time compressed. In the end, of course, we delivered on the SOW with infrastructure documented via architectural and tooling diagrams and ontological models describing data concepts and relationships. But we - my immediate colleagues and our client counterparts alike - were wiped.

So the project was hard. But while its particular mix of organisational quirks and implicated personalities was unique, most of its attendant challenges were not in fact never-before-seen anomalies. Two pizzas, thanks to Jeff Bezos, have long described how to satisfy the hunger of an optimally-sized team. Scrum, truly practiced, has empowered individuals to lean into definitions and agreements for almost thirty years. It is new in most cases that our teams are working in a 100% disembodied state. And it does, in this context, take more intention to keep the entropy at bay. To succeed, however, we merely need to commit to doing the things we already know are right. So, in a classic Covid moment, here's a revisit of some of the key basics to nail.

Know Your Team and Time

Two Christmases ago my son Gavin received a Revel model kit for a 1:32 scale Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IXc. Over the ensuing months, approximately every other weekend, he and I carved out a 3-4 hour time block that we’d use to snip, file, glue, paint, and strategise our way forward on its build. His bedroom shelf took delivery of a gleaming new fighter, with Merlin-variant Rolls engine and signature thumbprint glued to its canopy, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of March.

By far the simplest, most effective way of making consistent progress at pace towards an outcome is to dedicate a core team to the work. Note that ‘dedicate,’ here, means to reserve 100% of capacity for the initiative. Had Gavin and I been asked to forego other commitments such as school and work in order to prioritise the Spitfire, we could have gotten it done in an easy week. Interestingly, those 3-4 hours we did have to work with are the same as we find are often available from our key product (or project) stakeholders. This time allocation works if said stakeholders are outcome-oriented and willing to entrust the team with solutioning. It doesn’t if they are not, and it doesn’t if the allocation is for a member of the core team itself.

So find and reserve that team that’s going to be snipping, filing, gluing, and painting. Understand your story around how, when, and for what to reach out to the part-timers. Then understand how much time those part-timers in turn think they’ll be giving to this support. If from either side the assumed level of detail or involvement doesn’t sync with the assumed time allocation, lean in. Ultimately we want to not be blocked, so this is really about figuring out our degrees and areas of dependency and empowerment.

Know Your What and Why

And know that the latter trumps the former. In one recent data-oriented engagement I found myself in the bizarre situation where, after having supported the team through its design process, I was asked to turn my attention to development of a business case and associated metrics set. Without unpacking here the story of how the team had gotten itself into this situation, let's just agree that this is backwards. Unfortunately it's not uncommon.

What outcome are we trying to achieve for whom? (value creation)
And for what business impact? (value capture)
How are we assuming we realise the value we're after?
How will we measure success?

These are questions whose answers we want to ratify before we attempt to design anything. Otherwise stated, if we don't know the problem or opportunity how can we posit a direction forward? If we don't have an idea of the return we expect how do we know whether to invest? We can't and we don't. Answer, test, and align on these questions up front. Otherwise, pain.

Agree Your How

'Execution eats strategy for breakfast,’ is the famous (if slightly altered) dictum attributed to Peter Drucker. Yes, we’ve become enamoured of the Golden circle recently. Certainly, the outcomes we ratify above are important. The thing is, no visioning, story telling, or service designing really matters if we can’t deliver on its promise. Our How is our path to realisation; our process, in effect, is our product.

A while back I worked with a team that held daily standups and bi-weekly reviews. Planning and retrospective sessions were also calendared and a digital Kanban board displayed work items. At first glance it was Scrum. The problem was that meetings were partially attended and ran long. Reviews were canceled as often as they were held, items stagnated on the board, and others that were invisible during development showed up untested in the released product. It was messy. But the hardest part of the picture was that team members didn’t have a set of agreements against which to hold themselves or their teammates accountable for the mess. Even the desire to improve was in doubt. Without having taken the time to articulate what good would look like and whether it was worth pursuing, individuals had no fence post to lean on in standing up and saying, “this doesn’t feel right.” So no one ever said it, and the team never got better.

Given that we can no longer exchange glances, sense flow states, or even look around the room to see who’s present, our agreements with each other on how to work and produce together - and our revisiting of these on an ongoing basis - are more critical than ever. Like, to the point where we call each other out and commit to improving if we miss agreed-upon sessions without notice. Where we know if and when it’s ok to to “direct dial” a coworker before first messaging to ask if it’s ok. Where if we decide that meetings can’t take up more than half the day, are limited to 5 attendees, and require cameras to be on, they don’t, they are... and the cameras will be on. Where we assume that we can have uncomfortable conversations when needed because we trust in each other to do so.

It’s essential that we talk about these things. Spend time to figure out the agreements. Then document them, and lean on the fencepost when needed.

Visualize the Work... Along With the Meetings it (or Other Stuff) Engenders

Another maxim apocryphally attributed to Drucker is the famous “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Whether he said it or not (he didn’t*), the quote can serve a purpose in turning people’s minds towards the importance of well-defined metrics and KPIs. But if one of the latter is sustainable delivery of valuable output, there’s a key pre-condition to satisfy before measuring and managing that capability: seeing the work itself.

The retina, which contains 150 million light-sensitive rod and cone cells, is actually an outgrowth of the brain. In the brain itself, neurons devoted to visual processing number in the hundreds of millions and take up about 30 percent of the cortex, as compared with 8 percent for touch and just 3 percent for hearing…
— Discover Magazine

To see is to understand. Where conversation is ephemeral and one-dimensional, good visualisation is both persistent and encompassing. For close to twenty years, technology businesses have been visualising their workflows and leveraging TPS learnings to plan, track, and constrain work. So we should know how to do this by now. And in addition to our workflows and items within, we should be visualising our architectures, interfaces, and yes… our calendars. As we do our cramped video conferencing, these are the artefacts we’ll visit together in order to advance our otherwise invisible work, and understand our capacity for doing so.

It’s only when we can see the work, the time, and the space that we can grok things like effort, priority, and choice. That we can, in turn, focus. Visualise in order to fight off abstraction and overload.

Save Room

Now for some math. Basic queueing theory provides tools to use in modelling work arrival rate λ (how quickly things come in), processing rate μ (how quickly they get done), utilization ρ (calculated as λ/μ), and the interplay between them. Assuming a fixed μ, it posits, wait time is proportional to 1/(1-ρ), thereby going to infinity as ρ approaches 1. Otherwise stated and in perhaps what is the single most important concept that continues to confound knowledge-work-oriented organisations, the truth is that teams running at near 100% capacity are almost perfectly inefficient. Work simply does not get delivered.

Theory can sometimes be discarded for being just that, but here the retort lies in the experiences with which we’re all familiar. I once worked for a large multinational that had asked me to coach them full-time on Agile ways of working but hadn’t accounted for this initiative requiring any space or time from its own people. On another “mission critical” re-platforming project for a client with burning infrastructure my team worked with five separate stakeholders all of whom were given the mandate to “squeeze the work in,” on top of and around their other brimming portfolios. Serious tension around availability and buy-in surfaced in each instance. And in wrapping each, teams were left with lingering frustration at the delta between desired and actual progress. We’ve all felt blocked when the people we need to answer our questions are unavailable to do so. We’ve all seen our own capacity for value-add work and impromptu collaboration dwindle as our calendars are constantly filled with unplanned-for meetings or status updates…

So it’s of fundamental if sometimes counterintuitive importance that as we try to move our knowledge work through its ambiguous space, we leave room for figuring out our known and unknown unknowns. And for thinking. Note too, that it’s largely this room - or slack - that will let us be thoughtful about the What, Why, and How described above. Reserve the slack.

As - four months after data platform project - I confront the difficult reality that coming out of lockdown is in many ways harder than going in, I’m also buoyed by surprising positives that have resulted from the pandemic. Family dinners. Neighbourhood solidarity. Enormously reduced CO2 emissions… And inasmuch as sustainability characterises our goal when we speak of long-term responsible living on this planet, so too should it describe the way we find of working in our day-to-day lives.

When we’re explicit we’re kind (to paraphrase Brene Brown). When we see, we understand. When we can think, we can create.