The city by the lake and technology

I live and work in the Chicago metropolitan area. It comprises the northern counties of Illinois and, like much of the Midwest, has challenging weather. Often, you can experience all four seasons in March. The climate creates a flintyness toward nature and forces us to be kind to one another because if nature is not pleasant, then at least we can be good to our fellow humans. It explains why Los Angeles and New York people call the Midwest friendly. The stereotype of the Midwest conceals a strong work ethic and a judgemental streak, which many of us, including myself, exhibit. Today, I want to discuss what that means in the Midwest technology business.

I joined the technology business in the mid-1990s. The main intellectual centers of technology are Silicon Valley in Northern California and New York City. New York's concentration of media company headquarters gives it a powerful grip on media-related technology. Silicon Valley became a land of myth and legend where coders got to make billion-dollar corporations. That myth has some truth because Hewlett Packard, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook found a home in the valley and became household words.

The Midwest and Chicago represent what pundits dismissively call "fly-over" country. We are land you bypass to go from east to west. To many, the Midwest is about corn, hogs, and transportation to move those goods to the remainder of the country. Truthfully, the Chicago metropolitan area fulfills a vital role in the technology ecosystem, and it is the integration and interoperability of systems. Since its founding as a city, Chicago has been a hub of communications and a link between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier. As technology begins to eat the world, the city and metropolitan areas have specialized in the less glamorous aspects of technology, which keeps the global economy chugging.

Computer systems in banking, insurance, and business span fifty years, and they must communicate, or all forms of commerce will come to a grinding halt. Computer languages span functional programming languages, object-oriented development, and large learning models. Often, these disparate systems cannot speak to each other directly, so something called middleware is written to facilitate communication. Finally, businesses, cloud companies, and purveyors of Artificial intelligence need warehouse-sized facilities to house their servers and infrastructure. The Midwest and the Chicago metropolitan area excel at these activities.

People give more thought to those things once they break, which becomes a crisis. Midwestern technology professionals take pride in running these systems at peak efficiency with no downtime. Instead of splashy conference demonstrations, we prefer working software that others can test and experience for themselves. Reliable working systems are proof of skill instead of social media credibility.

This pragmatic streak defines most technology professionals in the Chicago area. In general, we do not want to change the world but instead want to make it better, faster, more reliable, and work with other systems. It takes an engineer's mind with an illustrator's creative sensibilities. It is long nights working on knotty problems and early mornings with off-shore teams on conference calls. Hard work and innovation combine to make technology work invisible, and Chicago plays a critical part.

During the days of the first Dot-Com bubble, The Chicago Tribune published a special technical classified page called "The Digital Prairie." Sadly, the Tribune became a victim of the digital economy, but I liked their portrayal of technology as a service and infrastructure that needs maintenance. So, the story of Midwest technology is getting desperate systems to work correctly and with little fuss. To Midwesterners, everything should be plug-and-play, behaving like magic. The reality is more complex, but the goal is what makes the digital prairie so fertile.

Until next time.

Leadership Techniques to Build Trust

The business world is like a merry-go-round, moving at unsafe speeds. Everyone is holding on for deal life, hoping they do not get thrown off and injured terribly. Instead of listening to concerns about the ride's speed, people stare blankly and condescendingly at those who raise the issue, refusing to believe them. No one understands why the ride turns so quickly, but to suggest otherwise seems like madness. I am in the middle of a career transition, which has given me time to reflect on what matters as a professional. 

The business press and popular culture spend plenty of time discussing leadership and vision in the business world. Many organizations need help putting people with leadership skills in the correct roles. Often, we promote people who need help to do the leadership job. The Peter Principle explains why many leadership roles in companies contain mediocre leaders. It is a principle that, when combined with the pressure to deliver revenue and profits to shareholders, further pushes people to extremes in behavior. Employees trapped in a cycle of abuse are forced to endure mistreatment from customers, often finding themselves under the leadership of managers who perpetuate the same behavior.

It paints a picture of incapable people with psychological trauma under unreasonable pressure, inflicting emotional harm on others to provide better customer service. It is a glum and ugly tapestry of alienation. It explains why strikes have increased since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and trends like quiet quitting have impacted offices worldwide. Something is broken in the work culture, hurting businesses, employees, customers, and society. 

In her book, "The Experience Mindset," Tiffani Bova points to three main issues that provide a roadmap to fixing broken work culture. Employees want to support doing their jobs. Short staffing, lack of supplies, and being penny-wise but pound-foolish undermine employee efforts to deliver the goods and services they provide. It is incumbent for organizations to provide that support. Next, employees want to be trained in the skills they need to succeed in their jobs today and in the future. It is a particular problem in technology as skills become obsolete in months instead of years. Finally, there needs to be trust between the people doing the work and the organizations they work for because, as Bova says, "Trust is the bedrock of any business."

The three mileposts of better employee experience are trust, training, and support, which organizations can provide if they treat employees with the same consideration as their customers and shareholders. What it requires is a different leadership style. We need a different approach instead of being feudal or authoritarian toward the people who deliver value to the organization. 

I have discovered a few methods which drive success. The first is the notion of servant leadership. A leader should serve the people who work with them. It requires time and emotional labor because instead of giving orders, you provide guidelines, psychological security, and an environment of trust. It can transform a group of misfits into high performers if done right. 

Next, I am a colossal propoment of L. David Marquet and his intention-based leadership. Marquet is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who commanded a nuclear submarine. Suppose there was a position that fit the autocratic mold of absolute power. In that case, it is responsible for atomic weapons, two hundred lives, and a two-and-a-half billion submarine. Marquet suggests a better way, which he calls intention-based leadership. He asks people to think about their actions and deliberate about what they will accomplish. Mistakes are forecasted instead of avoided, and people have the psychological safety to make decisions even in stressful situations like combat. Finally, intentional-based leadership says that everyone in an organization is a leader, not just those given the official title. It generates a feedback loop of trust, which helps everyone perform their roles better. 

Finally, Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor color my leadership worldview. She says that leaders need to care personally and challenge people directly. She also points out that you cannot be a jerk and be radically candid. Being a jerk is a behavior that can be changed with required effort and a willingness to change. 

Radical Candor, Intention-based leadership, and servant leadership can help build better teams and improve workplace culture. The techniques build trust, help employees develop the skills to be successful at their jobs, and provide the necessary support to do those jobs. It slows down the merry-go-round of the contemporary work culture. I plan to lead the way.

Until next time. 

The Anxiety and Instability of Professional Life

The professional world is brimming with instability. Some days, you are riding high on waves of success, and then it comes crashing into the shore, providing a harsh reality. It forces you to be humble because you become careless when you feel comfortable. The global economy is in a weird place, motivated by a tremendous sense of anxiety. The sizeable centralized nature of many organizations causes part of this anxiety. Today, I want to discuss it. 

Two of the most influential trends in the business world were ideological. The first came from the University of Chicago School of Economics and Professor Milton Freedman. The professor argued that the primary purpose of any business is to generate profits for its investors. Competing interests like employees and consumers were secondary in Freedman's view. The investors who put money at risk for the company should receive the lion's share of the wealth because they face the most risk. The shareholder theory of capitalism spread like wildfire through the business community. To drive profits, business people slashed headcounts at companies, squeezed salaries, and profit to shareholders became the only thing that mattered. Any other considerations would suffer. 

The other came from executive Jack Welch, who transformed General Electric into a corporate juggernaut. Instead of growing the business with better products, Welch grew G.E. through a ruthless combination of acquisitions and job cutting. Soon, G.E. resembled a giant unregulated bank, with shareholders keeping the party rolling as long as the dividend checks kept coming. When Welch retired, G.E. was a symbolic tower of beer coasters at the end of a bar that any mischievous patron could topple at any time. It is what happened as debts came due and the economy changed. Today, G.E. is a shell of its former self, divided into three smaller companies focused on building things instead of juicing share prices. 

Friedman and Welch have one thing in common: their belief that the people who did the work were expenses to be managed instead of people who created value for the business and its investors. It made a wave of downsizing in the business world, and departments shrank. The mantra among business professionals was to create lean organizations. 

The rise of computers and photocopiers slashed the clerical staffing at an organization. A professional had to advance into management to advance a career instead of earning tenure in your position. The situation resembled the book "Lord of the Flies," where to get ahead, you had to be hypercompetitive and jerk to your peers instead of working together. Numerous business cultures get caught up in this cycle of psychological violence and dysfunction until they ignore their core business and customers. I have experienced this firsthand, and it isn't pleasant.

The trend has plenty of names, like rightsizing, flattening the organization, and downsizing, but the impact is the same: fewer people doing more work. It has created a paradox in the business world because everyone is so busy that numerous choke points now exist, and work needs to be done promptly. Doing less with more is creating longer cycle times and more frustration. It also hurts workers who sacrifice mental health and family time to meet increasingly tricky corporate goals. 

The Agile reformation addresses the bottlenecks and frustrations of the corporate world. Still, business leaders who continue to treat employees like cost centers instead of people who deliver value are the principal obstacle to helping improve business culture. I look forward to the business community giving these individuals their comeuppance. 

Until then, I will keep working to make the business community more sustainable, sane, and satisfying. I hope you are along for the ride.

Until next time.

Fighting the Uncivil Office with Agile

The global economy is a rough place. One of the most challenging aspects of the worldwide economy is working with various people who keep it moving. Over my career, I have been amazed at the number of neurotic, damaged, and plain mean people I have experienced in business. It makes me wonder if the business work actively attracts these individuals or manufactures them over time. As I was recovering from my Thanksgiving gluttony over the weekend, I decided it was a subject worth writing about. 

Christine Porath may be a household name, but in 2018, she gave a TED talk at the University of Nevada. The woman who loves me forwarded the video: "She seems to know what you experience daily." She said. After watching the video, I rushed to the TED site and watched the entire presentation. Porath has something to tell us about the unhealthy environment of global business. 

Her thesis is simple. We do not treat people with enough respect in the office. Minor unkind actions lead to more significant problems in the office. Name-calling, disrespect, and othering build up like infectious pus ruining the organization. Eventually, the infection festers into poor performance and aggression. Incivility is a common disorder in the business world. It is a problem that made 80% of employees lose work time, 66% cut back on work efforts, and more than one in ten quit. The network company Cisco estimated the cost of incivility to its bottom line as twelve million dollars. 

Incivility is another form of waste in the workplace. Any good business person should be able to look at this expense and find ways to reduce it. The challenge is that two factors interfere with our ability to reduce this form of waste. The first is we are stressed and overwhelmed. Businesses are demanding that their employees do more work with fewer people. It means more work and fewer people to do it. Also, as work has become more specialized and intellectually demanding, the number of people who can do it well is decreasing. It creates all kinds of pressure in the technology world and gets vented in moments of rage and incivility. The other factor is that we condition business people to think that being a jerk is a path to leadership. 

Stories abound in the business world of leaders who practice a "mask of command." It is an artificial persona that portrays strength and competence but, in reality, often acts as a shield for being a jerk to others because, in the hypercompetitive world of business, nice people finish last. If you are warm and friendly, you are seen as competent and intelligent, inspiring others. The reason more business people do not do this is they "paid dues" in uncivil and exploitative environments. When they advanced, they went from receiving abuse to dishing it out to subordinates. It feels like a form of generational trauma, but it spreads out from the leadership team like pus poisoning the bloodstream from an infected wound. 

Fighting incivility in the office is challenging because it requires changing behaviors and processes instead of shuffling a few numbers around in a spreadsheet or creating an Instagram-worthy office. It means looking at people and understanding what motivates them and how to treat them with respect and dignity. It is not wearing a mask but caring about people personally and holding them accountable. As Kim Scott likes to say, there is a big difference between being a jerk and showing radical candor in the office. 

Uncivil behavior in the office should not be the price paid for a professional career. We should be able to live our lives and experience our careers with a positive measure of respect and dignity. Unfortunately, we do not understand that lesson until it is too late. I dedicate my career to making the office less ugly and uncivil. I hope that others will join me in this mission.

Until next time. 

Giving Thanks and Finding Meaning Over the Holiday

The Thanksgiving holiday in the United States is a strange time for business professionals. Most of the year, the company instructs us to sacrifice for our careers. The holiday arrives, and we slow down for a few moments to enjoy the company of family and friends. Only then do we understand the cost of our sacrifices at the office. Children grow up becoming people we do not recognize, and our romantic partners may be distant and alienated because we prioritize work. The messiness of our family life is a world away from the orderliness of budget reports and status updates. It is the tradeoff we made to provide for our families. 

I experience these feelings as much as the next person, but I always look forward to the holiday. Since childhood, I have treated the four-day Thanksgiving weekend like a small vacation and a chance to reset myself. It is a strategy that serves me well because spending time with family at the dinner table is much better from my perspective than sitting at a conference table with people pretending to be masters of the universe. Along with family time, part of my reset is expressing gratitude for what makes life meaningful. Today, I am going to take some time to do that. 

With the change of season, I read Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl gives a blunt and unflinching look at his experiences as a concentration camp inmate at Theresienstadt and later Auschwitz. Frankl lost everything during the Holocaust. His wife, mother, father, and brother all died by execution or illness. Frankl himself suffered starvation and beatings daily until he was near death before liberation by Allied forces in 1945. He has spent nearly four years in the concentration camps. 

What makes his story is the little details he reveals about life in the camps. The inmates treated their captivity like a full-time job and survival as a principal metric of success. Time would squash and stretch weirdly, with days becoming endless slogs of toil while weeks and months would drift by without consequence. It was looting the bodies of dead comrades for shoelaces, belts, and cigarettes. Captives looked forward to being last in line for soup because they would get a chance to receive a vegetable or scrap of meat in their bowl. Finally, Frankl observed that hunger and deprivation forced people to become their most essential selves. People who were decent and empathetic became more so, while selfish and cruel people became obvious. Confronted with death, humans are both the best and worst examples of how to be alive. 

Frankl does not consider himself morally superior and attributes his survival to chance. He uses his experiences to form his understanding of psychoanalysis and philosophy. It is that understanding that is the basis of a form of treatment called logotherapy and Frankl’’s observation that three things give people meaning even in the darkest circumstances. These three things are:

• Creating work or doing a deed.
• Experiencing something or encountering someone else.
• By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. 

The categories are deliberately vague because each person must discover what the work gives us; meaning or encounter provides value. What unites all humans is unavoidable suffering. People we love die from cancer. Old friends drift away, and the indifferent forces of the global economy can turn any of us into homeless beggars. We must find meaning in our world by being creative, loving someone or some experience, and finally learning to transcend the pain of unavoidable suffering. It is a blueprint for our absurd postmodern age. 

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for everything that helps provide meaning to my life. 

• I am grateful to Capco for allowing me to help clients be more successful. 
• I am grateful to my peers in the Agile Reformation, including Dimple Shah, Thomas Meloche, and Diana Williams from Project Brilliant, who supported my efforts to make business more sustainable, sane, and satisfying. 
• I am grateful for my parents, who I can still enjoy time with and who encourage me the way only parents can. 
• I am grateful for a woman who loves me despite myself and has become my partner in this chaotic life. 
• The strange business environment of banking in 2023 has shown me who the saints are and exposed the sinners in a clarifying fashion. I am grateful for this moment of clarity. 
• Cancer caused plenty of pain and unnecessary suffering and exposed me to what mattered, which was the people around me that I loved.
• The war in Ukraine and violence in Gaza have clarified how I feel about violence and authoritarianism. I am grateful for that lesson. 
• Finally, I am grateful to the people who follow me on this blog, via social media, and in my video feed. Thank you for allowing me to share myself with you each day. 

Any comparison of being a paid professional in the twenty-first-century global economy with the experience of prisoners in the extermination camps of World War Two is ludicrous and stupid. I can gain wisdom for my world from the experiences of another. Frankl feels like a person from a different time who has something to teach us today. So, as I survey my family and the tradeoffs I have made to support them, I am grateful that I can rely on the wisdom of the past to make sense of the present. In 2023, the sacrifices were worth it. 

Now, pass the cranberry sauce, and see you next time. 

In Praise of Duct Tapers and Problem Solvers

The world of business is shifting and complicated. Billions of dollars are sloshing around the global economy, and currents of this activity impact each of us on the planet. It is hard to make sense of all the motion and activity, so the business press attempts to make sense of it with strange trend articles. Fobes magazine had an article about the five tribes of employees you find in the office and their possible leadership potential. I enjoy these articles as social exercises, but they left out a crucial component, and I feel compelled to discuss it. 

Ryan Hogg in Forbes reported that the good folks at Slack have identified five prominent workplace personalities. He then describes their unique characteristics and possible ability to lead business organizations. These subgroups are detectives, networkers, road warriors, problem solvers, and expressionists. I am including a link to the article here if you want the full details. 

What struck me about the article was the perky and upbeat nature of how Hogg describes these tribes of workers. Detectives are data-oriented, organized, and outcome-oriented, while road warriors are 'feisty' and have a different vision of success than typical employees. It is easy to be glum and write about work with a sense of futility and toil, so I am grateful for Hogg to take a different approach. 

Working in a contemporary office has gotten a bad reputation. As corporations have grown, we need to do a better job developing leaders, and profit-seeking is the central focus of our activities to the detriment of everything else. It is a toxic perfume of alienation and exploitation. It explains television shows like The Office and The IT Crowd have become cultural touchpoints in the UK and the United States. Our work lives contain plenty of farce and pathos. 

According to Hogg, people like me are problem-solvers. We adapt to technology quickly and like using new ideas to solve old problems. Slack's head of customer success said, "I expect to set the problem solver to be an integral part of an organization because they're going to be the people that adopt artificial intelligence much faster and find ways to make their jobs easier." 

Hogg ignored the definitive book about office subculture seven years ago, David Greber's "Bulls#it Jobs." In his book, Graeber uses his experience as an anthropologist to explain the five tribes of people who undermine organizations—he labels these groups flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. Graeber's book is an unflattering look at corporate life and the "profound psychological violence" that accompanies it. 

Graeber and Hogg's overlap is the description of problem solvers and duct tapers; both live in an ambiguous realm of decisions requiring judgment and creativity. Duct tapers and problem solvers spend lots of effort fighting corporate red tape, fixing problems before they happen, and keeping the promises of others. They are project managers, scrum masters, and middle management types who support the organization. They also make many enemies because they spend most of their time challenging existing power structures and proposing new ways to do things. It requires technical and people skills with uncertain payoffs. 

I am proud to say that I have been a duct taper for the last twenty years of my career. Along the way, I have earned a few emotional scars and developed a reputation for frankness and delivery. Executives only understand the necessity of problem solvers and duct tapers once they need them. When a deadline is in jeopardy or an existential threat crops up in an organization, these people become saviors. Otherwise, they quit and join other organizations because even the best duct tapers and problem solvers know when to run for cover when an organization is about to blow up. 

So, if you want to ensure the survival of your organization, pay attention to this tribe of employees known as duct tapers and problem solvers. These people know your organization better than you do, from its seedy underbelly to the glamorous product launches. They also have a symbolic roll of duct tape to keep the organization from flying apart. It would help if you had more of them in your organization. 

Until next time. 

 

The Benefits of a Good Backlog.

My career is an adventure. Each week, I face new challenges as I attempt to help organizations deliver working solutions for the last ten years. I have experienced the Good, Bad, and Ugly of the technology business. I have never been a significant player, but in my small way, I have attempted to make life in the cubicles of your local office park a better place to work. Last month, I concentrated on creating a quality product backlog, and today, I want to summarize my thoughts on the subject. 

A product backlog is nothing more than a fancy list of work to accomplish. It should focus on delivering value to customers. Finally, it should obey the principles of Roman Pitchler's DEEP model. If these simple requirements are satisfied, your project and organization will be more successful than many attempting an agile transformation. 

The business exists to provide goods or services to customers. If done correctly, it is a mutually beneficial relationship where the customer gets what they want while the business makes a profit. It is up to the business to minimize waste and keep the customer happy. I am always amazed at how often this idea gets lost during a project. 

Inefficiencies and dysfunction reveal themselves during projects, and many of those issues are not engineering issues but are instead the products of human frailty. Ego and insecurity stalk the cubicles of many business organizations. High-paid executives throw their authority around to justify their existence. People will claim credit for work they did not do. Finally, pressured for time and short-staffed, people are expected to create complicated software solutions. It is no wonder that burnout is so rampant in the industry. 

I consider a healthy product backlog to be vital to success. Prioritization pr
events the highest-paid person in the room from overriding the organization's goals. By pointing out the importance of work to the organization and customers, questions of ego and authority fall away. If priorities are out of line with market demand, then the organization can pivot because the product owner and leadership team have an emergent backlog. We are empowered by estimation to make informed predictions about when work will be finished. Instead of an entire file cabinet of requirements that no one reads or refers to, the level of detail is sufficient to create working solutions. 

A simple structure of Bugs, User Stories, and tasks obeying the same workflow reduces conflict within a team and the larger organization. I wasted ten hours of billable time getting a development team to accept a product backlog item as a defect instead of a change request for one client. Because they were not paid to fix defects, the team treated everything as a change request, wasting time and avoiding the need to mitigate their poor code quality. A more straightforward backlog structure and clear expectations would have saved everyone involved time and money. 

The most crucial part of having a clear product backlog is that it is a public and transparent way to communicate how work moves through the organization. If someone wants to add work, they have to go through the product owner, and they can see the story move from creation to development to production. The organization sees how work flows through the system, and the organization can use the theory of constraints to help make necessary improvements to the system. Just like there are no secrets at a crap game, a good product backlog does not have any secrets. 

Each week is a new adventure, but with a proper backlog, most surprises are not career-threatening. 

Until next time. 

Postulates for Backlog Prioritization

Today, I am continuing my discussion of backlog management. A good backlog follows Roman Pitchler’s DEEP model. Sticking with three simple building blocks inside your backlog will streamline work, and placing all work that drives value in the backlog will make you more successful than half of the other product owners currently working. This week, I want to discuss something that many organizations struggle with – prioritization.  

As a software developer and agile professional, I spend plenty of time around entrepreneurs and business executives. Many of these individuals are insulated from the hard knocks of life by the success in their careers. Because business leaders are accustomed to getting everything they want every time, they need help when asked to set priorities. People unaccustomed to hearing no are notoriously tricky to work with. 

The cold reality in the global economy is limited time, people, and money to get things done. Bosses who create a climate of terror destroy their organizations. Therefore, priority setting is necessary sooner or later. Confronting this reality requires a few postulates for business people to understand. 

The first postulate of prioritization is if you do not set priorities for work, someone else will. When you give a software developer a list of things to do without priorities, they will work on the most straightforward task or the one that interests them personally. It means employees often spend their time on tasks that are optional to the business. It may not be a big problem at first, but it will create situations where a developer will build something, and it will be radically different from what the person paying the bills asked for. 

The following postulate is that when everything is a top priority, nothing is. In business, there are important things and things which are urgent. Rarely do the two overlap, but business leaders want to create a false sense of urgency to get work done. It is a recipe for failure because if items are all urgent and essential, they are just like they should have been prioritized. The easy or enjoyable tasks will go first, generating conflict between the employees and management who commissioned the work. 

Finally, we should prioritize work based on the needs of customers and stakeholders rather than the highest-paid people in the room. I have spoken at length about egoware and other types of waste in organizations. The top priority for any business is the customers who pay for the solutions and products the business manufactures. So, when confronting a situation where a customer conflicts with an Executive Vice President of Application development, you must side with the customer. Improved revenue and better profit margins have a way of silencing critics. 

So, for a backlog to be successful, follow these three postulates of prioritization. First, set priorities; otherwise, others will set them for you. Next, priorities need variation because if everything is a top priority, nothing is. Finally, prioritize based on customer needs instead of management desires. These postulates are the foundation of a successful backlog. A successful backlog is the beginning of a successful agile implementation. 

Until next time. 

A backlog must be DEEP

I am continuing my series of articles about the basics of healthy product ownership. The most fundamental thing in Agile is the product backlog. Borrowing from Dave Todaro and his book “The Epic Guide to Agile,” I said that the basic building blocks of a product backlog are user stories, bugs, and tasks. Today, I want to emphasize the structure of a backlog. 

Roman Pichler writes plenty of great books about Agile. My favorite is “Agile Project Management with Scrum.” Here, Pichler outlines his DEEP model of product backlog management. For a backlog to be robust, it must have the following necessary and sufficient conditions:

• It must be Detailed.
• It must be Estimated.
• It must be Emergent.
• It must be Prioritized.

I have blogged about each of these conditions in other blog posts. Today, I want to review them again and develop some structure you can use to ensure that your backlog is healthy and helping drive value. 

Many businesses actively view a product backlog as a grocery list to fill. It is a mindset geared toward failure. Even the most successful software projects began as small experiments that grew and adapted to market conditions. So, unfinished items are revised based on what the customers want. That is why we say a backlog is emergent and prioritized. A business must determine what is important and do those things first, and if the market determines those priorities need to shift, we must be flexible and intelligent enough to change them. Ego is the enemy of agility. 

One of the most universal features of project management is that once you start doing the work, there is no way to know how long it will take to complete the task. The reality is known as the cone of uncertainty. Estimates can be wildly off by a factor of eight from the low end to the high side of the budget and timeline. The only way to reduce the uncertainty is to do the work, which means that you are adding more detail and information to user stories. It also means that estimates may change as more information becomes available. The code of uncertainty will narrow, but it will take time and patience, which are in short supply in the global economy.

The properties of detail, estimation, emergence, and prioritization combine to make your backlog resemble a leaderboard at the golf event. A golfer rises and falls on the board based on the condition of the course. Halfway through a tournament, a cut takes half of the golfers out of contentions—the ones who make “the cut” then compete for the real money and recognition. Instead of golfers moving up and down a leaderboard, think of the user stories moving up and down the backlog based on the competitive information from your customer base. 

The road to healthy product ownership travels through a detailed, estimated, emergent, and prioritized backlog. A product backlog that meets those conditions will deliver value to the project and generate revenue for the firm, which keeps everyone working for another day. 

Until next time. 

Back to Basics the Building Blocks of a Backlog.

I want to return to basics for the next few weeks and discuss Agile fundamentals. Last week, I outlined my mission statement that the fundamental building block of an agile implementation is a product backlog. Today, I want to discuss the items you put in the backlog. 

I am currently reading Dave Todaro’s book, “The Epic Guide to Agile,” which I am enjoying. Todaro starts with the basics of Agile and Scrum. From this starting point, he covers the pragmatic impacts of applying agility to business. It is from here that he talks about product backlogs. In case you need a refresher, a product backlog is a list of work the team must do to deliver value to the organization. A backlog can cover numerous processes, from marketing to Human Resources, but my examples will focus on software development since I am a technology person. 

A product backlog should contain user stories, bugs, and tasks. A user story is a new functionality or a change in functionality that creates value for the firm. For instance, if you want to tie the corporate website to a Federated social media service, you create user stories for the development team to improve. Another example is when regulations change, you must change how to calculate sales tax in the shopping cart. User stories are uniquely suited to adding features and improving products. If you want to learn more about how to write user stories, you can follow this link, where I talk about how I teach others to write user stories. 

The next item you should add to a backlog is bugs. A bug comes from a funny story from the early days of computer science. The first computers were monstrous contraptions the size of entire buildings. These devices came before the invention of transistors and microchips, so they were composed of rooms of unreliable vacuum tubes that gave off unhealthy heat levels. According to National Geographic, a moth flew into one of these rooms and landed on a tube. The insect died instantly and shorted out the computer. Since then, anything physical or programatical that breaks a computer is called a bug. 

The product owner of a system needs to track bugs in a system. Thus, log a bug when something is not working as expected in the product backlog. For instance, if we return to our fictional shopping cart and sales tax. We must write up a bug if sales tax is incorrectly calculated. From there, the bug is prioritized like a user story and then worked on by the scrum team. 

We need to remind people not to get hung up on if they are working on bugs or user stories. As a developer and scrum master, I often argued about work. I always wanted to debate if something was a bug or a user story. A wise coach showed me that both product backlog items are working to drive value to the firm and that I should concentrate on the work instead of arguing about what kind of work I am doing. 

The final item in our backlog is called a task. It is an item that the team does which does not deliver direct value to the solution. Training, the configuration of environments, and product spikes all fall under the umbrella of tasks. At first, I disagreed with this approach because I consider spikes a separate entity. My attitude changed when I started working at organizations where twenty different product backlog types existed in instances of Jira with different workflows. Thus, spikes and work that do not add direct value to the product should be treated as tasks to avoid headaches in Jira and simplify managing backlogs. 

A product backlog lists User Stories, Bugs, and tasks. Together, they make up everything a team does to deliver value to the organization. Please avoid focusing on the specific details of each type and accept that all of them must be completed. Next time, I will discuss Roland Pitchler’s DEEP model of organizing a product backlog.

Until next time. 

From the Basics to Healthy Ownership

Agile professionals tell tales about our successes and failures regularly. It is how we learn about what works and what doesn’t in our profession. Agile people also enjoy a good tall tale about the foibles of working in the global economy. After some time, these tall tales become apocryphal stories that we share. I am guilty of this behavior, and I am sure other coaches do it. Today, I want to pull back from the mythology surrounding agile and focus on the basics. 

I am reading Dave Todaro’s book “The Epic Guide to Agile.” What I like about this book is that it concentrates on the basics of agile and scrum. Todaro builds out advanced concepts from the basic foundations grounded in years of experience working with software professionals and business people. It is refreshing to see this writing about agile. 

As a coach and scrum master, the most fundamental building block is the product backlog. It is the bedrock where most Agile efforts begin. It is also where we see the origin of many of the dysfunctions in a business. When reviewing the subject, a product backlog is a prioritized list of work, including user stories, bugs, tasks, and spikes. A product owner creates and prioritizes that list while a development team completes that list. In contrast, a development team completes that list, checking off individual stories.  

Backlogs work on the level of individual teams. When coordinating between multiple units, we create what the people in SAFe call a value stream. Value streams then roll up into portfolios of work. Thus, you can roll work up into larger blocks or break it into its most fundamental levels. We aim to have a clear view of what is being worked on and measure how much value is generated for the firm, not to create busy work at the organization.

To avoid getting lost, Agile professionals need to be able to measure progress and draw maps of where we have been to where we are going. It takes organization and a particular discipline, but if done correctly, you can communicate clearly with both business leaders paying the bills and development teams doing the work. The push-pull between the two groups is what I like to call “healthy ownership.” In a perfect world, leadership trusts the organization to get work done and can trust leadership to look after them. It should be a beneficial and mutually symbiotic relationship. 

Over the next few weeks, I will focus on how to help build healthy ownership in organizations, from setting up backlogs of work to ensuring that middle management does not strangle agility efforts for selfish reasons. I look forward to you joining the conversation. 

Until next time.

A Place for the Manager in the Agile Organization

I am always impressed by my fellow Agile advocates. Some are grumpy cynics who see failure around them and feel responsible for helping clean up the substantial debris cluttering global business over the last fifty years. Others are cheerful warriors attempting to show a better way by living example for others to follow. My approach lands somewhere in the squishy middle as I see behavior that violates my values. I understand intellectually that these violations are occurring because people created those systems to normalize those violations. 

As an agile professional, I have spent the last ten years fighting the uphill battle of changing business culture and performance. A common observation we in the Agile community have when we attempt to bring Agile to organizations is that teams quickly adapt to this new reality. Managers, in particular, are a constraint on how successful agile is in an organization. Today, I want to discuss the manager's role in an organization. 

My coach at CAPCO Financial, Michael Guerrero, ruefully observes that middle management is where agility dies. Executives know the importance of being more agile, and teams embrace the ethics of agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban. Managers are often caught in the middle and do not know how to navigate an organization transitioning to agility. The challenge of finding a place for a manager is becoming a central question in the agile reformation, along with how to scale it to the entire organization. Diana William and Liz Rettig from Project Brilliant gave an excellent presentation at AgileIndy 2023. 

The Scrum Guide and Agile are very good at defining the roles of a scrum master, product owner, and team member. The Agile community is silent about where managers fit into this system. It does not help that we do a poor job selecting and training managers and that those who advance into those roles behave in ways detrimental to the organization. Instead of making middle managers scapegoats for the failure of agile, coaches and scrum masters need to recruit them as partners for success. 

Williams and Rettig suggest four roles for the manager in an agile environment.

Provide Strategic direction –

Managers need to provide clarity and direction to the teams. They explain the 'why' of the decisions made and let the agile teams figure out the 'how' and 'what' of work. In traditional managerial roles, they thrive on ambiguity in an agile environment and must provide clear guardrails for performance and conduct. 

Grow People – 

A manager in an agile environment must grow the people they serve with training and development so that their skills become more 'T' shaped and they can advance within the organization. Even a person content to remain in the same position can learn to be better at their job. Managers of this type are judged by how they grow the people under their care. 

Create an Environment for Success – 

Managers in an agile environment need to learn how to address constraints and impediments. These managers must create solutions to these blockers and create an environment where people want to work. It is more than coffee, pizza, and foosball tables. It includes reducing technical debt outside the team and getting collaborations from other parts of the business. 

Being an Agile Champion – 

Finally, a manager in an agile environment champions the process. They encourage retrospectives, support efforts to build psychological safety, and allow teams to design their work areas. They must be willing to exhibit the same continuous improvement they expect from the development team. Finally, they need to get out of the office and talk with the scrum masters, product owners, and stakeholders to ensure they have what it takes to succeed. 

These are the four roles of a manager in an agile environment, and they will look alien to people accustomed to sitting behind a desk and doing administrative work. It is a much more hands-on role. 

When we portray agile in organizations, we show it like a three-legged stool with the development team, scrum master, and product owner, each playing a supporting role. We intentionally exclude the manager. If we want Agile to succeed, we must change this mindset to include managers. Thus, a manager should envelop the team providing these four services to make each of its legs successful.  

The next five years will be critical for Agile's success, and it is up to us in the profession to ensure managers are not left behind.

Until next time. 

What I Learned at AgileIndy 2023

As a business professional, it helps to spend time with others who you do not work with. It helps provide fresh perspectives and moral support when times are tough. It is also good to hear from others that they share similar struggles in their business situations. It is like cleaning the emotional pallet from the sour aftertaste of daily dysfunction. I took the opportunity to attend the AgileIndy 2023 conference to perform that cleanse. I was a presenter, and I learned a few things. Today, I wanted to share my trip report with everyone. 

I traveled to Indianapolis to present a talk on servant leadership and how to use language to build credibility with team members, stakeholders, and leaders. I had a packed room, and the presentation went well. I look forward to making many connections and seeing if my tips are helpful to people in the field. This journey's best part is meeting old friends and making new ones. The agile community is one big tribe of like-minded people who bicker like family but often unite to make work more sustainable. 

Along with giving a presentation, I got to sit in on some great presentations and discussions about how to make businesses more successful with agile techniques. If there were any big themes at this conference, they were twofold. The first theme was the role of managers in an organization going through an agile change. Teams that self-organize and deliver in rapid iterations create unique challenges for managers who now have to do something else beyond traditional management. The other theme is establishing trust in organizations. I want to discuss each of those themes. 

For many of us in the agile community, implementing agile techniques works well at the team level, and executives occasionally achieve buy-in. Most managers threaten agile methods because they fear the organizational changes that agile demands. Thus, self-organization, empowerment, and transparency often make managers feel redundant and threatened. Many change management efforts fail because middle management strangles it if considered a threat. Fortunately, Diana Williams and Liz Rettig had a great conversation about this forgotten cohort of people who can make or break your agile adoption. I know plenty of folks at Project Brilliant, and I was not disappointed by the advice and suggestions they provided. I am going to devote a future blog post to their advice. 

Mike Cottmeyer from Leading Agile gave the keynote speech about the enormous challenge facing the agile community in 2023: building trust between business leaders and agile teams. We in the agile community demand empowerment for groups doing the work. Still, empowerment does not happen if that team does not create working solutions for the business to sell. It means that for a team to be empowered, the company must trust the team to do the work. Cottmeyer points out there are steps to business agility, and approaches like SAFe and Scrum at scale are about helping the business manage technical debt and dependencies. Dependencies are agile killers in organizations, so it is up to everyone to find ways to mitigate them. The truth will always win between reality and purity, so Agile professionals need to be reality-based. 

I had some great conversations in the green room at the conference. Coaches love to talk shop, and sharing experiences with others is always instructive because our experiences overlap. Finally, I met Dimple Shah and attended her presentation, which covered diversity in organizations and how the drive for diversity is often the same as the desire for organizations to become more agile. In a relaxing manner, she reviewed that people need to both talk the talk of change and walk the walk. By following this simple approach, people create credibility in the organization.

I am fortunate to spend time around so many great people. It is also a blessing to share my knowledge and experience with others and help them. Best of all, I learned a few new things to return to my practice. I hope to present to AgileIndy next year, and I look forward to visiting plenty of old friends and making new ones. 

Until next time. 

Doing the job is harder than it seems.

Bill Belichick is one of the most successful coaches in NFL history. When you talk about coaching excellence, Belichek will come up in the same conversation as greats like Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi. I have a few issues with his methods and general sportsmanship, but the results speak for themselves. He has won the Superbowl as a coach eight times, and his career record is 329 wins to 165 losses, a winning percentage of two-thirds. Belichick is a winner. Like many successful NFL coaches, he is a grumpy authoritarian who believes winning excuses many transgressions. I want to set aside my feelings about the man and his leadership style to focus on something he preaches to every player who plays for him. 

From the biggest superstar to the most lowly practice squad member, Belichick admonishes his players to "Do your F#&%ing job." As long as each player fulfills their role on the team, Belichick is satisfied with them and will keep them around. When someone violates a boundary or does not fulfill their position, the player is often benched and managed out of the organization. It is a ruthless worldview that often treats people like replaceable parts. The clearly defined roles of each player make football easy. A running back blocks and runs with the football, and an offensive lineman prevents others from tackling the quarterback. The list goes on, but all 53 players on an NFL roster have clearly defined roles. Thus, if a player struggles to tackle opposing players or allows the quarterback to get tackled, they are not performing their function. 

Many business people think like Belichick. I suspect that many business leaders developed their leadership skills in high school and collegiate athletics. People often use the lens of winning and losing to evaluate decisions. The business often values toughness and determination more than nuance and introspection. It is a hyper-competitive brew that divides the world into winners and losers; no one wants to be associated with a loser. 

Environments like this are difficult to navigate because many roles are poorly defined and the product of years of social exchange between people. Does an employee with twenty years of experience take orders from a peer more familiar with the technology fresh out of college? How do people of color navigate cultural stereotypes and misconceptions from more narrow-minded colleagues? Finally, as we attempt to flatten organizations, how are chains of authority and accountability managed? If everyone is accountable, often no one is responsible. The ambiguity of roles creates friction and dysfunction in organizations. Where there is confusion is there is failure to get work completed. 

I speak from experience because, for the last ten years, I have served as a scrum master, product owner, or coach on teams. I am in a much different role with a client and have struggled. Moments like this force me to return to L. David Marquet's book "Turn the Ship Around!" for inspiration. In the book, he says that our paradigm for leadership is wrong. We often see the leader as the person in charge giving orders to subordinates who carry out the orders unquestioningly. The job of every successful leader and team member is to develop an environment where everyone shows leadership, from the lowest-ranked sailor cleaning commodes to the ship commander who relies on those sailors to get things done. 

It is a radical idea but helpful for a business environment where five generations of workers, from Boomers to Generation Alpha, start working in the same company. Experienced employees often take direction from newly minted MBAs. In Marquet's vision of leadership experience, employees can show the less experienced tips and tricks to improve, while newer leaders can impart new knowledge to the professional staff. If done correctly, it is a cycle of growth and development for both sides. 

It is not easy. Leaders need to be clear about a person's role on the team. Throwing someone to the deep end to figure out their role is a disservice to the team and the individual thrown into that role. It also requires humility and emotional intelligence. Not everyone can lead and be in charge, so they must sacrifice some of their ego to be part of a team. This task is more demanding than it sounds. Marquet's "Turn the Ship Around" features a different but equally important kind of leadership. It is the kind of leadership where people actively contribute to the team. In Bill Belichick's words, they do their job well. 

Writing about Agile, scrum, and leadership is challenging. You must articulate how you want to improve the world around you and practice that vision in front of others. Fortunately, society has difficult and grumpy people like Bill Belichick to remind us what is essential.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the AgileIndy Conference this Friday, September 22.

Until next time. 

The Paradox of Certainty

The biggest paradox in business is that business people and shareholders demand certainty. Profits must be steady or growing. The business meets expectations with little struggle, and the organization behaves like a perpetual motion money machine, creating gains and dividends. The reality is that business is a deeply uncertain activity filled with plenty of chaos. Consumer tastes change, regulations tighten, and the human beings who run corporations are frail and prone to mistakes, so while everyone demands certainty, there is never any guarantee that the expectation will happen. This paradox is central to most business challenges, and I want to discuss it this week. 

When you speak with business leaders, particularly executives, you hear them say, "I expect." It provides a veneer of certainty and cloaks the person in a coating of faux confidence and confidence. Often, you hear conversations like, "I expect the realse to go well," or "I expect that report on my desk at the end of the day." Meryl Streep portrays this language of callous efficiency with awful accuracy in the film, "The Devil Wears Prada."

Often, these expectations come into conflict with reality and the chaos that often surrounds technology projects. Developers sprinting toward a deadline and working long hours make mistakes, introducing software defects. Last-minute changes and defects extend timelines. Finally, power imbalances in organizations create situations where decisions create conflicting priorities that seize up progress. 

The empiricism and transparency that come with agile are supposed to address these problems but bump into the paradox of certainty. Decision-makers with expectations often do not want to know about the defects and dysfunctions that riddle their organizations. Instead, they demand results, and if they hear the word no or that the organization is creating a constraint hurting delivery, they will treat the messenger as insubordinate. It creates an atmosphere of fear where people know things are wrong, but no one takes action because their risk does not offer any reward other than unemployment. It is a scary place to be, and the effect resembles gaslighting behavior. 

I do not have a solution to this paradox. Still, as an agile coach and software professional, I know that we can reduce uncertainty by ruthlessly inspecting and adapting each time we finish a sprint. It also requires the swallowing of pride by decision-makers and developers to address each project's good, bad, and ugly. It is complex and requires discipline, which many business people lack, but those who are successful will make the effort and grow in the process. To break out of the paradox of uncertainty, try having observations and opportunities for growth instead of having expectations. 

Until next time. 

Burnout and the Technology Professional

Static, distraction, and stress are present in the lives of technology professionals. To stay relevant in the industry, you are active in internet culture, learning about new technologies and ways of doing things. This dynamic online lifestyle feels like staring at a disconnected television with its black-and-white static pattern. At the same time, you need to concentrate on getting work done while forces outside your control view for your attention. Meetings with senior leadership, instant messages from Slack, and even the dog wanting a walk interrupting our need to concentrate on the task are the battles we face with distraction. Finally, deadlines are cruel in the business world, and there are never enough people to do the job correctly. It creates a level of stress which do not exist in other professions. Combined static, distraction, and stress are adequate conditions to lead to professional burnout, and I would like to discuss that today. 

Global business culture makes it challenging to cover the topic of leadership burnout because it focuses on strength, competence, and confidence. Failure is for the sick and lazy. If you are not succeeding in business, you are not working hard or talented enough. The business press amplifies this attitude and the information ecosystem that thrives around it. Turn on Fox Business News or CNBC and watch it for any length of time, and you will notice that it resembles sports programming with winners, losers, human interest stories, and scores rolling by in the form of stock prices. Executives parade on the screen like celebrities, and nothing is worse than a network anchor pointing out less-than-expected revenue figures. 

The business world is about triumph, wealth, and success, but the business press often ignores the lonely wilderness that leads to that success. It is late nights, missing time with family, red-eye flights to meet clients, and dealing with sef-important jerks who often pay the bills. It is a world of rejection and loneliness where you can hustle for forty years and have nothing to show for the struggle. Talk to any business professional; they will have stories about their sacrifices to stay relevant and employed in this ruthless environment. 

It is why two recent blog posts from people I know and respect inspired me to consider my professional burnout and direction. Alan Dayley is an Agile coach and instructor whom I met on the old Google+ social media platform. He was talking about leading a training session with a group of executives, and a director of engineering boasted, "Engineers are like batteries. When they are exhausted, I replace them." Without skipping a beat, Alan said, "Then I am glad I don't work for you," before continuing the training. I am sure he did not receive an invitation to do another training with that client because he spoke truth to power at that moment. When leaders see human beings as expendable and replaceable, we have moments like that with Alan Dayley.  He was invited back to do more training for the client company. The executive with the "just replace them" attitude was from a partner company working with the client. The director sponsor of the training supported Daily in that situation.*   The attitudes of some leaders explain why burnout is so common in the professional ranks. 

Another person I respect, Angela Dugan, suffered a health scare while in the middle of being acquired by another company. She asked for time off to recover and was told no. Fortunately, she had the option to quit to focus on her health. She calls this intermission in her career her "sabbatical," and she uses it to refresh and recover. I have known Angela for over fifteen years, and she is a competent, empathetic, and results-oriented leader from experience. This reality did not matter to her new bosses when she asked for time off when her body and mind began to break down from the responsibilities of leading technology professionals during a pandemic and acquisition. 

These stories could make you cynical and jaded about the technology business, but I see it differently. People like Angela, Alan, and myself are out in the business world fighting the lonely fight of making business better, one project and person at a time. We sacrifice our youth and sometimes our health to provide for our families and improve the world. It is not a heroic life like the one popularized by the business press but one we should respect in our everyday work experience. 

I suffer from burnout from time to time. Unfortunately, I must muddle through the experience to support myself and my family. It is not fun, but I have come out of the experience stronger and wiser. Others are not so lucky, as they have suffered from heart disease, addiction, and mental health breakdowns. Businesses have gotten so big that they neglect that it is people who keep the global economy spinning. 

I wish I had easy recipes to avoid burnout. I do not. Instead, I have a few strategies to keep it at bay. First, I try to get a healthy amount of sleep. Sleep deprivation has the same effect as intoxication, so getting sleep is an intelligent way to approach work. Next, practice moderation with food and alcohol. I used both to help me cope with stress, and all it did was make me fat and miserable. Drink a glass of wine or a Negroni occasionally, but remember that most of life's problems will not be solved at the bottom of a glass. Often, new issues will appear. Finally, step away from work. Set firm boundaries and avoid answering e-mails during time off. Enjoy the company of your significant other and children. Go to a concert or dance the night away with friends, but do something, anything not related to the office. 

Burnout is real. A combination of perverse incentives and unhealthy expectations causes it. We must admit that it happens and that even the best people suffer. In an environment of static, distraction, and stress, it is surprising it does not occur more often.

Until next time. 

*Correction -  Alan Daily provided an updated account, reflected in the blog today, 6-September-2023.

I get knocked down!

When you become a blogger or post on social media, you offer your wisdom and opinion to others. Giving advice also comes with a particular burden because you must practice what you preach to others. Finally, your guidance has to have a positive practical effect.   If you are not helping others, you are no different than a mentally ill person ranting about lizard people on a soapbox at the corner park. The business world makes me feel crazy occasionally, but this last week was insane. Each blogger, coach, scrum master, and social media poster will face a test and must rely on their advice to struggle through.  

As a coach and blogger, I have repeatedly said that failure is more important than success to determine your ability to grow professionally. Failure is educational, tests your mental toughness, and motivates you to transcend those failures. I have failed plenty of times, and the experiences have made me more intelligent and wiser as a professional. 

The most vital test of a person is how they respond to setbacks and failure. My partner coaches a soccer team on weekends. It means I spend my Saturday morning watching five-year-old girls kick a soccer ball around a small field. It is also a chance to watch personal growth happen in real-time. A young girl over-kicked a ball, tripped, and fell. She was stunned for a moment but realized there was a fight for possession, so she huffed at the indignity of falling, got back up, and got back into the game. Later, she would score a goal. It made me proud of her because she rose above a setback. 

The business world is like those five-year-olds learning to kick a soccer ball. People fail and make mistakes. The ball does not bounce your way, or a teammate will disappoint. Unfortunately, global business is not youth soccer because you often don’t receive a juice box and encouragement from your coach after a game. Many times, you feel alone and empty. Business is ruthless when it comes to failure. 

As a culture, we often trumpet success but greet failure with awkward silence. No one knows what to say when you are on your stomach with turf stains on your face. For me, the obvious answer is to say, “Get back up!” How we respond to adversity is the best measure of success. 

If you excuse me, I have to clean some grass off my jersey and get back into the game.

Until next time. 

Decisions are Better Than Dithering.

One of the most amazing things in my experience in the business world is the people responsible for millions of dollars of business and hundreds of people but incapable of making a decision or setting a priority. It is so common that it has become a cliché in business writing and the popular imagination. Decision-making and prioritization are central to success, so why are many business leaders so bad at it? 

In college, I was eager to graduate because I wanted to work with the mature grown-ups of the business world. I was deeply disappointed by some businesspeople's emotional maturity and self-reflection. In fact, I soon discovered that a contemporary corporation has many of the same characteristics as a high school. You have jocks as part of the sales force and leading important teams because they look the part. I have experienced plenty of mean girls who become awful women in marketing and human resources. Band and theater kids gravitate to customer-facing roles, while the more nerdy contingent makes a living among the technology staff. If he were still alive, John Hughes could make a great movie about the contemporary office. 

Unlike high school, a corporation does not have teachers or administrators to reign in bad behavior and raging hormones. The students are running things, so tribal and personal bias plays a big part in who succeeds and who fails. Leaders prioritize being likable to their peers over getting things done. A popular person is likelier to be promoted than someone despised. It forces ambitious people to be uncontroversial. It means saying yes to everyone they can above them and being pleasant to a fault. It is the behavior known as "kiss up and kick down," which business professor Robert J. Sutton defines as an asshole. 

These individuals do not need to make decisions; they must be cute or charming to their superiors, keep their peers from hating them, and keep the people they serve busy. As time passes, they rise in organizations and act like cholesterol, slowly choking the life out of the organization. When asked to accomplish something, they often take credit for someone else's work or find a helpful scapegoat for failure. Being in an environment like this is why productivity is low and worker engagement is poor. 

The harsh reality is that Collin Powel is correct when he says leadership means you will piss people off. Deciding to do something or setting a priority for work will make enemies. Unfortunately, skillfully getting the job done is not enough; you must be likable. Thus, these ineffectual people wind up in leadership. 

The good news is that agile forces an organization to see itself as it is and confront ugly truths. It is then up to the organization to decide if these ineffectual people should remain in leadership. Nothing is worse than two equal priorities colliding and creating an organizational train wreck. So setting priories is the first skill that all leaders need to perfect. It is simple to do in practice; develop a list of things that need to get done and then number them with no two items having the same number. As items get completed, then review the list and re-prioritize it. It provides you with flexibility and communicates what is getting done. It will still create enemies and cause conflict, but the information's transparency ensures that all controversy will be out in the open instead of getting whispered behind your back. 

You cannot change business people's feckless and immature nature, but you can create incentives where people set priorities. A workplace where work gets completed is better than one mired in dysfunction. Each of us in the agile profession needs to be transparent and clear about priorities and decision-making. Otherwise, we are reliving the worst aspect of high school. 

Until next time.