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.