Chris Lorig's Blog

In most modern organizations, it's fine for everyone to challenge everything. While this is very empowering, it also brings a new responsibility: to determine when it is the right time to challenge something.

We all met these colleagues, that tend to challenge anything and everything. While they can be infuriating, they are also absolutely crucial to every successful team. But with the right approach, we can support them in how and when to best make their challenges.

Let's make up a colleague and call him Andy. Andy is very critical and analytical, with strong opinions and loves discussions. He's also very experienced and there is usually a lot of merit to his comments. Still he drives the team up the walls at every corner. Here's how.

In a typical software project, there are 5 phases that offer a lot of things to challenge: ideas, plans, data, work items, user value. And challenge Andy does: Inconsistencies in the plan; gaps in logical reasoning; incomplete data; approaches he doesn't agree with. Andy insists on discussing his concerns with all parties involved and thereby derails the team's progress again and again.

Since he's not involved in all phases, he's naturally lacking context and crucial details. For example, when the PM does the sifting and cataloging, they aren't consulting with him. Usually, Andy doesn't learn about the project until phase 3 and will not be spending the majority of his work on this particular project until phase 4. By then PM and stakeholders of course expect to see some value created and not to have to go back to negotiating buy-in to the initial idea.

The problem is, he's still right some of the time. Just not about his timing.

So when is the best time to challenge something?

When it's in focus. Within those five project phases, each phase has a different focus and a different output it aims to deliver.

1. Focus: data; output: ideas
2. Focus: idea; output: plan
3. Focus: plan; output: work items
4. Focus: work items; output: user value
5. Focus: user value; output: data

What if you challenge it at a different time?

You force all thinking and focus back into that phase.

What does that mean?

When you are in implementation phase, but you start challenging the plan, you force the project back into the planning phase, possibly rendering all work done so far obsolete.

Is that a bad thing?

Well, depends. If you found something that major that will render all work obsolete, then forcing the project back into planning phase makes a lot of sense. If it's only a minor disagreement with the approach that does not really invalidate anything, making this move can cause anything from frustration among colleagues to lost time-to-market to impending financial doom for the company.

Andy is frustrating the people he works with by forcing the focus on discussions that others don't deem relevant at the time and those discussions often end up with no changes at all, just another encore to the discussions that already happened. But every now and then, he finds a real blocker. A detail that has slipped through so far but is a huge obstacle to the value the team is trying to create. And that's why the Andys of the world are crucial for any team.

So, by allowing anything to be challenged any time, managers also invest their organization with the trust that they will make the right choice about when to challenge what. Of course people can always pass this trust back by sharing their concerns with managers and asking for advice about whether to raise this with the team at this point or not.

When we can coach Andy to challenge the right things at the right time (including when it's not in focus, but should be because it's such a big deal), that's when things really can take off.

There is a season to everything.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

Oldest of three, struggled to stay engaged in school, dropped out of college, has a hard time forming friendships, father died early, racked up debt, went from job to job.

My biography isn't too different from most stereotypical 'Black Kids.'

Except in my case, that's read as from an average middle-class family, not challenged enough in class, IT-dropout-startup-material, nerd, suffered through tragedy, willing to take risk, with a diverse set of work experience.

This is what some of my privilege looks like:

I've had debt collectors and the police knock on my door more than once. At times I wasn't even able to pay rent. Still, whoever confronted me always treated me, if not respectfully, at least civilly. I was never yelled at, threatened, talked over, blamed – instead, I was listened to, taken seriously, and in most cases, able to talk my way out of more severe repercussions. If I was black, I might have been evicted or even gone to jail.

I was also able to find new jobs quickly and for good money. Potential employers rarely questioned my credentials and achievements, however flimsy they were. I never lost an opportunity or was passed over for someone less qualified, who had a different skin color. Nobody passed my achievements off as theirs. If I was black, I'd have had to work much, much harder, to have it half as easy.

And, more than anything, I was able to move safely in this city. I was there, the day Jonny K. was killed. I walked through that same street just an hour or so before. I may even have passed those people that killed him. But nobody bothered me. I don't look 'other.'
Some nazis I ran in to beat me up once, sure. But after I went down, they laughed and moved on. No kicks, no rocks, I was bruised and barely even scratched. I was able to stand up and walk home. If I was black, I might well have been dead then and there.

I've never been looked at with suspicion in a shop, subjected to random inspection by the police, spit on or pushed around. I've never had people leave the subway seats or even car because I sat down in it. I've never been called derogatory names in the street. Parents don't call their children away if I walk past them on the sidewalk. If I was black, those things might happen to me every day.

I can't imagine what my life would be like, living in these circumstances. I know for sure that it would be a struggle, much bigger than what I ever had to go through just because I was black.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

One of my teams was so obsessed with velocity; they constantly stressed about doing 'more.' Yet, at the same time, they were not even able to get their velocity to a stable point. It turns out they cheated themselves out of good results.

From the outside, their anxiety was very puzzling, because they did such good work and delivered consistently. So, my agile coach and I started working with them closely to understand what the real issue was. The only thing that skewed the numbers was carry-over: When a story did not get done in one sprint, they would carry it over into the next sprint and – here is the kicker – would re-estimate it.

Take this example: Three stories, all 8 for a total of 24 points are taken into sprint one. They would finish one of those stories and carry over the other two. The team also agrees to re-estimate them to 3. Because the old velocity was 8, they take on those 6 points and assume to be able to complete them. They finish those as well, completing 6 points of velocity for this sprint, for an average of 7.

With a velocity of 7, 24 points would take a little more than three sprints, but they just completed 24 points in a little less than two sprints, with a velocity of 12. This number would be way more realistic.

So, they really cheated themselves out of almost half their velocity, because it made sense to them, to re-estimate the stories.

We did keep the practice of estimating what was left to do to plan the current sprint, but we kept the original estimation on the ticket to calculate the velocity. Suddenly having reliable numbers and predictability lifted so much of a burden off the team that over the next month, they even managed to increase their velocity just by not stressing about it anymore.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

We had to make substantial changes to the data structure of our legacy codebase. None of us had more than a few months of experience with working on this codebase, and the only thing we knew for sure was that there were millions of lines of dead code in there. And the changes were time-sensitive, too. How do you move fast in this kind of minefield?

We had no alternative to migrating a crucial set of data blindly: We did not know nor understand all the ramifications and side-effects this might entail. We could not take the time to thoroughly understand these things while at the same time we could not afford big bugs or lengthy downtimes. It was the core business logic, after all.

So instead, we spent much time discussing how to mitigate the risks of migrating blindly, and we picked this strategy:

First, we deployed the new data structure in parallel. We added all the code needed to handle data the new way and then modified the old code to self-correct the old data. Whenever the old models would be instantiated, they would transform their data and store them in the new structure and then proceed to self-delete and pass handling on to the new code. Most importantly, though, they would send a message to our error handling service, thus giving us a good overview of all the places in the code, where the old models were still in use.

That became our to-do list to clean up all the left-over pieces, and it's also where we had the most surprises, finding areas that we would never have thought of, and that might well have taken us down.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

All in all, this approach went much smoother than expected, despite taking some more time initially. It did save us a lot of work, headaches, and angry stakeholders down the road.

Forced clean-up

We were worried, we might fall into that same trap with this, too, abandoning it before we had finished all the work. That company had a history of half-baked, half-done re-writes and migrations, and to address this one colleague came up with this great approach:

We picked a date and made sure all tests relating to self-correction would fail after that date. We also added a self-destruct mechanism to the legacy code that needed to be removed: a week after the test failure date, this code would error when being loaded, effectively killing our environment until we removed it.

This time bomb helped us make sure we cleaned up even the last deprecated code and database tables left.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

Communication – a protocol view

What's communication? Simply put it's receiving and interpreting information that has been sent by a sender. The naive assumption here is that you can limit communication to conveying the mere facts. But the human communication protocol includes more and it always applies.

A colleague just approached me, wondering how to get people to act on her findings. She's a security engineer, so her findings usually include real threats to the business – one would expect the people in charge to not only take this seriously, but also act on it with conviction.

She told me about always having discounted communication skills as politics or games, while in IT, she would only need to communicate hard facts. And she worried about being naive about this.

Well, on the one hand, yes, this notion is naive – there's always more to communication than hard facts. But it's naive for different reasons than most people – including her – might initially think.

What's communication? Simply put it's receiving and interpreting information that has been sent by a sender (NB: simply sending is not sufficient for communication). The naive assumption here is that you can limit communication to conveying the mere facts. But the human communication protocol includes more and it always applies – to the point where lack of signal is being filled with made-up stuff (I'll get back to that later).

Let's look at that protocol. It includes any kind of signal, a body can send. Noise (more than just words, it's breathing patterns, tonality, cadence, speed, tapping, belly growls), kinesthetics (posture, body positioning, touch, skin temperature), appearance (facial expressions, changes in skin coloration, eye movement), odors (sweat, pheromones). All of these things convey messages and can to some some extent be modulated into conscious communication. But all of these also have a default signal pattern, when not modulated. And these default patterns are readily received and interpreted by the receiver.

So, when focussing on only one channel, words, to convey hard facts, the rest of the channels in the protocol aren't switched off. They're just sending the default signals. So whether you're excited about something, anxious about a situation, bored or sleepy, it's being signaled. And the other side receives it.

Now, we could have a look at this default protocol and decode it. Run signal analysis to figure out, which signal is interpreted in what way, try to modulate the sending channels into giving out the desired signals to convey send a certain message across all protocols. And we'd not even be the first to try. There's lot of literature out there about communication, sales, psychology, even how to pick up women, that try to teach this. Unfortunately more often then not, the application of it is imprecise, incomplete or too overwhelming, resulting in appearing incongruent and insincere.

My suggestion as a better strategy, is to influence your internal state. Humanity has always developed strategies for managing your internal state: Meditation, drugs, positive thinking, music, to name a few.

The idea here is, to not spend time and energy decoding the default signal patterns to recreate them, but instead take advantage of the fact that this “just works” and feed it the state we want to convey.

Nested example. Several years ago, I tried to convince to my team to adopt a new and amazing code version control system: git. I listed all the benefits, tried to convince them, that it was so much superior to what we were using, made all the good points, but nobody was excited. They just didn't care. They didn't mind the current system.

But I did and so I tried a different tactic. I started using it just for myself, with an adaptor to make it work with their system. That made it still somewhat painful to use, but I enjoyed it so much more. And whether I talked about it or not, people around me could feel my excitement, the pure joy of not dealing with certain things they still had to deal with. I became a beacon, sending this on all channels, and they received it. A few weeks later, most people had started using it and a few month later, we had transitioned completely. Today it's an industry standard.

Conveying the facts was insufficient, bordering on unnecessary. The key was making myself feel the positive feelings I associated with it and then let the default system take over the communication for me.

“If you want to ignite a flame in others, you yourself first have to burn.” — Salespeople wisdom

Of course this is not trivial or even easy, if you have to present something to people that you feel intimidated by or other wise anxious. It requires learning to control one's own emotional state, but in my experience, it still yields much better results, than trying to control 10-15 communication channels at once while also trying to make a convincing point.

So now I've given this text to my colleague, to take inspiration from and I'm looking forward to seeing her be much more influential in her work, once she gets to apply this.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

Some people – some of us – have a harder time than others, accepting support. Those people – we – need to learn, to give ourselves permission to be cared for.

Let me explain.

A few years ago, I got myself into a bad place. I was in debt, tax agents at my door and all I did was stick my head in the ground. I tried to make it all go away simply by ignoring it. And there would even have been easy ways out of this with the help of others.

But I was not at all willing to let anyone in close enough to help me out. Not in any way. Luckily people cared enough about me to push through my walls, to break them down and make me accept their care. Even though it came at its own price, it was well worth it in the end.

Paradoxically, I have a whole binder full of stories of stepping into someone else's life in just this way. Helping them to get over something, make something happen or simply be there for them. I'm quick to jump in and extend my care to others. Letting them reciprocate? Not so much.

Take it from someone that took the hard route: Make things easier on yourself and the people around you.

Give yourself permission to be cared for.

Just like you are always ready to step up and help a friend or family member, others are ready to do this for you. Allow yourself to let them care for you. I'm not saying “allow them” – they already want to do it –, but “allow yourself”. Allow yourself to receive their care and to take their hand.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

Some people – some of us – have a harder time than others, accepting support. Those people – we – need to learn, to give ourselves permission to be cared for.

Let me explain.

A few years ago, I got myself into a bad place. I was in debt, tax agents at my door and all I did was stick my head in the ground. I tried to make it all go away simply by ignoring it. And there would even have been easy ways out of this with the help of others.

But I was not at all willing to let anyone in close enough to help me out. Not in any way. Luckily people cared enough about me to push through my walls, to break them down and make me accept their care. Even though it came at its own price, it was well worth it in the end.

Paradoxically, I have a whole binder full of stories of stepping into someone else's life in just this way. Helping them to get over something, make something happen or simply be there for them. I'm quick to jump in and extend my care to others. Letting them reciprocate? Not so much.

Take it from someone that took the hard route: Make things easier on yourself and the people around you.

Give yourself permission to be cared for.

Just like you are always ready to step up and help a friend or family member, others are ready to do this for you. Allow yourself to let them care for you. I'm not saying “allow them” – they already want to do it –, but “allow yourself”. Allow yourself to receive their care and to take their hand.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

Maybe you've heard of delegation poker – a collaborative way to determine, what level of delegation a team and team lead are comfortable with. Let me tell you a story about how this applies to leaderless teams.

Once, there was a team and we set it up to be properly leaderless and self-managing. Of course there was a disciplinary supervisor, but for all product and delivery related terms, the team was empowered to act autonomously.

However with great autonomy comes great responsibility and this led to some level of resentment in people. Not everybody felt excited to participate in all discussions and decisions while others in the team made it very clear that they expected everyone to participate – that that was the meaning of self-management.

In teams with team leads I would open the Management 3.0 toolkit and introduce them to delegation poker, a way to collaboratively determine how much involvement in certain decisions the team wants and needs. And while this team didn't have a dedicated team lead, the approach still felt right.

So I introduced them to the method and after some brain storming, we came up with the following protocol:

In a first session we defined basic areas for decisions, like visual design, architecture, user flows, and the like. For all of these, we played a round of poker to determine how much everybody personally wanted to be involved.

Then, for every feature tackled, team members would get the chance to change their number, to account for things they particularly cared or wouldn't care about – or phases in life where they'd rather spend less time in decision processes at work.

How do you play this involvement poker?

It's just like planning poker or its predecessor, delegation poker, and it goes like this:

Everybody gets cards, numbered 1 through 7. They pick one and everybody reveals theirs on cue. The number hereby denotes the level of involvement – that is relative to the rest of the team.

1: Please decide and then tell me

2: Please make me understand your decision

3: Please consult me and then take the decision without me

4: Let's decide this together

5: Let me make the decision and I'll make sure to ask your input

6: Let me make the decision and then loop you in

7: Let me make the decision and get it done

With this statement in place, people knew who to invite to which discussion and to involve in which decision.

For example, it needed to be discussed and decided, how users should interact with a certain feature. Two of the engineers voted 2 user flow topics, one voted 4, and one voted 5, the designer voted 6 and the PO 7. Thus, they knew to expect participation from the PO and designer and at least one – probably both – of the engineers, that voted 4 and 5. So they did a brainstorm with all four, then scheduled a decision making that actually didn't even involve the 4-vote anymore, because she was confident, the other three would take the best decision.

The others then proceeded to make a decision and scheduled another meeting to share the results as well as the process of how they got there with the rest of the team.

The 2s were happy because they weren't expected to be involved in steps they didn't care about and to get looped in when it was decided. The 4 and 5 were happy to have had their say/participation. The 6 and 7 were happy to get a decision done smoothly and weren't disappointed because they knew what to expect from the others.

The basic rule is this: The higher the score, the more you are reasonably expected to be involved. Anybody may participate and as long as there is somebody there who has voted higher than you, you are allowed to withdraw yourself from the process when you see fit.

Only the highest number is expected to actually stay with the process to the end, because they obviously care the most.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

If you want to contact me, please let me tell you a bit about myself first.

My personal manifesto

Distributed teams over colocation

Flow efficiency over resource efficiency

Satisfied customers over satisfied assumptions

Leading through purpose over managing by objectives

Inclusivity over exclusivity

… that is, while there is value in the item on the right, I value the item on the left more.

Challenges I'm excited about

Building up and leading remote teams

Driving a culture of openness, inclusivity, positivity and productivity(1)

Improving the lives of the customer, one experience at a time

Fostering teal(2), level 5(3) organizations

Commitments I'm expecting to make

I commit to focusing on leading people and enabling them to focus on creating value for the customer.

I commit to making it my mission to help people in my charge grow in any way that they are motivated by and advancing their career in directions that excite them.

I commit to challenging my superiors to provide a clear vision, mission, purpose and goals for the organization and remove all impediments to reaching those.

I commit to creating a working environment where people in my charge can focus on the customer's needs and removing all impediments to this.

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If you feel the organization you represent appreciates these commitments and offers these challenges, please feel free to contact me through LinkedIn.

To make it easier for me to find your meaningful offer between the spam, please mention one of the books from the challenges section in the title.

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Why I get out of bed in the morning

To connect to everyone's inner child,

so that together we can make the world a happier, more passionate, fulfilled and friendly place.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology

This blog is about stories and the right stories can be really motivating. The story about Napoleon Hill’s son from his book, Think and Grow Rich, for example, has always amazed me. What else motivates people?

According to Simon Sinek, a well-worded why statement, for example – which is of course based on stories. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, if you ask Dan Pink – which requires a clear manifesto of values to operate under. Other self help books promote motivational beliefs or setting challenges or commitments for oneself.

So, here goes.

My 'Why' statement

To connect to everyone's inner child,

so that together we can make the world a happier, more passionate, friendly and fulfilled place.

My personal manifesto

Distributed teams over colocation

Flow efficiency over resource efficiency

Satisfied customers over satisfied assumptions

Leading through purpose over managing by objectives

Inclusivity over exclusivity

… that is, while there is value in the item on the right, I value the item on the left more.

Challenges I'm excited about

Building up and leading remote teams

Driving a culture of openness, inclusivity, positivity and productivity1

Improving the lives of the customer, one experience at a time

Fostering teal2, level 53 organizations

2: https://teamcoachinginternational.com/tcis-methodology/
2: https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/
3: https://www.triballeadership.net/

My belief

I strongly believe in teams motivated by a common purpose, united in a safe, transparent, and fair environment, coached for both mastery in their profession and a high EQ, guided by a management team of humble, visionary individuals. That is where success lies and where glass ceilings are shattered.

My commitments

I commit to focusing on leading people and enabling them to focus on creating value for the customer.

I commit to making it my mission to help people in my charge grow in any way that they are motivated by and advancing their career in directions that excite them.

I commit to challenging my superiors to provide a clear vision, mission, purpose and goals for the organization and remove all impediments to reaching those.

I commit to creating a working environment where people in my charge can focus on the customer's needs and removing all impediments to this.

By @cmw@dysfunctional.technology