Escalation

This is the first word you hear when you enter the office in the morning. The sun is covered by clouds and your smile becomes a question mark. Yesterday evening, everything was cool as expected. Today the CTO has invited the whole department for an extraordinary meeting. What have you missed? Rumours and comments spread around the floors until you reach the main meeting room. The CTO is there and announces: “The company of Mr E is dissatisfied by the performance of our product and has stopped the payments”. The CTO has given Mr.E already a date for the forthcoming solution. You and all the other developers have only to reach this date. That simple.

People start moving

What does it happen now? Adrenaline is increased, the teams are heated up and the people start taking actions. However, as it happens with the air molecules when they are heated up, the people start moving to all possible directions. Uncoordinated, producing chaos. Is this scenario known to you? This chaos in thermodynamic is called high entropy and a system in this state has less power to produce something. High entropy is a natural state for a system under certain circumstances like heat.

Focus

Nature though shows also states of low entropy and high focus if the appropriate elements are set together. A great example is electrical current. Take a battery, put it into a torch and it will light. Why? The two poles of the battery have the tendency one to give away electrons and the other to capture them. When you connect the two poles with a wire you set up a path for the electrons to follow their natural way from negative to positive charge. They go all the same direction magnetised by their nature. All the same direction. Ideally zero entropy. Well, in practice not exactly zero. As the electrons move some collide with the molecules of the wire and heat is produced as well causing some electrons to go off route and moving to different directions. However, the entropy in an electrical circuit is low.

Be as the electrical current

Low entropy. Moving to the same direction. Charged with high energy. This is the state we need for our teams if we aim to produce something great. Let’s make our teams work as an electrical circuit. How to do that? Removing the “heating sources” from the working environment and replace them with “batteries”.

Which are the heating sources in a company? I’ll list some that I have identified from my 25 years of experience in network maintenance, testing, teaching, developing, project management and research.

Responsibility is separated from ownership: You are put responsible for the product to work but the decisions about the product are taken by the senior management.

Islands of decisions: Decisions are taken by the senior management or the very experienced employees yielding to thinkers and doers in the company.

Customer isolation: You don’t have the tiniest clue how the “customer” will use your product and who is this “customer”.

Missing leadership: Everybody in the company talks about the product but nobody talks about the people making it happens.

One man show: Competent people have an idea and rush to implement it leaving behind the others.

Missing budget responsibility: The teams cannot decide by themselves about their expenses and so they have no idea if the way they go is expensive for the project or not.

Missing training: People are asked to perform in an area where they have little or no knowledge.

Done work is not visible. Open work is undefined: The people don’t know how much of the whole way they have already beneath them and how much is forward.

No time for research and innovation: People are asked to give good results without having the time to try things out and find what a good result is.

Information flow is blocked: Representatives of the teams are sent to meetings but the information stays among the participants of the meeting.

Those “heating sources” if they get combined they destroy the potential and the spirit of the people. In the following articles, I ‘ll go through each of them and we’ll investigate how to transform them into energy sources