Olaf Lewitz
Transcript
My French is very small, so I will talk in English. Please tell me if I'm talking too fast. Feel free to do any, and if I don't observe it, be more violent or provoking or whatever.
I realized after submitting sessions with this title to multiple conferences that it's probably the least sexy title you could have at a conference.
Which turned out to be a strategy to only invite people who really want to listen to me to come to my talk, and that's good.
So, welcome. Welcome will be an important part of this talk, but I won't start with it. I will start with changing the world.
This is a quote I found in a book last week. A book that was given to me by my wife as a gift. Because she was, while I was busy elsewhere, traveling the world to make it a better place, she was attending a session in a bookstore in our local neighborhood in Berlin. With a woman who inspired her so much that she was telling me about it on the phone and she was telling me about it on the phone on the next day and she was giving me this book. And it's about a thing called Kantari. Have you heard of that? I'm not sure if Kanthari is spelled... I'm not sure how it's pronounced in English. It's a kind of chili, as you can see on the picture. And it's the name of an initiative, a school in India, which was founded by this woman. Have you heard that name? Sabrie Tenbergen. She's German and it's interestingly hard for me to pronounce her name.
She turned blind when she was 12. She's same, same, uh, date of, no, year of birth as me, 1970. She turned blind when she was 12. Her parents knew when she was two that she would become blind and they never told her because they thought that she would have a miserable, more miserable time before actually becoming blind if she knew.
She has amazing stories to tell about being somebody who is handicapped. She doesn't consider her blindness to be a handicap. She considers it an opportunity.
About being excluded from many things, which is something that she never felt she was because she was always participating.
The story she told about how she found out that she was actually losing her sight was very moving.
It was winter and there was a lake near her village where they would go skating.
Where it's skating, which you do on ice in winter? Yeah. And she loved it. And on this lake, people usually would chaotically skate around and it would be a lot of fun. And she was approaching that lake and she saw that people were going in very, very tidy circles. And that annoyed her. She thought, why are they going in tidy circles? This is supposed to be fun and chaotic. So she went straight in and broke into the water because she couldn't see that the ice was very thin in the middle of the lake. And that's when she started to think and then her parents told her. She became famous in 2004 when she rode on a horseback through Tibet.
Which everybody told her not to do when you're blind.
And she didn't listen. And she met other blind people in Tibet. And in Tibet, probably still today, but back then even more, blind people weren't supported like they are in France or Germany or wherever you come from. They are just put into a corner. They are not viewed as valuable parts of society, like in most countries. So she founded a school for the blind in Tibet, which is now run by her first pupils. So she started doing something new. And she once, when she was visiting India, she had food with these chilies in. And these chilies apparently are extremely hot, although they look very unassuming. And she had this idea of founding a school. a movement of getting people who are in a socially unaccepted position, like she was when she was blind, or as a blind person, into entrepreneurship, into a leadership position, so that they could found initiatives, do projects in their home countries to change society. And this is what she did. She founded this organization named Cantari, like this chili.
Sort. And her vision is, we see a world spiced by ethical visionaries and driven by integrity, equality and empathy.
And when I read this quote, changing the world is an acquired skill on her book, and I went to look at the website and saw this vision of her school, I was like, wow. I'm talking about integral quality. It's hard to spell. In my point of view, this is much more about integrity than about integral theory, if you're into that. I'm not going to really touch on that in this talk. Because I'm curious about it, but I don't really like it very much. I'm all for equality and a lot for empathy, if you've known anything about me. Building organizations with these qualities is, in my point of view, existential. To building quality product and quality software. And that's what I want to talk about today. And this is why I started with this inspiring woman.
Because what we can learn from this is change always starts with me.
She had so many reasons to just be frustrated, disappointed and complaining. I lost my sight. Poor me. Society doesn't treat me well. Poor me.
Right? Or society doesn't treat blind people well and you get into complaining and you become this debating politician who is... This is not what she did, right? She knew if I want to change something, I need to change. And this is something that I've learned in, I don't know, 15 or 20 years of influencing organizations.
It's not about telling somebody to change. It's not about making somebody do something. You can't do that anyway. You can try, you can lose a lot of time, energy, passion on that. It doesn't work. What you can do is change yourself. You can make new choices. That can change the system, and the system then can encourage other people to make new choices as well. That's how change works. And that's also how we build software and how we build software with quality, organizations with quality.
If you've seen any of my talks in the recent two or three years, you've seen this slide. And is there anybody in the room who does not know the scene or the movie this is from?
Matrix, okay. It's really nobody, wow. So I don't need to tell you the background of the story. I'll just give you my key insights. A, Neo is aware that something's broken in his world. He's aware that something is not as he would like it. Something is incoherent, something is incongruent, something is... And he wants to find out more. He wants to see what is behind this.
And in his world, most people want to pretend it's okay.
One of the most important scenes for me in those movies, I'm not sure if it's in one or two, is when the traitor goes back into the Matrix and he bites into the stake and he says, ignorance is bliss. Remember that one?
I think it's very, very, very important for us change agents, change artists, change leaders, whatever. We're talking so much about change and we're looking down on people who don't want to change and who like the world as it is. And we are making fun of them. They have a choice too. Not changing is a valid choice.
Choosing that your organization is working fine, looking at the org chart and liking that because it gives you safety and comfort, that's a valid human choice.
Admitting that this nice org chart is not your real organization, and that you might want to start looking at reality and changing reality instead of changing the org chart, is another valid choice. And this is what this blue pill, red pill thing is about. Some people want to, dare to, embark on this journey to Go into the rabbit hole and see how far it goes. And this is because they have help.
Morpheus has been around in Neo's life for ages. He has been this guiding angel or this legend on the horizon. Neo trusts Morpheus because he's heard so much about him. And he doesn't have a clue what happens when he takes the red pill, but he trusts Morpheus to kind of take his hand. And when you look at the wording, when he offers the two pills, he says, do you want to take the red pill and we go see how far the rabbit hole goes? It's not I go leave you alone with your shitty organization once you've realized how bad it is. That's not what he said. Right?
The power of this choice, of making a voluntary choice how you want to live your life, how you want to do your job, how you want to change your organization, is, or comes through in the movie at the very, very end, when at the end of the third movie, after all these wars and machines, etc., Neo is fighting Mr. Smith, the agent. And at first he's... fighting hundreds, then he's fighting thousands, and in the end there are two, Mr. Smith and Neo, and they're in the mud and the rain, and Neo's falling down, and Mr. Smith asks him, why do you keep on fighting? Why don't you stop? Is it because of love? That's just an illusion. Is it because of humanity? You know this is just a matrix. Why do you not stop fighting? And Neo says, because I've made a choice.
That's the most powerful motivation you can have. You have made a choice. You have taken responsibility for your actions.
In French, the word responsibility is closer to what it actually etymologically means, the ability to respond.
Right? You're able to respond because you are looking at the system and making a choice. You're not just reacting to circumstances.
And again, this is a choice. Nobody has to do that. You don't have to be mindful. You don't have to be the perfectly calm, always making a good choice human being, right? Humanity is about this diversity, about living with the fact that some of us are making these choices and a lot of us like the steak much better and that's okay.
So be forgiving, be accepting with people who are not choosing to change as fast as you think is useful or helpful or needed.
My mantra about choice is called real options. I learned it from Chris Matz, who was already mentioned by Carl in his keynote, in the context of four kinds of value that you have in an organization. And Chris comes from, as you can see from these two examples, from a financial background. And he applied the kind of thinking that you get to when you do all this option mathematics. And you apply that to your real life. And it goes like this. Options have value, options expire, never commit early unless you know why. Repeat with me. Options have value, options expire, never commit early unless you know why. A bit slower. Options have value.
Never commit early unless you know why. Thank you. I'll quickly explain what that means. Options have value. There are multiple different things I could do now. I can continue talking and entertain you. I could go have a coffee and leave you bored. I could, I don't know, jump out of the window and see if I can fly.
These things have a different value.
The thing that only gets... that you only get when you read the sentence again and again, is that it says something different on another level. It's valuable to have options.
You look back at the blind woman. Many people think that they don't have a choice. They have to go to work. They have to go to school. They have to do what mom says or what boss says or what everybody does. And some people really seem to not have a choice because they are blind.
And if you think about it, if you think, no, I want to do something, you can create options. You can create options so that you have more valuable choices. And this is what that woman did when she decided, I can go on horseback and I can go through Tibet. The horse won't run into anything because horses don't do that. And I've been on horseback all my childhood while I could still see. I trust this horse. And she trusted that the people who told her not to go would actually go with her to take care of her, which is what happened. Options expire. or what boss says or what everybody does.
And some people really seem to not have a choice because they are blind.
And if you think about it, if you think, no, I want to do something, you can create options. You can create options so that you have more valuable choices. And this is what that woman did when she decided, I can go on horseback and I can go through Tibet. The horse won't run into anything because horses don't do that. And I've been on horseback all my childhood while I could still see. I trust this horse.
And she trusted that the people who told her not to go would actually go with her to take care of her, which is what happened.
Options expire.
If I have scheduled a talk here, I have the option to entertain you and to share my thoughts with you. If I don't show up on time, that option quickly expires. If I'm asked to submit a session to a conference and I miss the deadline, that option expires.
So that's quite easy. Another meta-level thing. The expiration of options, something that you can see on every tree outside in this nice season, is the expiration of options sometimes also is a transformation in something new. So sometimes when the context changes, one option expires, but other options emerge. That's the nice thing about ecology and evolution. The most important thing is this. Never commit early unless you know why. What we do in our lives a lot is mixing up commitments and options. When I buy a ticket for a cinema, I think I have to go. No. When I buy a flight ticket, I think I have to fly. No, it's an option.
When I go to marry, that's a commitment. At least that's a common understanding in our... Society and it's my understanding. But most things I can keep open and keep fluid and have more choices in this ecosystem of options.
I've relentlessly applied this in the past five years so I've been I have been doing a lot of practice. It totally changed how I think, totally changed how I live. Highly recommend it.
So bringing this to the original topic of the talk, what is quality? Do you know a guy called Gojko Adzic?
Okay, some do. He published this a few years ago, inspired by Maslow's Pyramid of Needs.
A pyramid of software quality. Software should be functionally okay and deployable, should be performant and secure, should be usable, should be useful, should be successful. Very nice things.
Maslow's pyramid of need is wrong in the sense of We don't need to have food and shelter to get to self-actualization. And if you've been, like me, using Microsoft software in the 90s, you know that you don't need to be okay to be successful.
So this is rather like an onion with layers. And this is not a perfect metaphor, it's one that works. If you come up with a better one, I'd be really, really happy.
You might have an onion that is a bit hard or already a bit brown in the middle, and still the outer layers are okay. You could have an onion where the outer layers are not okay, so it doesn't look successful, but still you find something when you peel it open. So my new image is something like this, right? Deployable, performant, usable, useful, successful. This is all kind of important. But you have a choice. And what I found out when I drew this, and I was like, oh, I need to draw it again. It's not beautiful. And I thought, well, this is kind of the point. Right? It doesn't have to be beautiful. Beautiful is one element to successful or usable or useful, but beautiful is not mandatory. Right? We have a lot of software that's not beautiful. And I found out that quality, like a lot of things that I've been talking about in recent years, like trust, and transparency and respect. All of these things are messy. Messy meaning you can't really put your finger on it, you can't really define it, it's not a rational, measurable, right, linear thing. It's complex.
To give you one specific takeaway from the talk, this structure with these five categories, you can turn into an amazing exercise for a team or organization to check how are we taking responsibilities in these areas. Some software teams, for instance, will say, okay, we're making sure our software is deployable, functionally okay and performant. Useful? That's not our problem. Successful? That's somebody else's problem. Product owner has to do that, or product management has to do that, or whoever. And then you can bring them into the room together and they can look at the thing together and look at, okay, how do we actually check if we are successful? How do we know? How do we know we are okay? How do we know we are usable? And what are the risks and how do we take care of these risks together? So to have these multiple perspectives on your system and have these conversations, how are we making sure this is actually going to work? Where are we currently good and where are we currently lacking? How can we improve? Very, very good exercise for any team that's developing a product. It doesn't have to be software.
So the interesting question is, we have lots of experience of not being very good at quality in product development in general and in software development specifically. So how do we get quality?
And I had this idea a while ago.
That instead of phrasing Conway's law as every system is as fucked up as the organization that created it, we could also turn that around into saying every system is as great as the organization that created it.
And when we look at it this way, we have a kind of guideline, how do we get this kind of organization, this kind of thinking in the organization, this kind of mindset, this kind of being with each other, being with our customer and being with the system, that actually reliably and repeatedly produces great products.
And what is needed?
Are you familiar with that book? With that guy?
Really good read. Company named Menlo in Ann Arbor, Michigan, based on XP practices and the principle of freedom, which probably appeals to a lot of people in France, I guess.
If you're familiar with the book Freedom Inc., which was written by a French author and an English, I think, they're talking about command and control organizations. Organizations that tell you how to do your work and then control how you do it. And how to shift that into a freedom-based organization. And Menlo and Sheridan is a very good example. And he said in the preface to his work, deep down I knew that there's a better way to run a business. And he started doing that.
Have you ever seen a source code that looks like this? Or a piece of source code that looks like this?
Okay, sounds like some of you have.
Can you imagine the pain of somebody writing code like this?
That was going to be my next question. Who of you has made the experience that you go look into whatever your source code control is and you find out it was an earlier self?
What is leading you to do this? My hunch and my personal experience is it's a lack of clarity of intent.
If every time we wrote a piece of code, we would really know what we're doing and what we want, then the code we write, the classes and the methods and the whole design, would show a clarity of intent. If I know what I'm doing, then my source code would look as if the source code would know what it's doing or what it's supposed to do. And the way we currently organize organizations, there's either no clear communication of the intent, there's no time to think about the intent, or there's just simply too much stress to think about it when you're writing the code. Because you don't have time, or somebody bullies you, or there's just too much general stress going on, or whatever.
So, how do we get to clarity of intent in an organization?
How does that work?
Rephrase it, my hypothesis is software quality is limited by how well the people creating it know what they want.
And if we look back at the pyramid,
Most organizations I've talked to, the people who felt responsible for these different kinds of quality were not even talking to each other and in some cases they didn't even know each other.
So that could be a starting point.
I skipped this because of time, but it's a very beautiful image my daughter has drawn, so I wanted to include it. It's a model of communication with an intent, a ground of trust, a boundary of a shared context, a model of our thinking,
protocol of our conversation and a purpose we share.
The slides are on SlideShare, so you can look that up later.
I want to briefly touch upon the thing that inspired me to label this talk integral quality, which is this book. Has anybody heard of it, read it? Okay, oh wow, quite a few people. Okay, this book is highly, highly dangerous. It changed my life, or at least it changed the way I think about organizations. In a very good way, and then in a way that led to some learning opportunities.
And I'll show you why. So this book contains a look at organizations and at the history of human beings creating organizations that goes a little through history. And I do it very, very quickly and short. Basically says... We had different approaches over time to run organizations. The first was by just a strong leader. and people are following, and they're following the authority of the fist or the weapon. At some later point, people decided it was a good idea to write down what is right and wrong, instead of just following the fist. So Catholic Church is a good example of this kind of organization. You have a very clear idea of right and wrong, which means even if you're not a tribe in the woods or wherever, You know that us and them is determined by the things in the book. So you know who is in and who is out. And that's evolutionary been an important thing for survival for the human species. What's my tribe? What's your tribe? Are you a human or a lion? Or are you a human or... Whatever the people in the other forest are, they're not us, right? So, okay.
Then, with the Industrial Revolution, the idea of optimization came. The idea of running an organization as if it were a machine came. And that was the... Arrival of achievement, of results orientation, of improvement. The Catholic Church doesn't have an R&D department.
It's actually not true, but it's a very catchy quote, and I stole it from the author of the book.
Then the information age came. Egalitarian thinking came. And finally, somebody thought, it might actually be nice to take care of the people. and to put the people in front, and run an organization like a family. So this would be something like the scientifically wrong but popular understanding of a wolf pack, alpha wolf, everybody else is following.
This is the right and wrong army, Catholic Church, hierarchy based on rules organization. This is the individual achievement, together achievement, management by objectives, that kind of organization, and that is the family organization. Many agile organizations are going into this direction. A lot of agile thinking, a lot of agile writing is going in that direction.
The new one, and this is what is great about the book, and I'm coming to the issue I have with the community around the book rather than the book itself.
This is hard to label because it's just emerging. It's a new thing. And it might be a thing. We don't even know yet if it's a thing. What the book basically does, Frederic Laloux has visited new kinds of organizations around the planet. And like a curious, wondering boy, he has gone, wow, they are doing this, this is awesome. And then he has gone, wow, they are doing... Oh, there's actually something similar. And now I found 10 organizations who have a decision-making process that is like this. Isn't that cool? So it has this childlike wonder, awe and curiosity. There's something new. It might be interesting. It seems to be very successful. Seems to be useful.
And he connected it to this kind of historical thinking of how did organizations work in the past. And he said, maybe this is a new way to run an organization. What is now happening is that people are going around, and I've heard a talk on a conference last week with a similar, less blurry slide, and he talked about going teal. And I'm reading about that. You've probably heard about the Zappos organization. the Zappos case, and there are people advertising teal services. Consultancies will say, I will help you reinvent your organization like the ones in the book. And you heard what Carl said, copying doesn't cut it. Right? Copying what other people did will not get you the same success. Right? Installing the Spotify operating system won't work. So we know that. And you can spot it very easily with the language. I've heard a talk on a conference last week with a similar less blurry slide and he talked about going teal. And I'm reading about that. You've probably heard about the Zappos case. And there are people advertising teal services. Consultancies will say, I will help you reinvent your organization like the ones in the book. And you heard what Carl said. Copying doesn't cut it. Copying what other people did will not get you the same success. Installing the Spotify operating system won't work. So we know that. And you can spot it very easily with the language.
I was expecting a different slide. Okay, I'll show you that in a minute. If somebody says, I'll make you evolve,
They have not understood the word evolution.
Okay?
We are going to promote emergent whatever.
That was the thing I heard in that talk. If somebody says, okay, I have this leader who is setting goals, and I need to use Kanban and flow optimization, et cetera, to give him the trust, that when he moves to green, people will still do what he wants them to do.
That is not going green. Going green means that you trust the people to do whatever the hell they want and that they will come up with a fucking good solution.
That might, well, the one problem I have is this labeling thing, right? Is my organization green or orange or teal?
This model is supposed to integrate. It's called integral something. And it is clearly linear. It is clearly a hierarchy, although the T thing is supposed to be without hierarchy, or at least without a fixed hierarchy. So this model is not coherent. And this is my problem with it.
It's also highly judgmental. I want my organization to be to you because I want to be the best.
Sounds great and being the best, being focused on results is clearly this kind of thinking.
Right? And I'm going to cover now what kind of thinking you could do instead. What the book says, and this is good stuff as in good practice, things not to copy but to try, is that there are three areas where these organizations excel or where these organizations do things differently. It's about allowing the whole person to show up at work. It's about allowing self-management to happen. So no authority, no power authority, nobody can tell anybody else what to do. The best example of that is Ricardo Zemler. I find it very curious that Lalu thinks Zemco is not a teal organization. Ricardo Zemla started in the 70s saying the only way that I can create an organization with alignment and freedom is that I tell every employee to put their own interest above company interest at all times.
Every management recommendation book, every recommendation of Agile, Lean, etc. I've heard anywhere in the past 20 years tells people to align company interests and then team interests and then individual interests. This is the opposite of freedom. It works. It totally works in an orange context. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying it's not emergent, it's not evolutionary, and it's not freedom.
So if you want freedom and alignment, you tell people to put their own interests above the company's interests, and then two things can happen. Choices. Options. Either the system breaks apart and you don't have an organization, which is good to know early, or people actually start running into the same direction. Because they want to.
Right? Because they sense a common purpose or whatever. You have set some atmosphere, some culture, call it what you like, that lets people be attracted to run into the same direction. And this is what great teams do, right?
Okay, adaptive systems, I don't need to talk about that in an agile or lean conference. So in terms of self-management, he has certain things, observations he shares. This book is rich in example practices you could be inspired by, not copy. And these are mostly organizations still in existence, so you can look up their websites. People around this book are creating a wiki website, or have been creating a wiki website with all of the stuff from the book, plus a lot of practical examples. What I'm afraid of is that this is turning into a recipe thing.
And the people who are doing it seem to think that they are creating a recipe for going teal. And this is making me highly, highly skeptical. And this wiki is a rich source of lots of great examples, like Spotify and the ones we share in the community. And as I said, these are areas you can look into. As I said, the slides are on SlideShare, so I cannot go into all of these things. What is important to me, and this is my different image, and you will be reminded of the onion, I hope. That was my artistic intention. The two things which are important to understand are evolution and integration.
I assume because all of these things are important parts of a whole.
Example of a leader. If I am a TEAL leader of a TEAL organization, and the TEAL leader of a TEAL organization in that book is a leader who stands back, doesn't tell anybody what to do, maybe creates a strong invitation, like, we want to change the way health services work in the Netherlands. It's one of the examples in the book.
And when he tells somebody what to do, he gets a flame wall on the internal wiki of 10,000 employees telling him, no, this is not how this organization works. Right?
And if something really bad happens, if this organization was attacked, if somebody within that organization would break a fundamental rule, it's important that somebody, that doesn't need to be the leader, be anyone, stands up strongly and says, no!
You're not going to do that and I will stop you with all the force I have, with all the red power that I have, all the wolf pack alpha wolf authority that I can muster.
Right? And we also want some rules.
We want to know what this organization is about. We might not want to be judgmental or critical or violent about it, but we do want to know who is in and who is out. We want to know what is right and wrong. We can still be forgiving, but...
Right? So we can be understanding and forgiving and still there is a rule, right? There is a boundary. Carl was talking about governing and enabling constraints. And I liked it really a lot that he gave the example with the two scissors being ambidextrous, which is a lot about integration, I think, right and wrong integration, left and right.
And then he told us that this type of constraint is bad and we should move to the other one. I think we need both. And we need some encouragement to challenge the rules, because otherwise we fall into habits and things stop changing. So all of these
Perspectives, energies, types of action are important in an organization, in a healthy organization. We want to have attention to results. If nobody makes sure that we have money in the bank, there will be a point where we don't have money in the bank and then the organization breaks down. So it's not about focusing on results above everything else, but some orange thinking about making good money so that we can continue changing the world into a better place is probably helpful, right? So it's about integrating these things, not about having a preferences. My organization will be so much better when it's teal. And my employees will be so much happier when I let them emerge. Or make them emerge.
So, evolution is not make somebody do Make anything happen. It's not about directing or direction. It's not about control. Evolution is about letting go.
And as we all have this thing that's called ego,
And if it's our organization, if it's our responsibility, this is really, really, really hard.
And that's where this work of the leader inside himself, inside his mind, inside his heart, comes into play into what kind of organization can I create.
Lalou says in the book that the organization can't evolve above the level of consciousness, I don't like the level bit, as I said before, of the leader. And this is the reason.
If as a host to a space, I am inviting behavior only if I like it or if I understand it, I'm creating a very limited space. If as a host of a space, and a leader is a host of a space, I invite behavior that I do not necessarily understand and that I maybe not even like. I create a lot of space for innovation, creativeness, conflict, failure. And if my ego is freaking out like, that's unfair, he had a better idea than I had, I want to have my power back.
If I don't give my inner child that space to grow, then I can't be a leader of an organization that goes beyond that. So that's important, letting go.
The other thing, this is coming back to the scissors examples, polarities. Our brain loves polarities.
I assume you know about the system one, system two thing, Daniel Kahneman, fast and slow thinking. Putting something into a box, this is right and wrong, yes and no, good and bad, Scrum and Kanban. We love that. Right? It's so easy. And we couldn't function if our brain wouldn't do that. If I drive in traffic and everything I do would be a conscious choice, making a conscious decision, I would die very quickly.
So this automatic thinking is very important. And we need to deal with these polarities. We need to overcome them if we want to integrate. And balance is a good thing, but it's not integration. So if my polarity is work and life, Probably heard about work-life balance. That carries the meaning that I am not really alive at work.
So what I want is integration. Whoops, that's actually
Hard to see with two images layered. This is supposed to be two circles that integrate in the middle. So I want to integrate both, right? Right and left hand. Scrum and Kanban, lean and agile, good and bad.
Pun intended. So, if you're interested in this integration topic, there's a guy called
Then Seagull.
Brain scientist, and he has different modes of integration of the human mind. He describes in a book called MindSight.
Which accidentally was recommended to me in Paris a few months ago by Oana Junko, who some of you might know.
He talks about integration of our consciousness, what am I aware of in my mind, integration of body and mind, being aware of what's going on in my body and using that, integration of right and left brain hemispheres,
integration of memory, integration of narrative. I make sense of my own life in the sense that I'm living my life, I'm authoring my life, instead of living somebody else's or what somebody else said I should do, etc. And all of these integration things are When you look at it from an organizational perspective and from an integration perspective of a software team, are exactly the things we need to do to make this quality thing work more reliably. Have more awareness of what we do. Who of you has worked with a team struggling with setting up continuous integration of their software?
Dan Siegel has a wonderful name, definition of the word integration. It's about valuing.
Differences
I think he even talks about honoring differences.
And then promoting linkages.
And what we need to do when we want to integrate software is we want to make ourselves conscious of how we work. We want to be aware of the different interfaces. We want to agree on a protocol, on a way to do things that we agree on so much that we can actually write it down and automate it.
And we want to be very conscious of what different things we have and how we link them together and how this linkage can be promoted in a way that it holds and that it's resilient and reliable.
And these are things that work in your mind, as well as in your team, as well as in the system that you create.
So coming back to this hypothesis, clarity of intent, or you could even say clarity of mind, it all comes down to integration. So how well am I, as a member of a team, as a leader of an organization, leader of a team, whatever, designer of a software or product manager, how well am I integrating
the different influences, the different senses, the different observations, etc., to have a clear mind and a clear intent. And if we share that in a way that then leads to a clear intent of the group, then we can have a system with great quality.
So linking it together, clarity of reality, this is the blue pill, red pill thing. And this takes a lot of courage, vulnerability, which also needs all of these human factors that we are actually able to look at the shit that we currently have together. I always say when I talk about Scrum, Scrum is a method that puts the carpet away, which you used to pile your shit under, every two weeks and throws that shit into your face, giving you the option or the choice to clean some of it up.
And then put it back. Some organizations choose every two weeks to put all the shit back under the carpet. These organizations are not going to be successful with Trump. They will stop liking it. Some of them then start doing Kanban instead so that they don't need to face the reality, and that's also not a very good way to use Kanban. Because then your Kanban system won't help you improve either, right? If you can't face reality, you won't be able to make good choices. So the clarity of intent and reality is needed to make good choices. Make sense?
This is touching into the human side.
This is the wonderful improvement, agile, teal, whatever you call it. And this is where I am in my comfort zone.
And requires two things. To actually be able to see, I need a lot of courage. This is the courage to face my reality, the courage to see, okay, this is where I feel comfortable and where I'm currently safe, but maybe I won't be safe for very long. Maybe I just want something else, so let's get up, and look what else is possible. And then you need a lot of trust to actually start going there. And both of these tie into these integrations that you do with yourself, with your mind, building the confidence that you need to actually do that. And again, this is something that is as important on an individual level as on an organizational level.
If we are not ready to look at the state our current software is in, any improvement actions that we take to get to a better quality will be probably fake actions or not be very helpful.
So we have a choice. I have another metaphor to close with.
A lot of our thinking is limited by emotions. This is sadly science of the brain. We spend a lot of energy on being angry about the past. Maybe even being guilty or shameful. And we spend a lot of energy on being afraid of the future.
Because we don't know it, we fear we don't understand it, we can't predict it.
That leaves a little, little space in the here and now for options.
Something I learned quite recently. Options only exist in the present. It's obvious when you think about it. So what do we do? Instead of feeling caught in this cycle of fear and shame and judgment, and getting to this anger, etc. What do we do instead? We take responsibility.
The word I mentioned.
Are you familiar with Chris Avery's responsibility process? This is my matrix version of it. So these are the matrix behaviors.
We had to do this obligation. They did it, blame. We suck, shame. And we didn't do that denial. Or I have a choice. I have one choice to leave the system. That's the ignorance is bliss bit. And I have the choice to, I want to do some change. And that's taking responsibility, taking action.
So, I want to show you the curtain thing. So, welcome. I started with this, and I'm going to end with it.
One minute.
What welcome does is it opens a space that is okay with things I don't like and okay with things I don't understand, to a certain extent, of course. And these two arrows are opening this curtain so that I can have trust and options in the present. Right? Compassion, forgiveness gives me means against the anger that was holding me back because of the past. And acceptance with things I don't understand, things I don't possibly like, things I can't predict, gives me a means to deal with the fear of the future. And that creates options in the present where I can integrate and where we can talk honestly about the state of the system and see how we can improve it.
One truth that I learned about people. You can trust every human being to eventually surprise you.