Andrea Provaglio
Transcript
So, my name is Andrea, Andrea Provalio, and what I do is basically I help organizations to become more contemporary, to work in the 21st century. I have a strong background in IT, technical background, but the last 10 years or so I've been working mostly on culture shift, especially working with managers and also with technical teams, executives, and so on and so on. So one of the questions that comes up very often in software development these days is we are supposed to deliver value, right? That's what Agile is about. It's about the continuous delivery of value. And so I've been thinking about this concept of value for quite some time. And I've been talking with colleagues and friends, including people in this conference. I've been interviewing some of my clients about what you mean by value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've been doing research. And I'd like to share some of the things that I've come up with with you today.
So what I'm trying to say is that this talk comes from a number of different sources. So value, value, value, value. Which, by the way, was the original title of this talk. It's not value in software development, as you can see in the program, which is more specific. The title is value. And the first question I would like to ask you, I do you the honor. is what is value to you? So what is value for you? And the way we're going to do this, since it is a nice conference, very friendly atmosphere, you guys know each other, what we're going to do is I'm going to give you three minutes to find someone next to you and talk about what is value to me. What is it value? Now, you know that time boxing is very important in Agile, so the three minutes start now. Have fun.
Yeah, exactly.
20 seconds left.
10 seconds left.
Five, four, three, two, one. Done. Okay, so any interesting insight? Did you find anything interesting about value?
Anybody wants to share? What is value for you? Yes, Mike.
Meeting needs. Thank you. Anything else? Yes.
combination of pleasure and usefulness. Thank you very much.
Anybody else?
Yes, value and values are a different thing. Yep, yep. Thank you.
So internal value is like a gyroscope. It's something which helps you to understand what you like and what you dislike.
Yep. Thank you. Thank you, Alexei. Anybody else? Yes?
Okay, what improves my life, our life? Okay. Anybody else? One more.
No? Okay. Well, good. I'm very happy because none of you mentioned money.
And not about money is not important because money is definitely very, very, very important. But in this talk, I'm not going to talk about money. I'm not going to talk about value in terms, for instance, of return of investment. I'm not going to talk about value in terms of cost of delay or cost of delay divided by duration. All the different indicators, financial indicators we have about value, this is not what I'm going to talk about during this talk. What I am going to talk about is... this perception of value and how it influences the way we work. So for instance, I know now, we know our definition of value, but what about these guys? Like Goiko and Tom Gilb and a few other people and Aaron Jeffries. So as I mentioned, I've been looking around, I've been doing research, and let's start from the basics. Let's start from the Agile Manifesto. In the Agile Manifesto, We explicitly use the word value or valuable in this case because we say that we should continuously deliver valuable software. Okay? Which is good. Problem is, there is no definition of valuable. Okay? We just say valuable, but we don't define it. Okay, or yep mentioned but doesn't define value scrum guide in a scrum guide at least last year there are 17 occurrences of the word value and no definition at all So we talk about value, value, value, and we never define it.
Other people, or training materials. This is a training material from a PO class. A friend of mine told me, you know, you might want to look at this stuff. Maybe there is a definition of value somewhere. I should have stopped the timer, sorry.
And so they say, for instance, for the profit organization, value is basically money. For the non-profit organization, value is... is the contribution they bring to the world. Okay, something like that. Good. Tom, oh, sorry, Ron Jeffries. Ron Jeffries is kind of aligned with what some of you said, and he says that value is what we want. If you want something, it's because you value that something. Okay, because it has value for you if you want it. Or Tom Gilb. Tom Gilb has a more engineering mindset, and he's more about being extremely precise on what value means, even numerically. Tom says that you should be able to quantify value. By quantify means you need to be able to attach a number to it. If you don't attach a number to it, you're not defining anything. That's Tom's perception.
But still, it's subjective. It's the benefit we think we get from doing something. And then Goko. Goko was speaking on this stage yesterday morning, right? And he takes a more, let's say,
mystical definition of value, because they say that the value of software is a vague and esoteric concept in the mind of the stakeholders, vague and esoteric. So you see, there's a whole spectrum. There are people who say, no, you should be able to define value very precisely. Some people refuse to define value. Some people say that no value is something that we cannot really assess. It's something in the mind. of other people, we don't know what it is. So it's complicated. That's my point. Value is something much harder to grasp, apparently. And one thing is value, and the other thing, as these guys mentioned, are values.
Like learning could be a value, capital could be a value. It's not value, it's one of the values. Or people's happiness, creativity, revenue, product speed, company survival, human life, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, values, values, values, values. So the question is, how do you connect this stuff? How do we come up with a better definition of value if there is one? If there is one. And because you might also want to contemplate the option that it was actually a good idea not to define value, because value can be very subjective, can be very contextual. So how do we relate this stuff? So when I was thinking about this talk, I decided that at the end of the day, the whole point of value is, in terms of software development, is deliver what? To what people, to whom, and most of all, why? Why do you want it? Why do you value it? Because if you want it, you value it. So deliver what to whom and why. That's the question. And I decided to structure this talk talk in three sections. What, who, and why. So let's start with the what. The first thing is, let's talk about money.
Not too long, but let's talk about money. The one thing I want to mention about money is that it's important. Duh.
It's clearly important because we need money for a number of things. It's also a trading indicator, we say. So it could be very gratifying to learn that your company made $2 billion in the last month.
It could also be kind of scary to learn that you have lost $2 billion in the last month.
It's a trading indicator. Money tells you things when it's too late.
But it's also something that we desperately need to be in business.
And in fact, profitability is just a necessary condition for companies'survival.
Just like food or air for me. I mean, this system here needs food and water and air and heat to survive. So I need food to survive, but I cannot say that... So let's say that I eat to survive. But I don't survive to eat. Right? And that's the point. Okay?
I eat to be alive, but I'm not. not alive to eat. So profitability is very important, it's fundamental, but it's also kind of a primitive thing. It's something that we just need because we need it, not because we necessarily want it, which is a different story.
The other thing about All the emphasis that you see on value defined in terms of money these days could come from this guy, another perspective, Ricardo Semler. Semco, remember the company yesterday? I think it was Henrik that mentioned Semco yesterday during the keynote. I don't remember. Oh, no, it was... Goico, right? I think Goico. Anyway, so in a very beautiful TED talk, which I highly recommend you to look at if you have the time, Ricardo says that, it makes just an observation, that most executives today are running their companies on a 90-day mandate. If you are a CEO, you're supposed to prove results every three months. So there is a lot of attention to short-term objectives and less attention to long-term objectives.
And as you can imagine, long-term objectives are more related to values than to value.
So this attention for financial aspects might come also from this one. So, as I mentioned, I'm still... I'm talking about the what, right? What, who, and why. I'm still talking about the what.
Tom, as I mentioned, has a very engineering mindset, even when it comes to defining something so elusive as value. And he says that the main purpose for Tom of quantify things is so that you can have a good discussion about it.
Let's put it another way.
Let's say that you want to assess people's happiness in your team. How much are people in my team happy or in my company? How much happy are they? What can you measure?
I'm asking a question. What could you measure for happiness? engineering mindset even when it comes to defining something so elusive as value. And he says that the main purpose for Tom of quantify things is so that you can have a good discussion about it.
Let's put it another way.
Let's say that you want to assess people's happiness in your team. How much are people in my team happy or in my company? How much happy are they? What can you measure?
I'm asking a question. What could you measure for happiness?
Smiles.
Time they last in the company? Time people stay in the company?
The amount of time people stay in the company? Or you can measure the social interactions, how much time they spend together. There are a number of things that you can measure if you want to start assessing how happy people are in your company. Now, the good thing is that probably each of these indicators is not precise anyway, is not a good indicator, but at least if we start talking about happiness in terms of amount of smiles during the day, at least we have a shared understanding of what we mean by happiness. And that's the whole point. So for Tom, the importance of quantifying something so elusive like happiness is that at least we need to discuss it. We need to come up with a good definition of it. It could not be the right one, but it's still a shared understanding. And then, of course, Tom goes through a number of details about you should measure, if you want to measure something, you should have a scale. In this case, our scale could be number of smiles during the day. You could have a benchmark, current situation, expected situation, horrible situation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you have to start defining that. in a more precise way, but the whole point is having the conversation. The whole point is having the conversation.
Now let's move on. Stakeholders, okay, that's another term that we hear a lot.
When I started looking at this stuff and I started thinking about stakeholders, I encountered more or less the same situation with value. That is, I found at least 20 or 25 different definitions of stakeholder. There is not a common understanding of what is a stakeholder.
For some people, the stakeholders are those who put the money into the project. Of course they are. They are putting their money at stake. But then again, depending on which author or which source you find, you can find different definitions. So eventually I settled for this one, which I like. For me, a stakeholder is anyone who can influence or is influenced by the outcome of a project.
Someone who can influence or is influenced by the outcome of a project. It's a very broad definition, but at least it's fair. So let's say that the government decides to build a nuclear plant 5 kilometers from where you live. Would you be a stakeholder? Yes. you would be, right? Even though you're not putting money into the project, well, not directly, okay? And so on, you would be a stakeholder, right? Okay, so it's a fair definition. The other thing is I like to use the word actor rather than stakeholder because Alistair Corbyn uses the word actor because he has this nice analogy with onstage actors, okay? He says that during a play at a theater, some actors are on stage and you can see them and other actors are off stage. They're just waiting for the right moment to come on stage, right? Which is something that is also true with stakeholders. Sometimes only at the end of the project realize that you didn't speak with the most important stakeholder in the project, right?
Or maybe you went through a very long decisional process to decide what the next step would be, and then a guy walks into the room and says, I don't like that, you need to do something different.
By the way, I remember a couple of British guys from London, they came up with a new definition, they called this the stealth holder. It's not the stakeholder, it's the stealth holder. You don't see these guys, but they are there, and when they are least expected, they jump on stage and they say something. So if our definition of stakeholder is anybody who can influence or is influenced by an initiative, then we need to start the... Now, I understand that the font is small, and that's okay, because they want you to focus on the font. What I'm saying is that a very good thing to do is to start creating a map of stakeholders, for reasons that I will explain later when I talk about the why. But are you guys familiar with this kind of mapping? It's called the interest versus power mapping of stakeholders.
Power means somebody or some function in the company has a high decisional power on this project. Like for instance, they can kill the project. They can say, sorry, we're not going anywhere, I'm going to kill this initiative. Okay, very high power.
Or they could have a very high interest.
For instance, the project manager could have a very high interest in this project, or maybe the users could have a very high interest in the outcome of this project, but they don't have as much power, right? So starting to map stakeholders or actors is very useful because you start understanding that different actors have different needs. And if they have different needs, they have different perceptions of value. And that's the point. They have different perceptions of value. What is valuable for someone with a lot of power and very small interest is different than someone with a lot of interest and very little power. They have different perceptions of value, which is one of the things I'm going to explore later. So question for you, just an honest question. So if we give this definition, so is the development team a stakeholder for you?
Yes, it's a stakeholder, right? They can heavily influence the outcome of a project. They are definitely a stakeholder and they're probably they're also influenced by the outcome of the project. So let's start thinking of stakeholders in a different way. That's my point. So identifying these kind of different subjects, different stakeholders in your system and starting to understand their relationships and their expectations, I think is very important if you want to come up with a better definition of value. Now, then again, I'm talking about what is value. And I don't want to go into the details of this slide here, because the thing is, there are different approaches to mapping value. One, for instance, is to say that for each stakeholder, so I'm going back one slide, okay?
Remember this slide here? Okay, we have a stakeholder map. Now, for each of those stakeholders or actors, there are different perceptions of value. So this is multidimensional. And for that specific stakeholder, the customer operations manager, whoever that is, I don't know and I don't care at this time, the goal could be provide good customer service. The goal could be customer recommend our service to their friends or the another goal could be to lower the operational costs and so on and so on and so on so each of those things each of those goals have value for that stakeholder okay only one stakeholder of multiple goals each goal has value and each goal can be achieved through different strategies
And now you multiply this by all stakeholders in your system, and you start seeing why it's messy, right? Because many of those strategies and goals probably will collide with somebody else's goals and strategies. Okay? One way to try to harmonize this is to create kind of a hierarchy like this.
So you have like a top level stakeholder at the business level, like your shareholders, like people who are financing the project or financing the company. And they say that for us, we have two goals. One is to increase profit and the other one is to increase market share. And for these two goals, we have two different strategies. Now those strategies become goals for stakeholders at a lower organizational tier. It's kind of like managing by objectives.
So you have high-level objectives, and then you can propagate this down the hierarchy. I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that it's one of the ways people are trying to think about value. On the other hand, this gentleman, Taze Norton, who I suppose you know, mentioned that working for external and measurable goals is going to kill your motivation, your intrinsic motivation, right? That's a very interesting point. So if you start defining value in terms of achievable goals and you give goals to people and you tell people, I'm going to measure you depending on your ability to reach this goal according to my metrics, we're probably going to kill intrinsic motivation.
And that's been defined very clearly also by Daniel Pink, Drive, the book, Daniel Pink. So the intrinsic motivators usually are autonomy, mastery, and...
Purpose, thank you. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
So you see, not only value is kind of messy, complicated, elusive, but it also has an implication on how people will participate to achieving your goals in the company. So things are more organic. And to me, when you start mapping stakeholders and you start thinking about the influence cities and their relationships, it's clear that this is what we call a complex adaptive system, right? So let me give you an example.
Here we have a stakeholder. Let's see if I can do this. Live, okay. Let's say we have this stakeholder here. Okay?
Apparently, in this quadrant, you have people with low power and very low interest. So not very important, right, as stakeholders. Yeah, but these are the clients or the users. And the clients can directly affect this guy or this guy. And these guys are in different quadrants, and they can influence these other guys. So a stakeholder who is apparently not so important has an influence in the system, and the system will react and will generate other interactions and so on and so on and so on. So it's...
It's not so straightforward. That's what I'm trying to say. Not only it's systemic at the macro level, like stakeholders, it's also systemic in terms of individual goals. Now, each circle there is a stakeholder. And as we said, different stakeholders have different goals. And as I said, different goals can influence each other in a very systemic way. Alexi was talking about system thinking in organizations yesterday.
Let me give you a very simple example, something we see every day. So you are a line manager or a product manager or a project manager, and you see a very important opportunity in the future, like one month or two weeks from now, there's an important opportunity and you want the product to be ready. Because that's your goal. You value being visible on the market. That's your value. I value being visible on the market with our product. That's my goal as a project manager. So what do I do? I put pressure on the development teams.
Come on, we need to deliver in two weeks.
And so when you put pressure on people, you know what happens, right? People don't think faster, they don't think better because you put pressure on them. They just take shortcuts. That's what we do when somebody puts pressure on us. So the development team has a different goal. The goal was to deliver high quality software. But now you put pressure on them. and their goal is reduced, because now we're not able to deliver such equality as we would like to. But we do that because of the organizational pressure. So we do that. We generate technical debt. Technical debt, after some time, one week, two weeks, one month, one year, will generate some other problem that will reduce your ability to be on the market on time. Right? So you have different goals that are conflicting. One goal is taking over the other, and you are generating problems for the long term, not in the short term. And that's all because people value different things. Right? And they have different power.
Good. So values. What are values?
I'm not going to talk about values. I mean, it's such a complicated thing, values. But in general, values are like reference points for what we do, as Alexei was saying, right? Some people value having good family time during the weekend. Some people value security. Some people value being in an extremely creative environment. Different values.
So individuals have different criteria to assess if their values are being, as you can see, met or violated. Like in general, I would say that I try not to hurt people. That's a value for me, not to hurt people, but under certain circumstances. situations, I might change my priorities. And so if I need to protect myself, I might decide that, okay, it's okay for me to hurt someone in that specific case. Okay, so values are extremely dynamic. They are hierarchical, dynamic, they change constantly. So one of the things that I did when preparing this talk was I interviewed people. And I interviewed, for instance, a business owner, owners of a company. And I asked him, so what do you value?
You own a company, what do you value for your company? And one guy told me, I value measurability over predictability.
But that's a real answer, okay? This comes from a real interview. So the guy told me, okay, well, I value being able to measure things rather than be able to predict the future because I know that it's not possible. But measurement, they are of a high value for me because I can see where we're going. Or it told me impact over scope, meaning I don't care how much features we deliver, I care that the features we deliver are relevant to the user. It's not quantity, it's quality of the features that we deliver.
Or directness and root cause problem solving. If there is a problem in the company, I want transparency, I want openness, I want to be able to solve the root of the problem. This comes from a real interview. So the guy told me, okay, well, I value being able to measure things rather than be able to predict the future because I know that it's not possible. But measurement, they are of a high value for me because I can see where we're going. Okay? Or he told me, impact over scope. Meaning, I don't care how much features we deliver, I care that the features we deliver are relevant to the user.
It's not quantity, it's quality of the features that we deliver.
Or directness and root cause problem solving. If there is a problem in the company, I want transparency, I want openness, I want to be able to solve the root of the problem. It's just an example, okay? Just an example of what this guy values.
A delivery company owner. So these guys deliver software. Making a world a better place, so helping people make their lives better and more fulfilling. So these guys are developing software because they value that other people can have a better life because of their work.
That's what they value. They also value profitability, but that's because we need that, not because we necessarily want it.
An IT manager valued sustainability and compliance.
to be sure that what we do is sustainable financially and technically, and that we are not breaking any regulation in our software. Especially if you are in biomedical software, for instance, you want compliance, right? A product owner. Product owner told me, okay, I like constructive negotiation. I like to be able to talk with different stakeholders and try to help them think and come to a shared understanding of the problem and to a shared solution of what we are going to do next. That's what they value. And they like learning and so on and so on and so on.
Talking about values, in a company, values are deeply rooted in the company's DNA.
And usually values come from the founders of the company, but they are deeply, deeply rooted in the company's DNA. It's also called sometimes a core ideology. Now, I want to show you an example of a core ideology.
And that's from the Merck Corporation. They're a pharmaceutical corporation. So they deliver medicines to people. And I know people working in Merck. And they told me that they also have a value book. In the company, there is a value book that is available to all employees. And it describes exactly why the company exists and what's the purpose of the company. and the values that they believe in as a company. Now, I'm not going to show you the whole book, of course, but I like this sentence.
We are in the business of preserving and improving human life.
And what I like about this sentence is that we are a business. We're making money. We need to make money to support the company. But our goal is to preserve and improve human life. That's why we exist. Not how we exist. This is why we exist. We exist to preserve and improve human life. And all of our actions must be measured by our success in achieving that goal. Remember measurement, Tom Gilb, you need to measure stuff, you need to quantify things so you have a clear understanding of what you're going to do and what you're doing.
So I very much like this sentence. We are in the business of protecting and preserving human life and everything we do must be measured in our success towards that goal. Very interesting value statement because it combines a number of different things. It combines measurement, it combines the financial part, and it combines a higher goal all together in two sentences. Very, very powerful.
By the way, the Merck Corporation gives away medicines for free in poor countries, which is not necessarily a profitable thing, but they do it.
So, as you can see, I hope you are kind of following my line of thought. Now, I started with value, what is value, and then we started talking about what is value for different people, and then we are starting to talk about why those people have that value, consider that a value. So we started talking about values.
Eric, during the keynote yesterday, was talking about having someone who is able to share the goal in the company. If you want alignment, you want a shared goal. You want to be able to keep people aligned to some common value or value set and a common goal. An interesting thing for me is this idea that the why is more important than the what. And then again, as a coach, as especially an executive or management coach, I see this a lot of times in our industry. Our industry is a technical industry, right? What we do is we find, we, we, Most of the time we're trying to find technical solutions. That's our mindset. So when somebody comes to us with a problem, usually our mind jumps directly to a solution. That's a problem, haha, okay, you could do that. Excellent. But what you're doing in that case is just selecting one of the possible alternatives and solutions, just the one that your mind is more familiar with. Okay, problem, solution.
I think we can do better. And this book explains that if you start thinking from the why we do stuff and not from what we're doing or how we reach a goal, we have a better
probability to come up with intelligent ideas. Let me give you an example.
Something from real life. So let's say that I tell my wife, okay, so where should we fly for the next vacation?
Now, just the fact that I'm thinking about flying reduces my solution set, right? I live close to Venice, Italy. It's a nice place. Venice is a nice place. But we also have wonderful mountains. We have the Italian Alps, which are just two hours drive from where I live. Beautiful places. So if I say, where should we fly for our next vacation? I'm excluding the possibility of just taking the car, driving a couple of hours, and spending a weekend in a beautiful place.
But if I start from asking, okay, so why do we want to take a break? Do we want to see friends? Do we need more connection? Do we want to relax? Or do we want to learn something new? We want to go to some new place and experience something we haven't experienced before. So why do we want to take a break? If I start from the why, then I have a whole set of options in front of me. If I start from the what, my solution set is much smaller.
Which is something that if you work on projects, you work with managers, POs and stakeholders, it's something you might want to ask from time to time. So why do you want this? So you want this product, so why do you want this feature again? You might want to ask why a few times. So why? Usually the first answer they give you when you ask why is something automatic. Oh yeah, we need that because of the users.
Why?
And usually at the third or fourth why, you see that people really start thinking. They start thinking in a different way. So don't start from the alternatives, but start from the why.
When we're trying to select alternatives, we might be tempted to find a compromise. Especially when these alternatives are really related to different goals from different stakeholders. For instance, yes, we want to be profitable and we want to be perceived as an innovative company, an extremely innovative company.
And sometimes you're tempted to try to find a compromise. A little bit of this and a little bit of that.
But I also like this sentence a lot. By the way, it's an American writer, it's not an IT person. And he said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two different ideas in mind and still be able to function. It's not a problem of this or that. It's a question of how can I get this and that at the same time.
How can we be a company like Apple? How can we be a company that has a lot of creativity and art in what they do and still being a highly technical and engineering company? How can we be both? How can we achieve short-term profits because we need to prove every three months that we're doing better? How can we have short-term profits and still keeping a long-term goal like Merck? How can we do this and that? That's a good question.
If you select one or the other, find the compromise, it's not the same thing.
So what time is it?
Oh, plenty of time. Are you guys tired? No? You need coffee? No?
Are you guys awake?
Not everybody, clearly. Let's try again. Are you guys awake? Yeah. Yeah, good. Okay, thank you very much. I mean, it's 9, 9, what's it, 10 today now, so I'm just checking. How was the conference so far? How was yesterday? Good? Good?
Yeah, good. Excellent.
It's the first time I speak here, so I'm learning about this conference. I really like it. So, let's move on. Just sign it to check.
Let's move on.
I just needed feedback.
So in the end, what I'm trying to say is that, is this thing here.
Oops. Go back. What I'm trying to say is this.
When people ask you, so what do you, okay, let's say that you value money. Okay, money, as I mentioned, is a trailing indicator. So it's something that happens after the fact. Okay, so something that had an impact. So you could say, okay, let's say that for us, value is money. So if you do so, you're living in this space here. You're just living in the space of... whatever you can measure.
And if you focus only, let's say that this bubble here is money, you're just focusing on one of the infinite possibilities that you have.
What I'm saying is that before the measurable impact, you have your goals. We want to have this impact because this impact relates to a goal that we want to achieve. And the goals are determined by the current criteria with which we select values or a priority in our values. And for each of these values, sorry, and values are not held by one person, but they are held by different stakeholders with different criteria, with different goals and different measurable impact.
How can you find your way out of this mess?
I've been thinking hard about how can I visually represent this complexity of value. And the best graphical representation that came to my mind is this airshare picture.
Visually, this is value to me. Meaning that you have this system here, which is multidimensional. Different people live on different planes of this system, and they do different things. Some people like to be sitting and reading, so somebody values learning. Some people are very busy, they're doing work, and some other people are just, where are these guys? Like these two guys up here, they decided that having a good time is probably a good idea. Okay? So different people in the same system have different values and they have different perceptions of values. Sometimes these perceptions will never intersect because they live on different planes. So our job is to try to make sense of all of this complexity and to help these people to... let's say, to work in the values domain and in the value domain at the same time. So for instance, we deliver stuff, right? That's what you're supposed to do. We deliver stuff.
Here. Okay?
You have a delivery cycle. If you work in sprints every once in a while, every week or so, one week, two weeks, whatever, you deliver something. Okay? Whatever you deliver has an impact on the system. Your users will like it or hate it or not use it and so on and so on. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is what I call the value loop. In the same way that we have sprints to deliver value, we should have
the same sprints or iterations to assess what is valuable to us in the next month, two months, Three years, 15 years. And the two things are orthogonal. They are perpendicular to each other. They're not on the same plane. So what I'm trying to say is that having this kind of conversation with top-level people in the organization, as Henrik was saying yesterday, How do they create alignment in the two companies you mentioned? They get together from time to time, everybody, 100, 150 people in the same room for one day. And they try to make sense of what they are doing and what they want to do. What is it they value for the next cycle? And then how they do it is a different story.
So prioritizing deliverables is not the main point. I think the main point is having at every single moment a clear understanding of what is it that we value in our current phase.
Now, the other thing is this. How do they create alignment in the two companies you mentioned? They get together from time to time, everybody, 100, 150 people in the same room for one day. And they try to make sense of what they are doing and what they want to do. What is it they value for the next cycle? And then how they do it is a different story.
So prioritizing deliverables is not the main point. I think the main point is having at every single moment a clear understanding of what is it that we value in our current phase.
Now, the other thing is this.
If you start thinking of value in a systemic way, one thing you want to be very careful of is to optimize only one part of the system. We know that local system optimization is a bad thing, right? You know what local system optimization is, right? You have a complex system, and then you put all of your attention and emphasis and resources on only a sub-portion of the system, and that is very likely to create problems for the rest of the system. Okay, so these kind of things you probably want to avoid. But what I'm saying is that if, then again, I work a lot with companies, especially at the cultural level, at the mental models level, and so I started noticing the implications of thinking in a certain way, like this one.
Like personal agendas, that's a very easy one.
Have you ever worked in a company where people have personal agendas, meaning they have hidden goals for themselves? Like, yes, one, okay.
Oh, never happened, right? No, no, never happened, never happened. What's happening in that case? It's a sub-optimization of the value system. There is someone who is saying, okay, I care more about myself than the rest of the people I work with.
I'm not judging, right? I'm just observing. I'm just... observing this kind of mental model. I care more about myself than I care about the company or the users or the society and stakeholders at large. Just an observation. Or excessive bureaucracy. Now, I'm not against bureaucracy. We need documentation, we need to send documents from time to time. I'm talking about an excess of bureaucracy, much more than you really need. Have you ever worked in a project with a lot of documents that you don't really need? Never happened, right? Never happened. Never happened. So what's the value system at work in that case? What do you think is the value system? What could be, at least, as an hypothesis? What could be the value system at work in that case?
Paper. Paper.
Paper. Paper is one. Okay. Power. Power, yeah. And to me, most of the time it's about shifting responsibilities. Okay.
We value our personal safety so much that we want other people to sign documents so it's not my problem anymore. Okay. They're responsible now. It's all about shifting or modeling responsibilities, make responsibilities unclear. Okay. That's another thing. So then again, personal safety rather than personal interest. Or unused product features. You're aware, right, that for complex products, most of the time we develop stuff nobody uses or almost no. body uses. But I'm talking about 20-30% of the features are not used.
So what is the value system? What could be the value system at work in that case? The hidden values, what could they be?
And see some running out of time, almost.
Fulfilling the contract.
Fulfilling the contract, that's one. Okay. Because we signed a contract where these features were explicit.
Being compliant.
Being compliant.
Make money over the customer.
Make money because you deliver stuff to someone who's going to pay for that stuff even though they don't use it.
Outputs over outcomes.
On site?
Valuing outputs rather than outcomes.
Output through?
To value the amount of stuff coming out, the result of the things that you do.
Okay, so the amount of stuff that you, yeah, okay, so we are delivering stuff, stuff, stuff, yeah? Job security is another one. Keeping people on the job. So you pay... Keeping people busy. Give the impression that we are working hard. And we are, but for the wrong stuff. And so on and so on. So then again, I'm not judgmental. I'm not trying to judge. I don't want to judge. What I'm saying is that if you start observing at the value system at work, in your project, or in your organization, you may realize that there are better alternatives. That's my message. There are better alternatives. But you need to start observing at the values level and not at the value level only, at least. So how do you do that? Eric mentioned transparency yesterday. Transparency is a very powerful thing. When you're no longer working in the dark and nobody knows what you're doing and you don't know what other people are doing, when everything, or at least most of what happens, is visible to everyone, people start thinking in a different way. They start interacting in a different way. For instance, they start seeing each other's problems. for instance, or each other's successes. So it's a very good thing. The other thing is, especially if you are supporting in some way a project because you are a project manager, you are a coach or a scrum master, whatever, empathy, I think it's another powerful thing to understand what's really going on in terms of values and value. And by empathy, I mean put yourself in somebody else's shoes. Put yourself in somebody else's shoes. So I hear a lot of times, I hear people complaining about how that manager doesn't understand anything around the sea. Okay, try to put yourself in his shoes. Try to see the world from his perspective. Try to fulfill his obligations. Try to understand things from a different point of view.
Because then again, if it is a systemic thing, if you start thinking that value and values are actually a very complex adaptive system, you need to be able to observe the system from different perspectives. And empathy is the way to do that. Observing things from different perspectives.
Honestly, honestly. And the third thing is having a non-judgmental attitude. Because if you start observing things from a different perspective, you need to be objective. You need to be honest to yourself. You need not to lean towards one or another. opinion, but just observe in a non-judgmental way. And that's the part about what you can do as a person. Now, what can you do collectively?
Something that Henrik mentioned yesterday, put people in the same room.
Bring people in the same room, have actors in the same room. And then let them become aware of the complexity of what they're doing and ask a lot of whys. Why? You have 15 stakeholders in the same room and you start asking, okay, I understand that you're asking for this thing. And why? Can you elaborate on that? So why do you need that? Because we have a contractual obligation. Okay, good to know.
Or maybe they say, oh, because the users need that. And you could say, okay, so you know that, right? And how do you know?
Or why do you care? This kind of stuff.
Sometimes it's not easy, sometimes it becomes interesting, so sometimes you need some groundwork before you can actually do that. Before you can put people in the same room and create transparency, empathy and a non-judgmental mindset in the room, it can take some groundwork, but in my opinion it's worth it. And the other thing is visualize things as much as you can. Visualize things. The good thing about visualizing visualization in general is that you are projecting to an external medium what's in people's mind. You need to externalize what people think. And a good way to externalize it is to make it visible. And you can draw cultural loop diagrams, you can draw tables, you can use impact maps, I didn't mention impact mapping as a possible tool to associate why we do something, with whom we do something, how we do something, and eventually what we do as a concrete action. That's another good way of creating alignment using impact mapping. Also by Goico, or brew your own. Create your own way of making things visible.
Whatever it is. Have people draw pictures, whatever. But let them understand. Jeff Patton explains this very good in his book. There are three people. And they say, okay, yes, yes, we agree, we're going to do this. And then you see the thought bubbles, okay? And one is thinking a square, the other one is thinking a circle, the other one is thinking a triangle, okay? But they say, oh, yeah, sure, yeah, we agree. Yes, of course, we're going to do that. And then you ask these people, can you draw, can you represent what you think we're going to do? And then you realize that you need more alignment. So come up with your own way. What time is it? Do we have time for questions? No, I think we don't. Or maybe yes. I'm basically done. What I'd like to mention is that, then again, I didn't want to talk about the financial part of value for the reason that I explained very well. So what's next for you? Hopefully, if you start making a connection between values and value and you start having a more, let me use a big word for an IT company, a more compassionate attitude towards how people work together and how they are trying to achieve goals that they perceive in a very specific way. Maybe you have a better possibility, you have a better option to create a good environment and creating real value. So I'm done. Thank you.