So, what is a frenzy anyway?

Frenzy: A state or period of uncontrolled excitement or wild behavior.

That’s how things seem to be managed around here. Everything is an emergency. Everything needs to be done now. Everyone is trying to get everyone else’s attention all at once.

It’s the non-stop firefighting that sucks in everyone it encounters in the company. Without clear goals and good leadership the only substitute is to fix things when they as they break. It’s a directionless waste of energy that never really ends.

How can you fix it?

By having clear goals and good leadership.

By knowing what your goal is you can figure out a way of getting there. You can plan your strategy to avoid having fires to constantly fight. You can invest in training when you have the time instead of having to hack together everything because it’s being done at the last-minute.

Why is it like this?

My belief is that it’s because of the “flat org chart” that people brag about. The lack of structure leads to lack of accountability and empowerment. Without those you can’t have leadership and goals. All you have is a collection of people who are each trying to solve all the problems they see. That in and of itself is a good thing — but the lack of vision kills it. The vision needs to come both from the top, but also all along the chain of command. If there’s no command, how can you make decisions?

So what you have left is everyone scrambling around to plug the dike as things break.

The frenzy.

I had a realization at work a few days back. My observation is that the decisions that are being made and the actions that are going on seem to be somewhat unrelated to what I perceive is going on.

This got me thinking about something I read online. I first encountered this was in relation to firearms and dealing with dangerous situations. It’s called the OODA loop.

This was developed by the US Air Force to deal with situations at all scales — of course this can be used in most situations as well.

From a high level the cycle is:

1. Observe
2. Orient
3. Decide
4. Act

This cycle continues without end. In the ideal case you’re running through this loop quicker than your adversary (regardless if they are a single person, or a rival army or corporation).

Each step is important.

We all go through life observing the outside world. It’s natural. The key is that to try to see the world for what it is without trying applying your own biases to it.

Orient takes into account what the objective is; where you’re trying to get to. It also takes into account the strategic situation you happen to be in — what your opponent is likely thinking.

Decide is where you figure out what you’re going to do. This isn’t necessarily the “right’ answer since many times that really can’t be divined. A decision must still be made none-the-less. You form a hypothesis to try and go with that.

Act is where you implement your decision.

Your action changes things which is why we go back to the top of the loop.

This goes on continually and iteratively we move forward to victory.

None of the steps can be ignored though. While everyone observes, it’s equally important that those observations go into the rest of the process. The decisions need to support the strategy. The actions must be consistent with the decisions. The orientation uses the observation as its input.

Too often I see the wheels come off though.

Decisions are made in a vacuum. Actions go contrary to the decision. Observations are ignored. In good times it’s easy to paper over the mistakes because of the rising tide effect. In bad times however this is a bigger problem.

Look around. Evaluate where you are and where you want to be. Come up with a course of action to try to get you there. Do it.

If you can’t because you don’t have the staff, well then there’s an observation. Do you need to do less? Focus your efforts more narrowly? Hire more people? Decide. Do.

A part of your business isn’t working as well as you would want it to? Pour more money in to shore it up and retrench? Pull out of it? Modify how you’re doing it? Decide. Do.

Not deciding or acting is itself a decision. It’s just a decision that’s the default. Know what you’re doing and be conscious of it.

It all comes back to the old saying “if you want something done right you have to do it yourself.”

That says a lot.

No one is as interested in how things turn out that you are. No one. Ok, maybe your mom or someone like that.

If you leave others to make decisions for you they might do some really idiotic things. It might not seem idiotic to them, but that’s because they’re not in your shoes.

This gets me to the office move.

If I had to do something like this I would ask one question: “What’s my budget.”

From there, I would do it right. Strike that, we would do it right.

We have to deal with the consequences locally.

No one except the folks in the office feel any of the pain.

This is some observations about another pattern that doesn’t work — when there is no clear business owner of a product.

When we started off we had a couple of strong decision makers. A committee of people would vie for his attention and the law was laid down. The buck stopped with the one owner of all things tech. It didn’t matter if you thought it was a good idea or a bad idea, the decision was made and we all moved on.

The fact that the buck stopped with someone is the real key.

As time passed and the organization became more diffuse this started to go away. Among other things a benevolent dictatorship isn’t very politically correct. Everyone needs a say into how the ship is going. With everyone having their hands on the controls the ship never turns. It’s just slowly cruises ahead with no direction. When the ship runs aground everyone has plausible denyability that it wasn’t their responsibility.

The committee is eager to claim responsibility for success and quick to denounce it when things go awry.

We tried a number of different schemes to manage this. We tried the scrum approach with different business owners getting their own teams. We tried the massive committee. Even anarchy.

Without clear top-down direction, things will rarely work right. When they do it’s a grass-roots victory from the trenches, not the top.

A clear direction gives the right priorities for a company. A person with whom the buck stops is empowered to make the hard decisions — because they are held accountable for the win or fail of their actions. Lacking that person the buck gets dropped, kicked to the corner and starts to collect dust.

I don’t think the buck can stop at a committee.

Today I had the unenviable job of going through peoples’ desks to put things in the shredder bin. It’s not the job I want, but someone has to do it.

I saw a lot of old emails printed out, project plans, test plans and whatnot. But one stood out.

It was a solid inch think stack of paper in a gusseted file folder. I remember being on the other side of the testing for this bit of work a couple years ago. It took me roughly an hour or two to get my part of the job done. The fact that my hour or two caused someone to spend the time to produce roughly 200 pages of documentation shocked me.

I can see documenting things that have legal consequences. You need the signature to take to court if you need to go that far. I can see using notebooks to take, well, notes in meetings if that’s the way you’re most effective. Or a notebook to jot down ideas as they come to you. I will even allow for printing out documentation — because sometimes it’s easier than looking at it on a monitor. Or because you need to scribble on it check-list style.

But to consume that much paper?

Why?

The hour of work I did was to run a program with some new data. The program itself had been tested months before. It was known that the program already worked… the underlying issue seemed to be trust. Even though it worked every previous time, the exact same level of rigor was brought to bear on this new problem. Lack of trust led to gross inefficiencies.

Now on to the documentation part. In testing this project I can’t reasonably conceive how that amount of paper could possibly be used. Even if all of it was used in scratch work, there is no reason that the paper should have saved for the intervening two or three years. Again, the only thing I can think that would cause that is lack of trust in the system. To feel compelled to save the artifact of testing means that you don’t trust your managers (and the whole company in fact) to trust you that you did your job.

The two-fold CYA walks down a path of barely being able to get your job done.

Let alone excel.

A company that lacks trust in each other so thoroughly will build up processes to smooth the feathers of the non-trust. It doesn’t solve the problem (lack of trust), but simply layers process, the faceless entity that cares about no one, on top of everything. It doesn’t trust. It doesn’t not trust. It just is. It just slows you down.

Remember: You are all on the same team. If someone messes up, give them a second chance; you’d want the same if you screw up. Don’t walk so slowly that you can’t trip because then you’ll never run.

Many years ago we upgraded an Exchange server something something got messed up. Somehow we got in in our collective heads that failure isn’t an option.

That is a fail.

If you only ever go so fast that you never trip, you’re not going fast enough. You need to run fast enough that you sometimes fall down. Failure is how you learn.

By never failing you never learn.

People don’t typically get fired for messing up if it’s not intentional. You got to take some risks.

Get ready to fall down every once in a while. Pick yourself up and run some more.