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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#141

Post by Too »

throwaway82931 wrote: post #92
foobarian wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work Not only that, but unfortunately they are usually right. Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti, which causes more problems down the line. To avoid the negative outcome leadership needs to be technically competent and resourced, and that's the other side of the coin - usually they don't have the expertise so in a w…

> they are usually right. This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted. I've worked for good bosses that aren't like…

What's difficult is that usually half the team of grunts can be trusted to run their own race, the other half can be completely clueless and need explicit guidance, even if they are decent programmers otherwise.

If you were to allow everyone to innovate freely, some would spend several weeks learning the latest shiny fad and creating things of no or negative value, like using AI to generate commit messages or adding service mesh to your single container kubernetes cluster. The disconnect from business value and writing code for the sake of writing code can be astonishing. Conversely, if you let loose one smart guy in the team, it may seem unfair to the rest of the team.

A good leader is the one who balances the need and utilizes the best of both these sides.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#142

Post by satisfice »

Heroism is not a culture problem. Heroism is always a good thing. But process weenies like to knock it because it makes them seem grown up and sober.

The point the author wants to make can be made without denigrating the glorious matter of a person who is willing to overcome adversity to and ambiguity and chaos to do something wonderful.

When process mavens attack heroism, they are essentially saying that high performance and creative solutions should be an algorithm, a mechanism, something inhuman rather than fully human. They want the business to be an equation, and that should offend us, not comfort us.

By all means let’s do something to make innovation reasonably acceptable and not unreasonably expensive— but no organization should lightly enter into highly speculative work. Heroism is heroic partly because it’s also dangerous. There are good reasons to discourage it and good reasons to engage in it. Heroism is fraught— but it’s essential to any kind of technical work, since we are surrounded by obscure, “wicked” problems.

A good organization will reward heroism that doesn’t have a happy ending, as long as it was responsibly and competently pursued.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#143

Post by imtringued »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

>we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint

Seems like someone has become aware of the power of liquidity and delayed decision making giving one the ability to respond to future information.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#144

Post by djaouen »

drewcoo wrote: post #74

Heroics are responses to crises. Why are there crises?

I am only responding to this post because I cannot in my flagged thread: your bogus self-defense mechanism is not permissible. You will be loved, whether or not you intend for it! :D

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#145

Post by throwaway82931 »

Too wrote: post #141
throwaway82931 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are usually right. This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted. I've worked for good bosses that aren't like…

What's difficult is that usually half the team of grunts can be trusted to run their own race, the other half can be completely clueless and need explicit guidance, even if they are decent programmers otherwise. If you were to allow everyone to innovate freely, some would spend several weeks learning the latest shiny fad and creating things of no or negative value, like using AI to generate commit messages or adding…

You’d think from this thread that the messes inevitably originate from ”grunts” wandering off the reservation. In my experience the source has often been “innovation” imposed from above, in the form of buzzword-driven development championed by semi-technical leadership enamored of this poisonous “grunts can’t be trusted” ideology.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#146

Post by djaouen »

drewcoo wrote: post #68
wonderwonder wrote: post #56

A long time ago I burned out and took a few years of leave from tech and instead took a document processing / generation job at a very large non tech travel / leisure focused company. Company used an archaic document generation system that had to have templates built by hand. then there was a significant amount of manual work moving data from microsoft excel to word. All Manual. My group consisted of myself, 4 other…

> What I found fascinating though was the group of existing document specialists were not suddenly capable of doing 2 - 3x the work. They just appeared to move slower. It was like pulling blood from a stone. They had no interest in learning new work which they were now free to do, they just wanted to clock in, turn their mind off for 8 hours, click the button and clock out. The ability to barely function and slowly g…

I assure you, this slow grind of replying to non-relevant threads of yours will end after I post the following YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUfgAbFY4CA

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#147

Post by Log_out_ »

The problem i see is that process designers do not have to justify the costs they inflict on economic +generating activity. Its purely designed by informal power struggles of "of course my department has to be looped in".. And thats the dilemma at the heart of all bureaucracy.. At the core its powerstruggles eating time and effectivity.

And to fight it, one would need sort of a controlling office that reports to and limits the damage done by powerstruggles. Never seen that in a company.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#149

Post by gmfawcett »

parkerhiggins wrote: post #140
riskable wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at a large financial institution and have had many similar situations. Fortunately, I'm the one in charge (team lead of sorts) and I have a pretty standard response to such "high level" nonsense: "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." Every "project" has plans, deliverables, and due dates and those are the ultimate arbiters of a team's performance.…

outcomes > outputs It’s proven time and time again by DX programs (S.P.A.C.E. etc) that focus time is really the only KPI that produces outcomes.

Reference, please?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#150

Post by araes »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

I like how the response was "falsify the metric data" because an ape in a suit somewhere demanded a "correct" metric. And were rewarded for their falsification. There's an Aesop's Fables story in there somewhere. I wonder how many metrics people depend on, like jobs data, get the "change the data" to suit ape in suit's needs?
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