March 17, 2022

s11e18: Getting unstuck, spotting bullshit, and explaining like I'm five

0.0 Context setting

It’s Thursday, March 17, 2022 and an overcast day in Portland, Oregon.

Today: a standup (mainly reporting on yesterday’s work: helping a team deconstruct and then construct feasible OKRs); a catchup; talking through a draft strategy; a production meeting kickoff for what I can only describe as what’s involved in making “Dan Hon Does John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, But For Teaching You How To Do Strategy Like I Do” videos; and then, finally, getting the ebook sorted out for sending tomorrow.

Not too packed, I think.

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Getting unstuck, spotting bullshit, and explaining like I’m five

I’ve been working with one of my clients for about five months now. When I came on, I think I can say broadly that everyone felt a bit stuck and burnt out. Five months later, things are going well and we’re talking about me putting together some training so their teams can learn what, exactly, happened over the past five months.

Here’s a brief structure:

I went and talked a bunch of people. I talked to the people on the team (a vendor), and I talked to people on the client side. I looked at the organization charts. I read LinkedIn profiles to get an idea of everyone’s experience and background. As many interviews (or “chats”) were one on ones, because, well, I like people to be as candid as they can with me. At some point they might need to get better at communicating with others they work with, but right now, I need to find out where the common ground and where the friction is. What are people afraid of saying, what are people frustrated about and where does that common ground not exist?

Then I lay it on to a model. I’ve got models for lots of things, and I’d be the first to admit that they’re imperfect: the structure in my head is not the territory. But it lets me make predictions and guesses and, after doing this for quite a while, I’m pretty good at it.

This particular case – working with a vendor/contractor who has a client – meant pinning down why everyone was feeling stuck. It’s not that anything in particular was bad, it’s that (it appeared to me, at least) they didn’t think they were making the progress they were capable.

Part of the reason was the position of the client, and more specifically, the individual managing the vendor. Sometimes it’s super obvious to see: this particular client wasn’t part of any particular business unit. They:

• were off to the side
• relatively new (in the domain of “infrastructure”, and in the even newer domain of “devopss”. I say “even newer” and by that I mean “with regard to the relative age of the organization”)
• had the position of an advisor
• … an advisor who by definition is allowed to have an opinion about anything

The last one pretty much cinched it. You’ve got a client in this case who’s job it is, in part, to improve infrastructure underlying a whole bunch of disparate systems, each of which do a job, and each of which, for the most part, do it well enough for nobody to get called up in the middle of the night. It might be stressful, it might be feel like there’s too much to do and not enough time or people, but it’s not like it’s on fire.

(It is actually on fire, by the way. That sort of low, simmering, point-of-criticality fire which means it could blow up at any point and yet it is also working pretty reliably, or reliably enough).

So: immediate problem. You have a client who can’t directly affect anything because they are in an advisory role and instead of having a direct line into the leadership of a particular system, they have a direct line into the leadership of the entire organization. This might look good, but it isn’t, because… well, they can’t make anyone do anything. They can advise the organization’s leadership, but they can’t direct anyone.

You can imagine that this might be a fairly common situation: how do you start coordinating the efforts of different teams, and then how do you keep doing it effectively?

First off, I have a bunch of sympathy. It looks like a terrible role to be in. You’ve straight line into leadership which means when they get a call, you get a call. But you’re not actually responsible for the operation of any of the systems, so you get to wake someone else up, or they’re also woken up at the same time as you. Depending on your setup, you might have even been advising that the particular system to do things in a way that would’ve prevented this particular out of hours call. But you couldn’t get them to do it because, well, you don’t get to tell them what to do, and by that, I mean you don’t manage them. And yet you’re also supposed to come up with a plan.

At this point it’s always a fun idea to go look at internal strategy, goals, OKRs and all that kind of stuff because I like finding out the difference between what people tell me is important, what they’ve written down as important, and what they’re actually treating as important in the day to day and medium and long-term.

Frequently these aren’t lined up and are kind of skewed, and again I have a bunch of sympathy: who has the time to do this properly? It’s hard! There’s so many people involved! We’ve never really been taught how to do it! Who are we supposed to learn from? All the writing about OKRs isn’t really helpful because it’s all in the specifics!

And this is where I might lose a little sympathy and start paying attention to attitude, approach and doing-things-ness, which is: yes, it is hard. Yes, you haven’t really been taught how to do this or you might not know how to do it. Yes, it’s hard to make time for it, or there’s never been time for it. I am now telling you that you do have to make time for it if you want thing x to change, and you’ve got some help and we’re going to work on the actual thing and not some PowerPoint decks about best practices.

So we sit down and we take a look at what’s important and I go off and do some work which involves pulling rather tenaciously on a piece of string, i.e. keep asking questions about why people do things, but in a totally non-confrontational, Ted-Lasso-ish be curious way because normally people don’t do things for reasons that make no sense at all. The reasons might be outdated. They might be due to misunderstanding. They might be due to a lack of rigor. But unless you’re unlucky, the number of people actively trying to bring down an organization should be pretty low if not non-existent. (I am not, I should note, talking here about scores of Google Product Managers attempting to out-compete each other on the launch of chat apps).

Frequently, one of the reasons why people are stuck is because they’re not clear on a goal (or, if you’re a fan of Playing to Win¹) a Winning Aspiration, and haven’t made a bunch of genuine choices about what to do and, what I keep repeating, what not to do.

The number of times I work with an organization and have to say: “well, I looked at what it is you say you want to do and let me summarize it: you want to do all the good things”.

If you put it that way, most people will admit that no, it is not possible for them to do all the good things. It is certainly an aspiration. But not a realistic or practical one.

Or another way: if you want to do all the good things, then all the good things are important, and without any other explicit context, then how can you choose what to do? How can you be confident you’re making a good choice? You can’t really, so you end up using rough rules like “do whatever is in front of us right now”, which is just a function of human attention, or “whatever is on fire” which is totally reasonable but does not get you out of the general fire-creating area, for example. Not being able to choose can also be quite stressful. And then if you’re “doing all the good things” then… how do you know when you’re done? If you’re doing a good thing, how do you know it was good?

This is why I kind of dislike best practices.

So in the end, what we end up doing, is setting a goal. Or a winning aspiration. Or a target. Or an objective.

But in the end it all ends up to be the same thing: a goal that makes sense and is defensible, and from that goal/objective/target/whatever, distinct choices flow. And from those distinct choices, sure, call them key results, and then do the hard thing of figuring out what actual key results would be, not bullshit ones.

And then we have a whole bunch of working sessions where I go through what bullshit is, how to spot it, find specific bullshit in front of us, not just abstract textbook made-up bullshit, practice calling bullshit out, and then what the opposite of a bullshit goal or key result or whatever looks like.

Which, I have to admit, is fun because this whole thing works up and down and sideways and everything at the same time. There are so many dots to join and so many ways of looking at it until some patterns emerge, and when you do the job well, those patterns are created and chosen.

And one more part, the part that I enjoy and that I’m good at? I make it understandable and add the analogies and examples because it’s so good when people understand.

---

Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1

A reminder - tomorrow(!), paid subscribers and supporters will be getting a link to Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, collecting the best bits of the first 50 episodes. (You’ll still get the link if you become a paid subscriber/supporter after this week, don’t worry).

As always, you can subscribe at a pay-what-you-want level.

---

Phew! That was about twenty minutes, again. I still need to figure out how or when to do the longer pieces, because the sand timer’s hitting 15 minutes and it’s pretty frustrating.

It’s nearly the weekend. In America, it’s St. Patrick’s day, which is a super weird thing to say.

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan