How & Where Control Happens in Lean

On a previous article, I tried to clarify the scope and meaning of micromanagement [1].

Adrian Cockcroft made it very clear when he responded in a CIO summit:

"I’ve often told the anecdote that at a CIO summit I got the comment “we don’t have these Netflix superstar engineers to do the things you’re talking about”, and when I looked around the room at the company names my response was “we hired them from you and got out of their way”. An unenlightened high overhead culture will drag down all engineers to a low level, maybe producing a third of what they would do, working on their own. A high performance culture as I’ve seen at Netflix and AWS builds platforms and encourages practices that magnify the output of the engineers. The same person could produce ten times as much." [2]

And yet, even companies where one would expect a more dynamic culture, sometimes get stuck into a lot of micromanagement and upfront planning that just limit what people can do.

Even Google has gone through this challenge (from the book "How Google Works", page 7):

As it is explained in many posts, articles and books, micromanagement and upfront planning have a common root: the need to feel in control. In other words: fear.

Especially when things are not going as expected, this fear increases and becomes an issue.

There is even a rational part of it: If with all this control things are not going well ... once we stop controlling, this will be just chaos.

Well, as it was explained in the article already mentioned [1]:

The difference is not "to control or not to control". But what are you controlling?

Still, after reading that, a CEO of a company was asking me "A PLAN" for a Lean & Agile Transformation.

In today's VUCA world, trying to deal with uncertainty by building plans is like a kid hiding by closing the eyes. It just doesn't work. Once finished, the plan is already obsolete.

Does this mean that we need to give up any kind of control? Not at all! We just need to exert it in a different way, in a different moment. The analogy I came up with, is the following ...

Imagine you are investing in the Stock Market. Can you really control the prices? No.

What do you do then, when the volatility, uncertainty and complexity of the reality is so high, that any interpretation can be ambiguous? Well ... you use a time-boxed approach.

Basically, you set up an investment horizon and also, some upper and/or lower limits, when you expect to receive an alert if the price breaches these thresholds.

Of course, trying to manipulate the price of a security is a crime. Literally.

And it is also a crime to try to intervene in the work of a team, once a goal and timeline have been agreed. In this case, it is a figurative crime (but still a harmful one).

The moments to control are at the beginning (what is being promised? how much time and cost are required? what is the delivery record of this team? etc.) and at the end (was the promised scope delivered? did everything go as expected? etc.)

This is why companies like Mc Kinsey recommend that in the new organizations, management needs to think "more like investors".

Of course, they don't explain WHY or HOW. It is just what they have observed in others.

What about "raising the flag" when something unexpected happens?

Unless something extremely serious happens, any exception during normal execution should be raised by the team. These are moments when risks are detected and teams ask for leadership support. This is how servant leadership is put into action.

They can also propose some intermediate milestones, but these milestones have nothing to do with traditional "status reports" that tend to hide issues. They are opportunities to ask for feedback and get help.

Like a stock price that we cannot control in detail (micromanage) but still, manage based on a time-box and some thresholds, in a similar way management that is coming from traditional approaches need to understand that the option they have to manage risk, is by defining scope and timelines. Then, teams need to be empowered and have full freedom to get the job done. Any attempt to "help" or interfere in between will be just harmful.

Let the teams come to you for help.

If a team doesn't perform, the scope and timeline of future assignments are going to be reduced. In extreme cases, the members may be even invited to join other successful teams in order to learn and gain more experience.

And once teams are delivering on time and budget, overachieving their promises, the scope and timelines can be extended up to a point where just continuously measuring the impact of their work is enough to make sure all teams are aligned on the right issues.

After all ...

Remember (if you did) to "Like" this post ;-)

References:

[1] https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/redefining-micromanagement-fernando-guigou/

[2] https://medium.com/@adrianco/you-dont-add-innovation-to-a-culture-you-get-out-of-it-s-way-2e6148349aae