Management 3.0

In this article, I will highlight the best parts of the book "Management 3.0" and add my insights as well. Since I have students who can't read in English, this article aims to help them quickly overview this book. "Management 3.0" was written by Jurgen Appelo , who explores modern approaches to leadership and management in the context of agile and dynamic work environments. The book focuses on providing practical insights and tools for managers to lead effectively in today's complex and rapidly changing organizations.

The world is too complex to give you merely a list of practices to follow.

What managers in the 21st century need most is insights so that they can develop their own prescriptions for their own particular needs. - Mintzberg 2004

Causal determinism tells us that each thing that happens is caused by other things that happened before. It enables software developers to design, plan, and predict what their software will do in its production environment. Causality enabled me to predict. It appears I call "the human brain is wired to find purpose and causality in everything. We attribute cause and effect to all things around us, even when there's no reason to.

Our minds are wired to favor what I call "linear thinking" (assuming predictability in cause and effect) over "nonlinear thinking" (assuming things are more complex than that). Our linear thinking minds see the world as a place full of easily explainable events with simple causes and simple effects. Reductionism states that organisms, human consciousness, economies, climates, and software projects all behave in ways that cannot be predicted by deconstructing them and studying the parts.

Embracing complexity and understanding that management practices need to adapt to the intricacies of modern work environments. People may draw their organizations as hierarchies, but that doesn't change the fact that they are actually networks. Second, social complexity shows us that management is primarily about people and their relationships, not about departments and profits. Complexity thinking adds a new dimension and makes you realize that we should see our organization as living systems, not as machines. The goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible, not by making it simple.

Surveys on Agile adoption indicate that change management, organizational culture, team education, and external pressure are the main obstacles to further Agile adoption and causing software projects to fail. It seems that managers all over the world are posing a problem instead of participating in the solution. And sadly, it is the same with almost any substantive organizational change. And as I said before, this won't be effective; all the leaders should participate in all the transformation that they are aiming for.

When we think in the agile fundamental, first, the need to recognize people that are unique individuals instead of replaceable resources and that their highest value is not in their heads but in their interaction and collaboration. Agile understands that the best products are created when customers are directly involved with the team creating them. Simplicity is the key to good design of each feature, and after their implementation, the usefulness of features is immediately verified by the customer.

Agile software development, with values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto, has a focus on people and teams, frequent delivery of high-quality releases, intensive customer collaboration, and responding to change, with minimal upfront planning. People have the right capabilities of interaction and organization, but they also need energy to make proper use of those capabilities.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein)

People sometimes confuse complexity with large numbers (like many things happening simultaneously), but complex things aren't always large. The complex system approach suggests that innovation is not a planned result but an emergent one because in any competitive environment, innovation is the key to survival.

Knowleage

There is a strong link between innovation and knowledge. In short, a software team is a kind of system that consumes and transforms information, producing innovation. It seems that knowledge in a human brain is a bit like information on the internet: a parallel distributed system with things redundantly stored in multiple locations and with no one in control. People's expertise is not the most important indicator of their performance. Instead, what actually makes a difference is their connectivity in the organization and their soft skills.

Creative

Creativity is about producing new things, diverging from conventional approaches, inventing new answers with old information, and seeing solutions where others didn't see them before. People are creative only when they feel it is safe to express their ideas. They must have the freedom to be creative, to take risks when talking about new ideas, and acknowledgment that failure is okay.

Motivation

The primary focus of any manager should be to energize people, ensuring that they actually want to do all that stuff. Motivation is "the activation or energization of goal-oriented behavior." The point is that they need to work in a system that continues to energize them and does not take energy away from them.

Like a gardener looking after his plants in the garden, a manager looks after the employees on his team. To fully support their capabilities for knowledge, creativity, and control, a manager must keep his team motivated. People who feel good about themselves produce good results. This is what a manager or leader should do:

Managers should select people, set expectations, motivate them, and develop them. Motivation is a fine example of social complexity. It is nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable, and it cannot be defined or modeled with a single diagram.

Diversity

Managers have the tendency to hire lookalikes of themselves, as pointed out by John Maxwell. Unfortunately, our genes don't care about the success of our software projects, but we do! Favoring similar people is a trap that managers must try to avoid. That's why I nowadays prefer new people with different educations, experiences, technical skills, people skills, viewpoints, personalities, and soft skills. It's how I try to enforce stability, flexibility, resilience, and innovation in projects and processes.

Personality

Research has found that creativity is a product of knowledge, motivation, and personality. In any project team, knowledge can only lead to innovation when people's personalities and motivations are properly addressed.

Without the right "team personality," it is hard to get any creativity out of a team. And that's why focusing on the right virtues is so important: Virtues shape the personality of a team and therefore the creativity in their work.

People are the most complex elements in any software project. This makes them best qualified to directly control their own projects because people (not processes) are the only part with sufficient complexity to deal with the variety of states that they are confronted with. And any complex system, if it is to produce useful results, needs some level of control.

Innovation is not only useless without people but it's also useless without implementation. It doesn't matter how creative people are; if the ideas they generate are never used to implement new products or services, they are merely interesting artifacts.

For an organization to be innovative, managers and team members must actively cultivate knowledge, creativity, motivation, diversity, and personality.

Extrinsic Motivation

Is a problem because of the nonlinear behavior that pushes individual elements in such a system, leading to unexpected consequences and side effects that are often too complex to be foreseen. Extrinsic motivation of people rarely works well because it suffers from unexpected side effects.

Intrinsic Motivation

Does not suffer from the nonlinear side effects so often experienced with extrinsic motivation. In the case of intrinsic motivation, it is not a matter of wanting result B, so we must give an incentive for A. With intrinsic motivation, A equals B: The things we do are themselves the rewards! The real purpose must be to introduce others and stability.

There can be three types of purpose in a self-organizing team: The intrinsic purpose is innate to the team; the extrinsic purpose is assigned by the manager, and the autonomous purpose is assumed by the team itself.

Every person on your team has a different motivational balance sheet. The processes and tools you introduce will score both positive and negative points across the team. In my teams, I like to play with them the Moving Motivators Game to check what their priorities are and how I can help them reach them. You can do it by printing the cards, like the picture below, or using Miro or another system that you prefer.

You cannot predict the behavior of a team by analyzing individual team members separately. The emergent behavior of the team is a result of the interactions between team members. The team is responsible for its own team culture, process, image, and sometimes even its own name. In a software team, like in any other self-organizing system, none of the participants can fully understand the entire system.

Delegation is the act of handing over responsibilities for something to someone else. Empowerment is more than just delegation. It includes the support of risk-taking. The better your team, the greater your power. And to make your team better, you empower them.

Choose the right empowerment level

• Low Empowerment: Contains activities that have no far-reaching consequences for the company.
• Moderate Empowerment: We find things like interviewing job candidates by team members, self-education of employees.
• High Empowerment: We find organizations where people determine their salaries together, where people are allowed to work only on the projects that they want, where there is no distinction of job titles, and everyone is called an associate, and where people can work at home or from the Bahamas if they so desire.

Choosing the right empowerment involves delegation poker, where you can decide with your team who is responsible for what, what they can do without asking you, what they need to ask your advice about, etc. In this delegation, you can decide on levels: Tell, Sell, Consult, Agree, Advise, Inquire, Delegate. I will do another article explaining each one of these levels.

You develop employees by gradually building up empowerment, giving them more and more challenging tasks. Confidence in their skills will grow with their success so that they will be ready to take on further challenges.

Advises

• When something bad happens after you delegate a task to a worker, do not take (back) responsibility for the task. Instead, take responsability for the way you′ve delegated it.
• When there is presure from top management to get a situation back under control, always try and resist the temptation to do the work yourself. What you need to get under control is your method of delegation.
• As a manager (or coach) you can act as a mirror to the team. You can help them with their own thinking processes. If they look at you for guidance, you hold up the mirror and help them to find guidance in themselves.
• You build trust simply by doing what you have commited to. Trust means that people know they cna rely on y. It is easy to build, but even easier to break.
• Your job as a manager is not to create the right amount of rules in the organization. Your job is to make sure that the people can create their own rules together. And it′s their colaborative effort that allows the system to find its own way to the edge of order.

The way managers define boundaries and constraints strongly influences what emerges from a self-organizing team. You don't manage the people. You manage the system. Competence is, in the first place, a personal responsibility. Competent leaders are often line managers, but line managers are not always competent leaders.

Real communication includes making sure that the meaning assigned to a message is the same on both sides. It is only real communication when both parties agree that they have properly exchanged information and that both are assigning the same meaning to it.

Communication = Information * Relationships * Feedback. Communication requires proper feedback between people, which often does not happen.

Communication requires proper feedback between people, which is often not happening.

To become a leader is not the highest purpose of a manager. Instead, it is his job to decide how much to rule and how much to lead. Some managers lean toward ruling, others toward leading, but they all do at least a bit of both. Acting as a ruler corresponds to authority levels 1 (tell), 2 (sell), and 3 (consult), whereas acting as a leader corresponds to authority levels 4 (agree), 5 (advise), and 6 (inquire). Empowering people may turn you from someone who is predominantly ruling into a person who is primarily leading. But the authority level differs per activity. And with authority level 7 (full delegation), you're not even involved as a leader anymore.

A shared objective (extrinsic purpose) transcends any goals of individuals or (sub) teams within the group for which the manager is responsible, and therefore, the corporate goal should also transcend the goal of the CEO. Goals should address people's intrinsic desires.

I tell my friends about the goals I have. When people know what my goals are, it tends to strengthen my own resolve to achieve them. By communicating this, I make sure that the environment gently pushes me and keeps tabs on my progress. So you tell people about your goals because you don't want to fail. And that takes courage. Most importantly, the goal should not be connected to rewards (and certainly not financial ones), and it should be communicated well so that it guides team members in their work.

I don't believe managers need an overview of the best organizational diagrams. What they need is advice on how to achieve adaptability, and this principle is built into their DNA. We want to know how to have an adaptable business so that it is easier to let an organization morph into different structures depending on context, products, size, and people. After all, teams don't operate well when people don't know what the teams are and who they can rely on. Managers are there to serve the teams, not to control them. Project managers are there to manage projects, not people.

As I wrote earlier, most problems in software projects result from bad communication. For proper communication, people need good information, good relationships, and good feedback. People follow what they see, and you must show that which is good.

You must try and make people understand that continuous change should be the default behavior of an organization. People change their behaviors when new behaviors are desirable.

Innovation Adoption Curve

Your goal is not to make everyone have the same ideas and opinions. Your goal is to let the team find a better position on the landscape by allowing them to use their conflicting ideas and negotiate their differences so that they can move ahead together.

One way for managers to drive change in an organization is to make change desirable and to make stagnation painful. There are three strategies for achieving optimal performance: extract practices from previous top performers and learn from others who broadcast their best practices to those whom it may concern.

Marti has six views:

• Energize People
• Empower Teams
• Align Constraints
• Develop Competence
• Grow Structure
• Improve Everything

Here's a revised version with corrected grammar and improved clarity, along with an added final phrase:

I specifically use the term "views" instead of "principles" or "pillars" because it stresses the idea that it is one and the same system, with viewpoints from different angles.

I hope you have enjoyed this article; it's a brief summary of the 413-page book that marks the beginning of the Workshop Foundation. If you want to delve deeper into this subject, please feel free to contact me and check out the upcoming classes. While I touched on the topics of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in this article, I have a more in-depth piece dedicated to these subjects that I recommend you read.

See you in my next classes.

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