The Productivity Paradox and the power of Backlogs

When it comes to companies pursuing "Agile," there is much to do around process and ceremonies. The mechanics of how you do standups, sprints, etc. But that's not what we're after. We can train people on process all day long, but that has nothing to do with agility. As we know, or should know, agile is a mindset. Furthermore, without trust agile doesn't work. Trust is an organizational lubricant; it eliminates friction. Lastly, in agile, but really permeating throughout our entire lives, we should focus on manners, respect, focus, discipline and prioritization. We need to re-engage on common courtesy and (re)teach adults how to respectfully interact with each other.

When you go to a store, or your car mechanic, or anywhere, really, you don't jump the line. You wait your turn. If there's something urgent you might negotiate. "Do you mind if I go ahead? My wife is giving birth in the car and I promised her I'd get her this soda." When the request is reasonable and polite, most of the time people will accommodate you.

Yet, at some work places this seems to be ignored. If we're truly interested in "becoming Agile," and creating teams of high performing dragon slayers then people need to (re)learn to behave. Instead of someone saying, "Drop everything, I need this right away," the conversation should be courteous. How about, "Hi there, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I have this urgent thing and you're the best person/team to do it. Do you mind making this a priority?" Then the response might be something like, "I'll add it to the backlog and it will be our next priority when we finish up what we're doing. Unless this trumps everything, in which case I need to let others know there will a delay." That's how courteous human beings respectfully interact with each other. None of this, "I don't care what you're doing! Get it done!" Who talks to someone like that? A flaming jerk, that's who. One who is resented—maybe even hated—by many and, sometimes—gag—promoted ahead of peers. Also, hopefully the team has a scrum master (SM) who runs interference and a kick-ass product owner (PO) who has the backlog conversation. And team members have learned to tell people to please consult with the SM and/or the PO so they can stay focused on doing their work in progress. A PO who proverbially steps in front of the car, stops it and redirects it to a place of safety where a discussion can be held that results in a best-compromise resolution and ending with a hopefully amicable parting.

I thought of this because of backlogs. Product backlogs, sprint backlogs, backlogs in general. What few people seem to fail to understand is when talking about backlogs they’re not only useful, but powerful. They add indirection. Backlogs change both the nature of conversations and the way work is prioritized. Instead of asking a team to work on something right away, the conversation should be about adding items to the backlog. If something is truly important, maybe "it" is moved to, or near, the top of the backlog. If used correctly, a backlog protects teams from interruption and context-switching. You can think of it as a gatekeeper. When someone claims to need something pronto, you don't say “No,” but instead respond you'll add it to the backlog as a priority and it will (may)be the next thing you work on when you have cycles (provided it passes the sniff test). Only true exigencies should trump work in progress.

Many times, when discussing backlogs, we talk about the value of visualization and so on, but what we don’t mention, yet is its most powerful attribute, is that it completely changes the nature of conversations with and inside teams. You no longer interrupt people. Instead you add it to their queue and perhaps even prioritize it as important. Teams don’t seem to recognize how powerful this can be. All this goodness about agile isn't worth much if people we ask to work hard can't say, "Yep, I got it; it's at the top of my list after I finish what I'm working on." That's how my car mechanic talks to me. And I'm perfectly OK with it. I've been with him for over 15 years, know he's good and trust him, and carefully nurture the relationship. You can yell and scream all day long, but people like my car mechanic will simply fire you as a customer. Because you're a jerk... don't be a jerk...

Beyond that, the science is irrefutable. When people and teams are able to work at a sustainable pace, when they don't get interrupted and aren't context switching, throughput goes up and cycle time goes down. Furthermore, when people are treated with respect and are invited into conversations that affect them, morale tends to go up which further enhances performance. Even if you don't care about the well-being of people, you'd still want to heed over 100 years of learning about human performance and productivity.

As a lean-agile coach, I'm currently involved in a large, ambitious product development effort. If done correctly, it can truly be transformational for the company and have a huge, positive impact on its competitive position in an increasingly fiercely Darwinian market. Yet, you can talk until you're blue in the face with leaders and teams about everything we know works—and works well—and still, mostly leaders step all over teams to the point of bullying people into submission. Of course, that's not leadership; it's bullying. But people like that tend to get short term results that are rewarded with promotion into, guess what, even higher leadership positions. Or not. In a well led organization where there is an emphasis both on performance as well as respect for people, bullies are eventually pushed out. But in some companies, companies that see themselves as hard-charging and demanding employers, this bullying can, itself, be seen as an attribute worth nurturing. Oh by the way, your best talent eventually walks out the door, because truly, who wants to work in that kind of environment when you're good at what you do and have options? Thus, you trade small, short-term gains for long-term, very expensive, retention and attrition problems. And then good luck getting stuff done. It's what I call moronic management. In the Air Force we said, "You lead people and you manage things." Bullying is managing (barely), leading is inspirational.

Lastly, when I coach leaders and teams I spend time on Lean principles (continuous improvement through iterative waste reduction, flow optimization and small batches) and what is known as the Productivity Paradox. Re. the latter, colloquially we say, "Stop starting and start Finishing." We know small batches—mostly doing one thing, finishing it before you start the next—perceptually may feel slow, but the science is crystal clear, it speeds things up, including your feeling of a job well done—job satisfaction. This also brings up the importance of work-in-progress limits, or WIP limits. You can throttle the work to a sustainable pace through the smart application of WIP limits. Look it up, it's really cool (article )

Re. the former, interruptions (including interrupting ourselves AKA multi-tasking) is additive in increments of 20-40%. Every time you're distracted and/or switch you waste 20, 30, 40% on negative energy. This is in part also because of a concept called "attention residue," first defined by professor Sophie Leroy (CV here ). People experience mental residue left over from the previous task. This residue leads to poor performance on the next task. The more intense the residue, the worse the performance. The attention residue phenomenon is consistent with Gloria Mark’s (gloriamark.com ) work on how interruption disproportionally delays the time to complete a task. Any distraction, regardless how short, has a significant impact on the time it takes to complete an ongoing task. There's Also a great book that came out a while back called "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" by Cal Newport (book ), a computer science professor at Georgetown University (his short bio here ). After years of careful observation he noticed the people we admire most—we deem highly successful and at the top of their pecking order—are people that can sequester themselves, refuse interruptions, and focus on one thing only. He provides great examples. Bill Gates is one; Gates goes on "Think Weeks" where he's by himself so he can focus on reading a stack of books. As an aside, his ability to almost photographically recall specific content is impressive.

Anyway, the deep focus and deep work principles these generally admired individuals bring to their routine is what enables them to succeed. They create time and space to stop starting and start finishing. Indirectly, they apply WIP limits. Then they come back into the mainstream and are available for a period of time. Backlogs, in a small way, enable teams to do this. Someone on a team, or several people, can start a task/job/story, focus on it and finish it before they pop the next item off the stack. At my current employer we have several teams that had the courage to act on this information and implement the concepts. Their productivity is up by 20, 30% and... drum roll... they're generally happier; their job satisfaction is up, which itself positively impacts productivity (opportunistically speaking).

By the way, what I'm learning as I'm trying to apply this to myself—drink my own Cool-Aid? if you will—is that when I mostly ignore email and MS Teams chat for a couple of hours the world doesn't end. If it's urgent I tell people to use SMS text, because I see the pop up out of the corner of my right eye with my iPhone on a stand next to me. If people abuse the privilege they lose their ability to get my attention. I placed an anecdote about that dynamic at the bottom of this post.

I'm learning that people react unexpectedly with comments like, "Oh, you're always so busy, you must be working on something important." It also works in your favor to create time and space for yourself to focus and finish. And it feels satisfying to do something for a little bit and finishing it. Even if you maybe leave it for a while and get back to it later, it's a positively self-reinforcing dynamic. You tepidly try it, you experience the surprising awareness this stuff really works and the accompanying rush, which in turn makes the second time easier, the third time even easier, and so on. To the point where it becomes part of your routine, fundamentally ingrained, part of who you are.

You see some companies create black-out hours for email and stuff. Usually to respect the fact people have lives that can't always be filled with work which, by the way, is a toxic, uniquely American problem. Those efforts touch on what I've discussed here. I've also read about companies formally implementing voluntary nap times in the early afternoon with reports documenting soaring productivity later in the day because people are refreshed after a 30 min. nap. Doing less is more. As the SEALs are (supposedly) apt to say, "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast."

All this to say,

1. We should be empathic and respectful, and not bully. Instead we engage and courteously ask. Usually you'll be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.
2. A backlog is a fantastic tool to create indirection in the workflow. Something important is prioritized at or near the top of the stack so is close to being or will be the next thing worked on.
3. We heed the lessons learned from the Productivity Paradox and further supported by the research documented in books like "Deep Work." That is, we discipline ourselves to limit context-switching and interruptions so we can get 30-40% of our productivity back, almost for free.
4. We create interruption-free zones, maybe call them mini-sabbaticals. But you sequester yourself, and focus and finish. That is, throttle back a little, and create intensity and discipline around focus.
5. You learn "this" (item 4) actually enhances your reputation. Furthermore, because you increase your effectiveness you tend to also get noticed for getting things done.
6. Speaking of effectiveness. I mention to people they have to be careful focusing on just efficiency because you can be highly efficient at being ineffective. Pay attention to effectiveness, but don't forget about efficiency.
7. Lastly, being an immigrant from the Netherlands and thus spending time on the socialist ?? European continent, the saying there goes, "In America they live to work, but in Europe we work to live." I think the generalization holds. When you take care of yourself you wind up also taking much better care of the work and your co-workers. So it's a win-win.

Try it. You'll discover interesting things about yourself and others, and I would be surprised if you don't also wind up being a more effective and satisfied individual who others seek out.

Anecdote about people losing the privilege to get your attention.

When I served on the Raleigh (NC) City Council, we made a trip to Charlotte, about three hours Southwest, to learn about how they plan, zone, govern, and work with the private sector in public-private partnerships. Always a good idea to learn from others about what works and doesn't, especially when you're setting policy that affects close to a half million people.

Anyhoo, one of the Charlotte city councilors told us this funny anecdote. A constituent once called him at 3 AM (!) to complain about a pothole. He tried to politely respond and made a note about it. After the Public Works department fixed the pot hole he waited until 3 AM to call the constituent back. When the constituent finally answered the phone the constituent was noticeably annoyed. "Why do you call me at 3 AM?" To which the city councilor responded, "Oh, since you called me at 3 AM I assumed that was the best time to get a hold of you." And then he almost rolled on the floor laughing about this. We all laughed because when you're a local politician you can so easily identify with this.