The 'soft' underbelly of Software - Ideation & Conceptualization 1/3: Broad first - Essay 0002
Madhav Vattikuti
SVP Technology | GM India | Perceptive Inc. | VP @ IQVIA | CTO | Clinical technologies | Software Engineering | Product Management | Operations Lead | Board Member
The psychological adjustments needed to establish a concept, and further, a context for the concept is something that is very essential for eventual success or failure. Oops! The the key psychological adjustment is to ensure we do not assess, judge or label anything as a success or a failure. This labeling prevents us from ensuring we extract useful learnings from an incomplete or deviant endeavour and taking 'success' for granted.
Ideation and Conceptualization are very broad terms but they always exist and function within a very limited context of the individual(s) driving it, the organization supporting it, the culture surrounding us and the strategy set for us/by us.
Strategy Setting: The key driver for strategy always seem to be 'world domination' but which part of the world and to what end?? :-) Unfortunately, many times, the strategy puts the organization or the idea at the centre and fans out to define the dependencies, adjacencies, similarities and even the competitive forces. I would offer that putting the target audience/user at the center and understanding their world will result in a more compelling holistic strategy and with effort, even a differentiated strategy. Many a times, the audience/user is not even the revenue driver but there is no doubt in my mind that putting the target user at the center actually helps achieve commercial success because both parties (supplier, payor) are eventually responsible for the end user Experience (big E). Understanding the user space with a very wide lens allows creation of a powerful framework to then focus your strategy on. The seed of a successful software engineering effort is the strategic setting for it.
Cultural Influences: There are innumerable bias factors emanating from deep human psyche which might be the result of many generations of evolution. That is a whole topic by itself best left to trained psychologists. The cultural aspects that is relevant to this series is the company culture. We don't need to look too deep to determine that a company led by a technologist, led by an operational strategist, led by a commercial leader, led by a domain specialist or led by a financial wizard result in very different cultures with very different dominant and suppressed behavioural traits. A 'yes-man/mam' culture only works when the unitary leader is extremely capable but it also only lasts until the leader is available. It is my proposition that every leader at the top of the company or leading a group deep within, ensure they are able to balance their default behavior and key strengths by surrounding themselves with the best individuals who complement (and maybe even complete them). This propagates through the rest of the organization creating a culture of inclusion and recognition. Broad and inclusive leadership is a key enabler in the process of creating successful software programs. This is best enabled by holistic leadership within the organization or at least topically within the team entrusted to deliver world class software.
Organization: Lot of people have defined organization as the organisational design used to organize individuals. Many have also defined, superficially I believe, that 'organization is the people'. To me organization is actually the strength of the connections between the individuals within the organization and the navigational impedance (or rather admittance). I liken this to the strength and the ability of the synaptic connection between neurons, if neurons are the individuals in the company. If there is zero impedance (or at least a very low impedance) between the network of individuals, the organization has the ability to adapt and learn quickly. In the absence of this, we are faced with a phenomenon which comes up almost instinctively in every root-cause-analysis. Silos. Back to my brain analogy, speech, comprehension, muscle-movement are all independent functions but not really individually purposeful or useful. A broad network that enables unimpeded connections between individuals (and neurons) is a strong fabric for successful software development.?
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Each individual should 'network'? to create this fabric but a leader can enable the alignment between the strategy, culture and organization.
Individuals: this is too vast to be covered here and is an integral part of almost every article and so I expect that this will be layered into almost all articles.
I am humbled by the interest in my perspective and am eagerly absorbing and learning from yours. Please keep the comments coming.
Previous Article: The 'soft' underbelly of software - Introduction - Essay 0001
Enjoyed it. I like the way you have called out how cultural influences of a company are attributed to a leader’s strength or dominating trait. A founder-leader of a company may exhibit any of the traits you have called out, but such organizations often have a well-defined mission (IMHO), as in why the founder created the organization. Do you feel a founder-led company may have traits of a ‘yes’ culture? Regarding the importance of balance and surrounding oneself with complementary individuals, I believe it's especially crucial for a founder-led company. What's your take on this? I agree with how the fabric of connection between individuals will enable organizational success. Low-impedance connection across individuals to function as a whole, building that human connection, in my opinion, is key. More like a loosely coupled architecture with segregation of responsibilities between microservices communicating in an event-driven way, aka low impedance. Though the hybrid model may deny us of the face-time between individuals, this model can gives us the ability to get talent where they are from. Building that personal connection and periodic in-person meetings in a hybrid model may work well for many scenarios.
Building a strong foundation with softwarearchitecture, executing a solid strategy, and fostering a positive companyculture are the keystones to leadershipexcellence. It's inspiring to see these pillars come together for success!
Technical design expert | Patient Safety Application
1 年Good topic. Recent example for it is hybrid model, but does the ideation and conceptualization by organization are received well by the individuals? Corona changed the way we think, the idea and concepts of Hybrid model is needed one. I believe our country is at the baby step with remote work. Organization trying to find a balance and engage employees with better office setup and team activities on this hybrid model. I see some individuals are little reluctant to come back or stay in office (most of them just show their head and run back to home in hurry to avoid traffic :)) even for those 2 or 3 days and their general answer is "I can be productive in home why I need to be in office". The collaboration is distancing to build the culture even at the team level if it is not at an organization level. Humans adapt and evolve over the time, that’s why we are successful in the evolution so-for but it takes time.