On Systems of Control

There's a common trap that we leaders tend to fall into. And if we're not careful, our guilty pleasure becomes a cultural norm. And that cultural norm will forever stifle the potential of the great people we lead.

The trap, like any good one, looks really attractive. It begs us to step into it, to feel comfortable inside, to make us entirely dependent on what it has to offer. It gives us little dopamine hits. It gives us the illusion of control. It gives us an addiction.

The trap is the notion that we can control the people we lead as if we might control the cars we drive or the microwave ovens that warm up our rushed workday meals. We think we can control the costs associated with the business value we deliver. We think we can control when that value will be delivered. But is it really control?

No, I don't believe it is. What we offer is more like systems of constraint. But I'm not talking about healthy constraints that keep us moving in the right direction without bleeding the organization dry. I'm talking about the constraints on the ability of our talented people to create, to innovate.

Innovation, you see, can look a lot like play. It's messy. It looks like failure most of the time, until it very suddenly doesn't. Play is an important activity, not just for children, but for adults, as well. Play is where we learn the range and constraints of the tools and materials we have to work with. Play is where we discover novel new uses for them.

And so when play bumps up against our systems of control, play is often told to grow up. It's labeled as scope creep or unplanned spend. It has no project code to charge back to. It doesn't have any respect at all for arbitrarily determined delivery dates.

But these systems of constraint give us really slick reporting. They give us the false sense that we know all there is to know about the progress of planned work, and gives us the false sense that we can control when it's all delivered. If you've gotten this far without tuning out, I want to challenge you with this: if your culture puts a higher value on systems of control than it does on playtime and innovation, you're making the choice to feed your addiction instead of building great things, or unleashing the potential of great people.

Some signs that your culture is addicted to the illusion of control:

• Your salaried workers have to fill out time sheets.
• No technology can be built without committee approvals (think: Architecture Review Boards).
• Work outside of a project plan may not be done without formal exceptions.
• Work outside of a financial plan may not be done without formal exceptions.
• There are hours of status meetings on your calendar every week.
• There are meetings about those meetings.
• Your staff is much more likely to buy solutions than build them, because the bureaucratic pain of buying is a lot less than the bureaucratic pain of innovating.
• You have quarterly project reviews that give you all kinds of metrics on how things are going, but few (if any) tell you how your business is doing or how your customers are having better experiences.
• You have a project plan with fixed dates that are further out than 6 weeks or so.
• You have technology debt that can be measured in decades, because the systems of constraint will never allow experts to take good care of their technology without embarking on a big, expensive project plan to modernize those systems.

These systems of constraint weren't built in a day and likely won't be unraveled quickly, either. Doing so will take hard work, it will take pain, and the people who's livelihoods depend on feeding the addiction will understandably work against reforms in order to keep their jobs (though a few really great ones will use their understanding of the system to work with you and accelerate the path to something better... keep them close!)

Becoming aware and openly saying you have a problem is the first step to recovery.