Team Entanglement and Disruptive Observation

In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove illustrates a business as a simple “black box”, with inputs going in, outputs coming out, and processes running inside. Grove encourages managers to “cut little windows to peer inside the black box.” This is great advice. And it takes judgment to choose the right place to put those little windows, so we’re looking at the right parts of the process to give us the insights we need.

Inside that “black box” is a great deal of complexity. When thinking about where and how to “cut little windows”, I like to imagine that inside the black box is a quantum computer. It helps me to remember that observation is not always neutral; observation itself can disrupt work.

Why This Metaphor?

Quantum computing is strange, and powerful. It is going to let us solve problems whose complexity overwhelms classical computers, and even human brains. It’s going to do that in ways that most of us (including me) really can’t understand.

Here’s my layperson understanding of why a quantum computer can do more*. You may have heard of the idea of quantum entanglement. That’s where a group of particles, unconnected to each other, share a quantum state. Their state cannot be described independently of the others.

Quantum computing relies on entanglement to work. You give it your hugely complex problem. Then it gets into an entangled state in order to solve the problem. But here’s the rub — if you make an observation before it’s done, you disrupt the entangled state, you collapse the wave function, and you have to start over. If you want the computer to solve your problem, you have to let it run.

This image is powerful when thinking about teams. Work is happening — complex work. It’s happening because it’s distributed among team members, and the state of the work may be difficult to determine by looking at each piece independently.

Disruptive Windows

Teams aren’t computers (quantum or classical). It’s just a metaphor. But by imagining work as entangled, we raise the stakes on the placement of our little windows. Because if we put them in the wrong place (or place-time, I suppose), not only will we get poor insights — we could disrupt the work. Our attempt at observation will destroy the thing we’re trying to observe.

This can happen in any company, but it’s especially acute in growing companies. And the faster your company is growing, the higher the chance of getting this wrong.

As companies grow, they outgrow the structures, systems, and processes that served them previously. Intentional growth requires getting out in front of these things, and planning for the evolution of your org design and processes before they break, not after.

I’ve seen fast-growing companies literally run out of desks for employees, because they didn’t expand their physical space fast enough. (This was in the Before Times, when we all worked in offices every day.) That’s a very obvious (and very obviously painful) example, but it underscores how hard it is to get evolution right. If we can’t reliably ensure that each employee has a place to work, how will we scale processes that are complex and largely invisible? How much harder still to scale something like our “little windows” into those processes?

When a company is small — really small — leaders don’t need little windows. The whole company is open-plan; there’s no black box to peek inside of (yet). Everyone is working on more or less the same thing, together. People have different roles and responsibilities, but getting a view into those roles is as simple as a regular one-on-one, or a kanban board. As the company grows in complexity, processes start to disappear into the black box. By the time a company is at 20 people, this is already happening. At 20, there are teams, rather than individuals, working on specific problems. You can still glean information through 1–1s, but they’re more likely to be with a single representative of a team, rather than every individual who knows what’s going on. Once a company hits 50 people, you’d better have built some little windows.

The problem a lot of growing companies face is that leaders try to use the same little windows as the company is changing. But the windows have to scale as well.

When the windows don’t scale, you’ll often end up with a micromanagement problem. What employees call “swoop and poop” is often just managers who are using the wrong windows. They see inputs, and they don’t see the outputs they want. They start to worry about outcomes. When that happened before, they knew why, because of the open-plan process. Now, the process is in a black box. The manager is anxious — understandably. Outputs matter, outcomes even moreso. If the outputs don’t make sense, the manager tries to find out why, and the only way they know how to do that is to replicate the open plan. They start asking all kinds of detailed questions. They want daily updates, or progress reports. They’re in all the Slack channels, they want a new weekly meeting, they just need more visibility into what’s going on, they want to know how they can help.

Meanwhile, inside the black box, entanglement has been disrupted. The team that was solving a problem is now putting out fires ignited by observation. This team might have been flailing, or they might have been doing the best work of their lives — it’s hard to tell, now, because whatever they were doing, they’re not doing it any more. Instead, they’re scrambling to report on their progress and set up a new weekly sync and create a new Slack channel. The team is building windows, instead of solving a problem for their customers and the business.

OK, fine, I hear my fellow managers say. It’s disruptive, but I do need to know what’s going on, actually, it’s my job. Yes. It’s true. Leaders need the little windows. And it’s hard, and you’re going to get it wrong. We all put the windows in the wrong place. We all swoop and poop. We all disrupt our teams and make their lives harder, sometimes. Or, as my husband puts it, “all bosses suck”.

Building Better?Windows

So how do we do a better job observing without collapsing the wave function?

I’m going to answer this question in two parts: the foundation, and the fenestration.

Foundations

These are no different to what every team needs, but without them, it will be very difficult to get the right view into your org.

1. Trust. Do you trust your team? If not, you need to address that. Without trust, a little window will never give you confidence that the work will lead to the outputs you expect. Do they trust you? If not, you need to earn their trust. Without trust, any attempt to peek into the work will be met with those great disruptors, suspicion and fear.
2. Clarity. Your job as a leader is to provide vision, and clear strategic direction. If you haven’t done that, you can’t expect the black box to spit out the outputs you want. And no amount of micromanagement will make up for it.

Fenestrations

Let’s assume you’ve got your foundations in place, or you’re at least working on it. How do you go about creating these non-disruptive windows?

Do your job, not the team’s job. Ask yourself, why do I need this information? What decisions will it help me to make? When the org is small, a leader might be personally involved in every account, or every prioritization decision, or every deal. That doesn’t scale, so you hire people to do that work. If you jump back into the tactical work every time you’re not sure it’s going ok, it probably feels like you’re “rolling up your sleeves”, or “in the trenches”. In fact, you’ve just demoted yourself, and therefore you’ve demoted everyone on the team. And while you’re doing that, who’s doing your job? The answer is usually no one. Which means you undermine your foundation — built on critical strategic decisions — and perpetuate a cycle of dependence. Stop doing this, and you’ll stop putting a lot of windows in the wrong spots.

Create and empower leaders. Identify people on your team who are strong at stakeholder management, and let yourself be their stakeholder. Listen to them — when they talk about goals, are they saying what you think you communicated? If not, work on that first. Invest in these relationships. Trust them to work with the team, and to help you find the right windows into the quantum box.

You could find these folks in any role, but if you’re going fishing, you might first try pools of existing leaders (eg, people managers, product managers) or people whose job it is to bring alignment and improve process (eg, program managers, agile coaches).

Be disciplined about communication. Especially when you’re anxious, or tired, or both. Which, in a growing company, might be most of the time. It’s easy to dash off a question on Slack before you forget; it only takes a minute, and it feels like you’ve put that question in the right place for it to get answered. But this is a false economy, because you’re not accounting for the cost of responding to that question. Your two-minute half-baked thought shot off during a meeting might result in:

• a negative emotional response;
• several frustrated drafts;
• half an hour of poring over analytics;
• a three-person call to check assumptions;
• another 15 minutes writing this up into a reply.

All of that costs money, and there’s opportunity cost, too — the stuff that those people were doing before you interrupted them. Simply writing a draft as a reminder of your question, but holding off on sending it until later, can be a good habit to get into.

As a leader, you need ways to understand what’s going on inside your org. Make yourself accountable for ensuring that your windows into the work are supporting your team, not disrupting them.

*For more and better explanations of quantum computing, I recommend this episode of the Titanium Physicists podcast.