The Unicorn Project: The Five Ideals

‘The Unicorn Project’, a new novel by Gene Kim is all about developers, digital disruption and thriving in the age of data.

‘The Phoenix Project’ brought readers The Three Ways:

• The First Way: System Thinking
• The Second Way: Amplify Feedback Loop
• The Third Way: Culture of Continual Experimentation and Learning.

Read more about The Three Wys – key principles of DevOps in my previous article.

Now, with ‘The Unicorn Project’, Gene Kim introduces The Five Ideals:

• The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity
• The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow and Joy
• The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work
• The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety
• The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus.

‘The Unicorn Project’ is a follow-up to the bestselling ‘The Phoenix Project’ book which takes another look at Parts Unlimited from the perspective of Maxine, a Senior Lead Developer. She is exiled to the Phoenix Project as a punishment for contributing to the last payroll f*ckup. She tries to survive in a new situation for herself, which she perceives as a heartless bureaucratic machine, and work within a system where no one can get anything done without endless committees, paperwork and approvals.

This is a story about rebel developers and business leaders working together and racing against time to innovate, survive, and thrive in a time of unprecedented uncertainty ...and opportunity.

So, what are the Five Ideals?

The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity

Let’s talk about technical debt – everything you and your team need to clean up, or where you need to create or restore simplicity, so that you can quickly, confidently, and safely make changes to the system. Sometimes it is a build and test system that does not give fast feedback to your developers, or when it stops working at all. Sometimes it is when simple components become complex, and you can no longer reason about it or change it without huge effort or risk of total disaster. Sometimes this happens when decision-making process or the organizational structure loses locality, forcing even the simplest decisions to be escalated.

We call it all ‘complexity debt’, because they are not just technical issues – they are business issues. We always have a choice. You can choose to create new features, or you can choose to pay down complexity debt. When a fool (sorry) spends all his time on features, the inevitable outcome is that even easy tasks become more difficult and take longer to complete. No matter how hard you try or how many people you have in your team, in the end your service or system collapses under its own weight, forcing you to start over from the scratch.

Simplicity is very important because it enables locality, here understood as local decision making. Locality in your code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling you to deliver features faster. Teams can quickly and independently develop, test and deploy value to customers. Empower people to control the situation without being controlled. Locality in your organization allows teams to make decisions without having to communicate and coordinate with people outside the team, without having to get approvals from distant authorities or committees so far removed from the work that they have no relevant basis to make good decisions.

You should be able to create value by changing only one file, one module, one service, one component, one API call, one container, one app, or whatever! Which is why putting cross-cutting concerns in one place is so great, for example logging, security or retry policies. You change it there, and you have changed it everywhere. Isn’t it strange that when you build a feature, changes sometimes have to be made by the front-end team, the back-end team, or the database team?

The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow and Joy

How do you feel at your work every day? Is your work marked by boredom and endless waiting for other people to get things done on your behalf? Do you blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of your work during a deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout? Or do you work in small batches, ideally one-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on your work? These are the conditions that allow for focus, flow, challenge, learning, discovery, mastering your domain, and even joy :-)

As the opposite of the Second Ideal your team is just a stupid (sorry again) feature factory that customers may or may not care about. Work is not fun at all, as it should be. There is no flow of features, there is no feedback and certainly no learning. Where instead of improving the processes you work within, you blindly follow them. And finally, the process has imprisoned you, sucking out all the joy from your everyday work, pushing you further and further away from the Second Ideal. I hope that this is not your case.

The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work

Think, with the Toyota Andon cord as an example, of how we must elevate improvement of daily work over daily work itself. When anyone encounters a problem, everyone is expected to ask for help at any time, even if it means stopping the entire assembly line. We thank them for doing so, because it is an opportunity to improve daily work. In this way problems are quickly seen, swarmed (yes, not tiered, but swarmed), and finally solved, and then those learnings are spread far and wide, so all may benefit.

The opposite of the Third Ideal is someone who values process compliance and – my favorite – TWWADI (The Way We’ve Always Done It). It is a huge library of various rules, regulations, processes, ISO procedures and numerous steps requiring someone's authorization, with new rules being added all the time to prevent the latest f*ckup from happening again. You may recognize them in your own organization as rigid project plans, inflexible procurement processes, powerful CABs and Architecture Boards, infrequent release schedules, lengthy approval processes, strict separation of duties and many others. Each adds to the coordination cost for everything we do and drives up our cost of delay. And because the distance from where decisions are made and where work is performed keeps growing, the quality of our outcomes diminish. Unfortunately, a bad system will beat a good person every time.

You may have to change old rules that no longer apply, the way people are organized and the architecture of your systems. For a leader, it no longer means directing and controlling, but guiding, enabling and removing obstacles. That is not a servant leadership, it is a transformational leadership. It requires understanding the vision of the whole organization, the intellectual stimulation to question the basic assumptions of how work is performed, inspirational communication, personal recognition, and supportive leadership. Some think it is about leaders being nice. But it is not. It is about pursuit of perfection, the urgency to achieve the mission, a constant dissatisfaction with the status quo, and an enthusiasm for helping customers.

The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

Let's talk now about psychological safety. I know organizations where nobody goes out of the box, nobody takes risks, nobody experiments, nobody innovates, all because of a culture of fear. I know organizations where people are afraid to tell the boss bad news or just tell the truth. And you, are you afraid or not? Or maybe you are the scare boss or a finger-pointing person? In such an organization, novelty is discouraged, and when problems arise, people ask ‘Who caused the problem?’ They name, blame, and shame that person. They create new rules, new steps to approve, more training, and – if necessary – fire a ‘scapegoat’, fooling themselves that they have solved the problem.

The Fourth Ideal is about psychological safety, where it is safe for anyone to talk about problems. There should be a confidence that you and your team would not embarrass, reject or punish someone just for speaking up. When something goes wrong, be the person who asks, ‘WHAT caused the problem’, not ‘WHO’. Every problem is a learning opportunity, an unplanned investment that was made without our consent, but whose affects you can benefit from.

Imagine, you work for an organization where everyone is making decisions, solving important problems every day and teaching others what they have learned. Your adversary, on the other hand, is an organization where only the top leaders make decisions. Who will win? Yes, your victory is closer than you think.

Unfortunately. it is quite easy for leaders just to talk about the platitudes of creating psychological safety, empowering people and giving a voice to the front-line employees, blah blah blah… The leader must constantly shape, coach and positively reinforce these desired behaviors in the team. Psychological safety can disappear so easily, because when the leader micro-manages, he cannot say ‘I don’t know’ or starts acting like a know-it-all jackass.

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

And finally, think about services you manage, which of them are customers willing to pay you for? Which ones really increase your competitive advantage? Or maybe they are only of value to you and your your team?

A hundred years ago, most of the large factories had a Chief Power Officer onboard who managed electricity generation processes. It was one of the most important roles in manufacturing, because the lack of electricity meant no production. It was a core process. But that role has completely disappeared. Electricity has become an infrastructure (sorry boys from the infrastructure) that is bought from a public utility company (or cloud provider). The service provider can be easily replaced. Usually the price decides about the choice. You can rarely gain a competitive advantage by generating your own power. It is now merely context of the main business, no longer core. One keeps what is ‘not good enough’ and outsources what is more than good enough.

Think deeply about the Fifth Ideal and identify areas of context you can get rid of by freeing yourself and your team from the technical debt, that has tormented you for years. Imagine what you could do for your customers without dragging all that baggage with you. Even though it may be more painful in the short term, you will find some significant benefits in a long term.

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‘The Unicorn Project’ book is a MUST read for all Leaders, Developers and Ops Specialists in every company going through a digital transformation who want to co-create valuable outcomes with their customers and for their customers. The book is easy and fun to read. The beginning of ‘The Unicorn Project’ book describes the nightmare that many of us in IT organizations are struggling every day to gradually build an environment in which each of us would like to work. Any organization, including yours, can follow this path with The Five Ideals!

'The Unicorn Project' coming November 26, 2019