Use Persistent Models to Improve Alignment and Course-correct Your Strategy

I've spotted a pattern I'd like to share with you.

Its got to do with a slow but inevitable swing back in the way work is approached. And by being aware of this trend can help Technology leaders be ahead of the curve in terms of being able to thrive in our roles and help our organisations outcompete those slower on the uptake.

Hi, if you are a new reader to this newsletter, I am Daniel Walters, former CTO and present-day CTO coach. I write about software development and my experience learning how to do this better over a long career leading software development teams.

Please Humour Me, Awhile

An overarching theme I cover in this publication is examining the elements that contribute to being a 'learning organisation'—that is, an organisation that applies systems thinking to understand how all its parts work together to realise its purpose and follow and evolve its strategy for success.

Over the past four years, in my weekly blog, Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes, I have covered in detail the ideas that form a more significant hypothesis, and in this post, I seek to combine those concepts to make the case. I have been exploring this hypothesis since my very first post:

Our industry is finding better ways to work that help everyone pull in a common direction and which course corrects to maximise success. This is not unique to our industry; these are similar lessons learned in other fields before and an observation a growing number of people are making about our industry now. And tantalisingly, I've seen some evidence that these lessons may help us with problem spaces bigger than software, but let's slow our roll and focus on software.

My hypothesis is that our industry's default mode of work being predominantly organised by activities, i.e. projects, initiatives, and tasks, reduces the context those in software product development roles can operate with, resulting in inferior products and services and worse working conditions.

It is my belief that a key to building impactful products is to provide everyone involved with enough context to make great decisions about every aspect of the organisation's efforts to fulfil its purpose—to harness as many brains as possible to their full potential.

Of course, effective decision-making also requires the right degree of agency and support, such as access to resources. I cover these topics in other posts; today, I will focus on context. I assert that it's a leader's prime responsibility to provide context:

The tricky question is:

What is enough context?

There's no universal answer to this, but my career experience has demonstrated to me that for most organisations, the gulf between the context available and the context that could be available with little effort is significant.

We routinely shortchange our teams by not making information the organisation has collected (or had available but failed to collect) about its customers, strategy, competitors and even how to get work done in the organisation.

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The Limitations of Being Action-centric

One challenge in software development is when the solutions and activities overwhelm the goal when solutions precede understanding the context, or when the focus on action subverts the goal.

It's an easy trap to fall into—actions are concrete and low on uncertainty. Leaders use actions in communication as a shortcut to achieve shallow alignment of understanding. We are wired to accept this as adequate because this is what we are used to.

This seems to be a universal problem, bigger than software, one I suspect many industries learn to become more aware of and address as they evolve. For example, the focus on efficacy and effectiveness in the medical field and the evolution of business management in Drucker's era.

Those same challenges also appear in our socio-political landscape. For instance, politics seems mostly about proposed actions competing in poorly understood contexts. Changes are often suggested with unclear goals and benefits, and everyone debates based on what they imagine the context to be. Politics is not my expertise, I follow as an interested citizen, so I am interested in other perspectives.

Leading people working on complicated problems during a time of rapid change requires rapid learning and better ways to connect people with how to participate.

My Request for You To Help Me Explore This Hypothesis

I will share what I have observed and experienced, engage in the discussion with the desire to learn, and leave it to you to judge if there's anything there. I won't suggest actions, just ways of looking at problems and the pathway to solutions.

I'd like to ask you to please challenge and engage me. I have more questions than answers - I am writing about something that is evolving and still trying to understand and explore. So anyway, here's what I believe:

I believe that how we lead and support each other is the area with the most leverage for helping improvement. Understanding what we are trying to achieve and why we are trying to achieve it enables the quality of the decisions we make.

Leadership Folly and Misplaced Causality

So where can this go awry? As leaders, it's an easy trap to see the failure to follow directions as failures of the people you seek to lead rather than a leadership issue. So many leaders' brilliant plans were brought undone by what they will claim was 'an execution problem' like it wasn't their responsibility to create the conditions for their team to succeed.

What I have learned over time is that the gap between the responsibility for giving direction and failure is a function of two issues relating to leadership:

1. The leadership's understanding of the context and the problem
2. How effectively have we, the leaders, cultivated an environment where adequate context is available?

So, I will first start with these two issues to determine what can be improved. Unfortunately, many leaders go hunting for who to blame for the 'execution problem'.

What do Leaders Need to Understand the Context Adequately?

To understand a problem adequately and engage with people closer to the problem than you requires curiosity and the willingness to listen. If you can't make sense of what the team has proposed as a solution with what you understand of the problem, you must consider the difference in context between you.

What are you aware of that they may not be, leading to this disconnect? Remember that this gap is yours to fill and your responsibility to resolve.

What do Teams Need to Make Great Decisions?

For your teams to make better-quality decisions, we leaders must go beyond communicating the actions we'd like them to take—that is, to go beyond communicating the HOW. It requires communicating the WHAT and WHY, too.

How Does This Relate To OKRs?

I see evidence of growth in knowledge about how to plan complex change. One area I see is the growth in popularity of OKRs and the realisation by most of the OKR practitioner community that OKRs should represent outcomes, i.e. the WHAT. In time, I am confident that OKRs will evolve or be replaced.

I have written about the significant shifts the practices associated with OKRs have taken over the past decade and they continue to grow to the point where practices have moved a long way from what is described in the seminal OKR text, Measure What Matters over a decade ago.

I've written about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) a bit historically on my blog because I have found OKRs can be an effective tool for communicating what is to be achieved. Communicating the WHAT is a part of my larger thesis.

I've focused on OKRs not because they are the best tool—they are not. They are just currently the most popular approach and the most accessible. The idea I am exploring is bigger. What if there are more effective ways to communicate our strategy to solve a big problem?

I hypothesise, based on my observed experiences, that the context, i.e. the different WHATs we need to achieve and how they interrelate, i.e. the WHY, our logic of why we believe what we do and how we will understand progress, are all essential parts of a context that helps us align

And what if doing this is a more effective way to engage and align people to work together to solve a big problem?

'OKRs are a powerful yet incomplete idea'.

Specifically, in terms of helping people understand the context of their work more fully, OKRs may communicate a WHAT but generally don't communicate the WHY. It's also common for a team to be focused on a single WHAT without much awareness of other related business goals.

A more complete context must communicate and align with the organisation's strategy. It needs to communicate the present set of goals and how they relate. It also needs to express the relationships between goals of different timescales.

What needs to be true (i.e., the outcome when a goal has been achieved) now to achieve our more significant, long-term goal? How will we know we are making progress? What must we sustain elsewhere to ensure our progress is not destructive?

These relationships between different aspects of what we need to achieve collectively provide useful context for decision-making.

For instance, teams knowing we must achieve two goals to win within a time window can help them decide they need to cooperate rather than compete for resources.

Knowing that a short-term goal is in aid of a longer-term goal may help a team select some options over others that may otherwise have seemed equivalent.

Friction Communicating Strategy in Organisations

Communicating strategy, i.e., WHY we are doing WHAT we've set out to achieve and HOW we are currently trying to do that, is not a new idea. However, most organisations still need to improve at translating direction into action.

Too often, there is a disconnect between leaders or strategists and the rest of the organisation. There are several reasons for this:

1. Leaders and strategists need to be more comfortable with communicating uncertainty.

2. The time and effort required to communicate a strategy that is understood is underestimated.

3. Doing this well is not valued. It's easier to blame failure on a failure to execute.

That is not to say that most organisations make some effort to communicate strategy; there are. Most organisations have some version of town halls, all-hands, strategy roadshows, etc.

But rarely does it communicate all the context required for understanding that supports good decision-making and buy-in. It avoids acknowledging uncertainty, is HOW-centric, and may not connect the dots between WHAT is being done now to support WHAT in the future.

What is communicated is often boiled down to focusing on the HOW and wrapped in confidence because that works in the boardroom. When questions come back from the rest of the organisation, it's often seen as adversarial rather than a desire to understand.

So what is an improvement over this situation, and how does this relate to big global problems?

As I mentioned earlier, this is not new knowledge I am exploring here. It's something that different fields and industries rediscover as they evolve, and right now, with the competitive pace of evolution in software development, we are rediscovering it again, too.

I am finding that much of the same ground has been covered before. But we are also amidst a period when the speed and reach of communication have been changing rapidly, causing instability and creating situations where these ideas could be leveraged for a broader effect.

The Rise (Again) of the Persistent Model

One of the patterns I see currently starting to be deployed in software development and that has been deployed in other industrialised fields throughout history is visualising the relationships between desirable outcomes.

There are examples in Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with Strategy Maps, the Theory of Constraints (ToC) with Current/Future Reality Trees, and the North Star framework with the Bet maps. There are examples in more complete performance measurement frameworks such as PuMP; in Continuous Discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees, Impact Maps are another similar concept. Hoshin Kanri is another form of sorts, although the relationships seem more often categorical than causal. Many OKR coaches who teach ways of using OKRs oriented around outcomes introduce such a concept (albeit all slightly differently).

I am not referring to the comprehensive idea of mindmaps (although some examples appear very similar), as mindmaps are generally relationships between concepts.

I refer to visual relationships between outcomes, causal chains of our assumptions about cause and effect, and means and ends. These relationships show what might need to be achieved first or also be true at the same time, what is more micro, what is more macro, what is for the current time window, what is for a future time window, etc.

What are you seeing used in your organisation? Is there more effort being put to provide the appropriate context so everyone can do their best work? Is there a shift from communicating HOW-first to WHAT-first? Are there visual tools being used to identify the hypothesised causal connections which are the WHY behind the WHAT?

Share your experiences in the comments and give me feedback on my theory of how the orthodoxy of how work in software product development is changing.