AA195 - Tyranny of Plans & Planning in Software Development

welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to. Welcome back to Arguing Agile. If you work in software development long enough, you will be under the tyranny of plans and planning. Plans, plans, plans, gotta have a plan. And that has to have a plan, and you have to have backup plans. So yeah, absolutely, today's going to be a great podcast. So there's a lot of companies out there, and a lot of people out there. So this is organizational, and this is personal. That have a real problem with uncertainty. Or another way to say uncertainty would be ambiguity. They have a real problem with ambiguity. So organizationally have a problem. Personally have a problem, I guess, professionally have a problem. So we're going to dig into all that today. So I want to talk about the corrosive nature of plans and planning on the podcast. I was on a program once in this sort of It was a, I think they brought me on as a scrum master. But they expect me to do product work. It doesn't matter. I was more of a program manager, to be honest, on the team. What the most senior people or the, the leadership of that. They would give you about six months and then they would shuffle everything. They shuffle the teams, the goals, you know, they would pivot technologies, they would pivot basically everything. And they'd say, okay, now you gotta make me a new plan. To get all the work done. Like here's all the, here's all the things that we want you to, here's all the, the high level goals that we want accomplished. High level goals. That's what they would do. Like the equivalent of like epics, basically leadership will give you the epic, build me a, a way to do my laundry online, virtual laundry service, some laundry in the cloud, laundry and clouds. Sorry. I'm trying to protect. The very very guilty. Yes, indeed. But about every six months they would shuffle everything because they didn't feel That the the plan as written was progressing the way they wanted and they felt that it was better to just cut their losses and usually what would also accompany in that program was Ever recycling of leadership. Of course, they would cut the leaders and they would put new leaders in from somewhere else and they'd say, you get with your teams and do a, do a plan for all the work. Two, three years of plans I wanna see in paper by the end of this week or whatever, you know, the end of two weeks or whatever it was. And they must have done that three times in 18 months when I was there. And I thought it was the most insane thing in the world.'cause, 'cause at the same time they were doing this. We were servicing customers and the people that did the budgets and did this kind of like shuffling, never talked to the customers, of course. I was actually servicing and talking to customers and they were as bewildered as I was. Of what management was doing with the, you know, cause they felt ignored when, you know, they felt left out when this shuffle would happen. And also to your point about, changing people around, I mean, they're going to feel a certain sense of panic, right? I mean, people that they used to dealing with are no longer there. And then six months later they change. So there's a lot here. I think that when you said in the introduction that we're going to talk about some organizational issues or maladies and then some at the personal level. If you're in leadership in an organization like the one you described, You demand plans and you demand detailed plans and these plans can go out a year, two years, whatever, but Every six months you clean house, right? And that's because You're reporting to other people how these plans are going right and lo and behold, you know When you plan out something like this that is two years out or 18 months out Things change from out under you they change the weather changes everything changes The market changes, your customer's needs change your, your team members change. Teams underneath, right? So, of course, they're not going to pan out exactly like that. But instead of saying, well, you know, this plan was ambitious, whatever, wrong to begin with, they're going to push the blame downhill, and they'll clean house. Yeah. That is something that I've seen as well. Every, about every six months is about right, I think. what they will do is, they will try to bring. A little more comfort into this by saying Joe over there or Mary over there. They've done this before and they were great. They brought a project in on time and under budget. Yeah. Right. So we're going to bring them over here. This is a completely different area of the business, by the way. Right. They worked in whatever, and now we're in cloud services, but they've never worked on before. it doesn't matter. So for me the story of what you're talking about was the person worked in like front end dashboards and we were in like back end data pipelines and data transformation. It's all computers. Yeah, it's ones and zeros. Things have nothing to do with computers. Right. So they'll bring that person in, under this false sense of comfort that because they were successful somewhere else, they'll be successful here. And then wait six months or less, What will happen is that person will also be cycled out and rinse and repeat. So this is endemic, I think, in quite a lot of large organizations, medium sized even. Well, is that because the organizational design of large organizations is just unresponsive and like poorly thought out. Like what, why are larger organizations more susceptible? I think they're more lethargic. They have many layers. So that's part of the reason why, because every layer is going to look at how they look good for their, you know, in front of their bosses that their whole purpose in life is to make their bosses look good. That's it. Okay. So I want to talk about the people, which is where you're going is where you're pushing, but I'm not done picking on the organization yet. And we haven't even gotten to the backdrop of like capitalism ruins everything. so there's three things in the air right now, which is like the market, the business, AKA the system in the market, and then the individual inside of the system. Let's stay with the system. We're talking about systemic issues. One of which is you got bad org design and the org is too big to change. They're too big to respond. They're basically too big to fail. No matter how much failure they get, they're just going to keep on chugging along doing the same thing they always did in the same way they've always done. Right. And then you're allowed to change, any drape colors that you want on your cabin on the Titanic. Like that's the equivalent here of shuffling your leadership in this kind of program. Yeah. The things that I have seen in the program I'm talking about, they would always measure all the wrong things. Of course it's not like leadership is looking at velocity. They're like, how come we haven't delivered? Like we had eight things scheduled on the Gantt chart to be delivered in this quarter and you only delivered four. So you're at 50 percent delivery. And now those are the numbers that they're looking at. Like the, again, the customer that was talking to me is like, I don't understand why I'm not on any of their metrics. And I would say to the customer, I also don't understand why you're not, why don't we together. Talk to, you know, program leadership basically. Which didn't go over well, you know, cause that's seen as a challenge. That's exactly what it could be because then we entered what I want to talk about on the personal side of this topic, but Well, no, I'll just say the luck component of what you just outlined is like, well, this person was successful on this other team in this other business with these other customers and this other technology, and because they were successful over there, they will be successful over here is the funniest thing to me at this stage of my career. To observe from the outside because if you ever watched a video one time of people would open the door and they would step out of like a store or whatever, but there was like a step down, and most people would trip on a step down or not realize and do the little whoop, and you know, step down, and it's like, yeah, you could say it's all, every single person's fault, but at some point, you gotta say like, I mean, It's a design issue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The system is doing this. You really, you have to realize the system's doing this. the luck aspect of like, well, one person stepped down successfully out of 10 people who tripped. So the other nine are wrong. The I see a lot of companies, again, in product management, I see a lot of companies that because their product didn't hit on the market. They start blaming people or you didn't deliver it right. Or like the sales thing, we go back to all that all the time on the podcast. but they don't realize that like, well, the successful products in the field were, Brought to market at a time where nobody was solving this problem. Now everyone's solving this problem. So maybe like the market timing wasn't right. Or maybe your product didn't differentiate enough. You know, maybe it wasn't priced properly. There's like a million factors, but just like going viral, like there's luck involved, no matter how many influences you listen to. Tell you that like, Oh no, it's a formula. There is luck involved. There's just no getting out of that. Yes. There, there's luck involved. The same thing in business. We're not allowed to say like, Hey, you know, if only you were lucky enough to be born 20 years earlier, you could have bought a house. And had no problem and it would have been, you know, cheap and you could have got a job like it was your fault for Being born 20 years late, right? So so sorry next time you should try harder to be born earlier It is absolutely ridiculous. But just to kind of talk about a little bit more on the org design side of it, most organizations evolved to this stage by being successful doing things the old fashioned way, which is put a mark on a Gantt chart and say, let's hit that, right? Unfortunately, it was in the time when they were really not being successful, even though projects were being met, right? Customers were not being satisfied, and that's because their needs still changed, right? Six months, a year after their requirements were signed off in blood. But then they were met with, well, you change your mind, so you pay. But unfortunately, a lot of those people are still there in those PMOs. They work that way. And this is now 2024 customers should be engaged. Not only at the beginning, but throughout, and that was never something they grew up with. So, in terms of their philosophy of how they operate, customers are not in the equation, right? They're at the end of the chain. Build it, and then ship it over to them at some point. As opposed to build it with them. Yeah, and again, all the while ignoring all the biases. You know, all the survivorship biases of the Silicon Valley folks and whatever that are telling you like, Oh, you know, just steal everyone's IP and launch your black cab service in London without licenses. And as long as you're successful, then you can, you know, get the lawyers to handle it when you have bajillion dollars in profits. But what they don't tell you is, out of. 100 companies that launch like that. Maybe one is successful, right? But that one that's successful is like, well, Uber did it. So I don't understand what your problem is. Yeah, it's always easy to be a follower, isn't it? So you can look at somebody and say, look, they did it, and we can just follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. You know what I find amazing is that not enough people are talking about, This as a causal factor, like a major causal factor, your org design. And part of that is because I think it's frowned upon to question that because you're going, you get into a company and you're in your way. You are somewhere, right? But you know, when you say, well, the way we're geared up is wrong. We should change this. It's not very well received. You just got here. Stay in your lane. Well, we had a podcast on the illusion of control which is actually pretty well received on YouTube. The people say the illusion of control why you can't say like, Hey, this organ design is kind of crap. Or, even on the illusion of control podcast, I said, why is the default? Like autocratic, you know, dictatorial country, like way of running. Like, why is that the default business like org design in, in America? Like that, that doesn't seem right to me that, you know what I mean? Today it's not right, but that's how we grew up. Yeah. That's so, that's so, well, it's not, it's not how we grew up. Because before Taylor businesses were completely different. Oh, you can go that far back. Yeah, For sure. Well, I mean, that, that is, I mean, like with the Taylorism, surprise, it's Taylorism. No, we're not done. We're not done. We're not done. We still got a lot more podcasts. The Taylorism way of doing things, the independent consultants came in to the business studied because they were educated and everyone else was dumb and we studied what the workers were doing and they drew up a list of exactly how to do it so that no movement was wasted and they had to be called in because the workers were too stupid to do it and the management was too, too incompetent to do it. And they basically laid their framework down and said, we are controlling everything. And if you want to improve on it, you have to call us back. when conditions change, call us back. and it was about control and they have the bureaucracy that they laid down, the timekeeper and the disciplinarian and all that. Yeah. Was about keeping that system of control. And again, the modern education system, MBAs and all that is just built on top of that structure anyway, There's a, capitalism ruins everything aspect of this that I like. The focus on short-term profits and loading down your workers on cognitive load and expecting, nine hours a day to be in the, I'm sorry, 9, 9, 9, 9 6. Is that the, is that the Chinese like the nine 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM. Six days a week. Six days a week. Is that the, is that the culture like expecting that out of your people? Cause you'll just, you know, put them out on the street to be homeless, not have shoes, you know, like it's 1914 there's an implied fear-based system in, in, you know, the system here. So if you look back at, what. The competitive landscape was like, the products during Taylorism, during that era. Pretty much everybody was doing things that were industrialized. Products had a long chain, and people were building things that were the same. You're essentially stamping out. The same thing over and over again, where having a checklist probably was the right thing to do because you didn't miss something. unfortunately, it was at the cost of sacrificing all innovation, because the workers weren't allowed to innovate. It was the consultants only. That was then. Today, we have to respond fast to fast moving markets, fast moving product cycles, fast moving customer needs. So you don't really have the same work environment anymore. And to keep the org structure that harkens back to that era of Taylorism, even in today's time, makes absolutely no sense. So this is where you say, well, you know, you're told what to do. You're told what to build. You're not really encouraged to talk to customers for the most part. Yeah, we know it's good for them. It's a waste of your time to talk to the customer because that's time off the assembly line. That's time off of my checklist, going back from that time to coming to today, one thing that's changed is pretty much everybody is a knowledge worker today. Even if you're in a factory, you're a knowledge worker. You have knowledge of the factories process. You have knowledge of what are the wastes, if you like, right? So you could be tapped to kind of improve on reducing or eliminating those wastes. Savvy companies are doing that. Not everybody's doing that. So the all cultural aspect, again, I go back to, I'm amazed that people are not talking more about this and not more is being done to kind of disrupt this. Other than the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture where you have flat organizations and, you know, the Yeah. You know, the, the, the likes of Zappos, et cetera, right? That, that's very much a, very much a small percentage. I think the the three types of organizations, the bureaucratic, whatever, and the generative bureaucratic. And I am going to screw this up. The three types of organization, sociologist, Ron Westrom. In 1988 he developed a topology of organizational cultures. We we had it on a previous podcast But there were three types of organizations, pathological, meaning power oriented, bureaucratic, meaning rule oriented, and then generative, meaning performance oriented, the startups that we're thinking of the startups they are the generative organizations. They are truly trying to create the whole organization. Is based around creating something and larger organizations and even bureaucratic organizations will hear that and they'll say, Oh, no, I'm, I'm based on creating something too, right? Totally, but that's not the real, the real reason for your organization is to, so that the people in charge can show off their power and abuse people or whatever, like that, that's the majority of work that happens. Unfortunately, if you've ever been in a place where politics is the main thing that happens in the organization That's because it's a pathological organization, bureaucratic you can imagine the same thing, You know who has whose turf and whatnot and then generative is probably the startups where every day you're doing something different and everyone's doing everything right that kind of thing if you've ever worked at a startup and you've worked at a large company You don't need this difference explained. You just know it, you know, well, the culture is different. I mean, yeah, the culture is different, but there is a reason the culture is different is because the focus of the organization is in a different place. And if you stay at a startup long enough, you'll see the culture shift from generating towards one of the other two over time, as the company grows, you add more and more layers, a startup could be pathological as well. I mean, this, you know, you got those people, the old control freaks, the old Theranos you know, I can use that name because there's like documentaries about the around us and stuff like that. I should stop and check that but also move it on because I want to get to the I want to get to the people. I want to get like Curtis says it's about the people and let's get to the most interesting part of this illusion of control which is the people. So. In the pathological organization, it gets that way because this, this feeling of being in control, Is tied to somebody's identity So like their identity is I am the person in control and then Go back to episode 100 on the fixed mindset like it'd go back on carol dweck's mindset mindset when ed was here. The idea that If you answer, I don't know to a question and you were in a leadership like a director level or a vp level or whatever That's like an original sin, basically, in terms of the organization. Like, if you realize that, like, Oh, I'm in this position, I'm a leader, or maybe my leader's in a position and they can never say, I don't know, because sometimes I've worked for people that they'll just make something up and it'll be completely nonsense. Congratulations, you just found a red flag to let you know, Oh, oh, I'm not in a fast paced, advancing startup. I'm in a pathological organization. Yeah, absolutely. I've met leaders like that. I've worked for some leaders like that where they would make stuff up and then later on when they proved to be wrong I never said that. Right. They'll say well, you're the one who acted on it. It must be your decision. In those kinds of environments those leaders are there to make sure that everybody that reports to them works by the book. Their book. So yeah, I mean, I'm sure everybody's come across this at some point if you've been working for a bit in your career, it's a great one. There's a great one on the other side, which is quite rare, but it is very refreshing when you see a leader that just says, I don't know. So I was at a small it wasn't a startup. It was a small software house. 50 people. Global though, right? The leadership was reasonably flat with only two layers and the leader would often say, What would you do in this situation? Right. And he'd say, Because I don't know. You're closer to the situation than I am. So what would you do? And he would solicit your input and act on it. I thought that was refreshing. That was really amazing actually, because he would come out of the customer site back in the day and sit there in front of the customer. and this would happen in front of the customer where the customer asks a question to him. Right. And he would say, I don't know, what would you do? And I say something of, well, I'm going to go with what he said. Yeah, very empowering Makes me want to share more, you know, Yeah well, it also it allows you to own The solution the resolution solution, but like both I guess. Yeah, but also it's like I have in my mind, the Toyota Kata questions, like the, andon questions are like, what's the situation as you're observing it, you know, what did you expect? What can you do to resolve all the step through the questions that I always mess up in every podcast. But it reminds me of that set is like the set of five questions or whatever it is. It reminds me of that set of questions is I'm not stepping in. I'm not stepping in to tell you what to do. I'm stepping in so that you feel supported. First of all, I'm there in case you're just like, what is the situation? What did you expect to happen? I have no idea. It's my first day. Right. Okay. You need some help. Somebody steps in, we give some coaching, get you some help. You're not unsupported. it's not a, you failed pointing fingers. Type of situation i'm here to coach you and to help you through this. We're on the same team Yeah, and so where it goes south really fast is when that leader has one of their peers Right within earshot. They're not gonna say I don't know in front of their peers that is losing face Yeah, and they're gonna want to do the opposite which is exert their authority and do a little bit of peacocking as I call it unfortunately that has a negative effect on people that work for this leader because That's the behavior and it goes down one of two paths. Typically. There's only two that i've seen which is Good workers will say this is terrible. I'm leaving And so you lose good people. The other people that stay will say, Oh, wow, if I do this, I'll get promoted. This is the behavior that is expected of me. And they start emulating those leaders. I've seen that too. But like some people, some people really do Like, their heart's in the right place, they know what they should do but they don't push back or they commit to things that they know they can't do, and I feel that is because they're either stressed out or they're under such cognitive load. they agree to things that they know Like if they were de stressed Unburdened whatever being like, yeah, they were not stressed, but not in that situation They would make a better choice But because they're already overloaded, they commit to something and then end up working nights and weekends they have the seniority the talent and the positional authority to actually be like, no, we can't do this, but they will say yes. I've seen a lot of senior devs, architects, stuff like that. Managers, especially but they'll say yes Because they're under this cognitive load of oh, I got these deadlines and I got these other projects going on and I got this And i'm afraid of looking bad or whatever You know, there may be other factors, but the cognitive load is the main factor, Definitely and i'm willing to bet that those people are in that culture where you know, saying no is not really well received Yeah, probably I mean that Like, I, I it's hard to separate a person's identity slash position because some people's position is their identity. Yeah. Like, oh, I'm a founder in a startup. Right. I'm a VP at a bank. Like, that's their identity. Like, that is their personality. And then these people, like when they get fired, they don't know what to do with their lives. They're completely lost because that is what they, you know, it's hard to separate the identity from the person and I'm like it worries me This the like this stuff worries me when I see people like this because they're even when I was in like the agile transformation business Whenever whenever I thought that was a good idea and like working with people that really knew psychology, that, that part of my career, I started understanding though, like these people have a emotional damage, emotional damage. Number one, they don't learn from failures because they don't look at failures as a chance to learn. They don't look at it like that. That's true. But even if they fix that, they've got this thing inside of them where they had these chaotic childhoods where they, nothing was under their control. So now as adults, they seek to control everything. So they need a plan for everything. Right., nothing can be ambiguous, they're these people in my program I talked about earlier in the podcast where they need two years of plans. Across a market that might be gone in two years. Yeah, they need two years of plans Just so they can feel that their money's being well spent, you know They're not okay with any level of ambiguity and if we start working in six months passes And now we're on a completely different part of the roadmap that we didn't plan in the first place Or let's be honest Gantt chart Now it's somebody's fault because we didn't plan well enough. So the next time we plan We're going to spend even more time and go even deeper. And now we need three years of plans. this pursuit of certainty or the sense of certainty, right. In business, that is something that I've seen very, very often go wrong badly when you're looking at plans at 18 plus months out. They do that because they're in a position. To have to defend a budget typically like they asked for a budget and people above them that grant the money are looking for something, a sense of comfort that you're going to spend the money wisely. You're going to have the impact. You say you will. So how do we know that? Well, here's what I can give you. I can give you a Gantt chart that says by March 2025. We will be on Saturn. Yeah. Right. Actually, this is a great, this is actually a great example of the Gantt chart plan is like, here's our, here's our 15 year plan. It costs bajillion dollars to put a man on the surface of Saturn and nobody in the room ever just stood up and raised their hands like excuse me I don't think the service of Saturn is actually solid. I think it's, I think it's a gas giant. You, you're fired. Get out. You're the troublemaker. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So these people have these plans, and to your point, you know, the minute it starts to deviate, They're looking for someone to blame someone to sacrifice, right? What happens in that organization though, right? They sacrifice somebody. Okay, and now the plan is now adjusted Re baselined is the technical term right in project management and you follow another path and you're doomed to repeat that again and again so either your plan is Superiors will get fed up with you and say you have a repeat pattern here of not delivering and you're gone. Or you keep firing people under you where you don't even build up enough, you know, Trust equity with those people that can actually help you deliver anything. So as an interim thing like few months, maybe a year or so if you're there great collect the paycheck do that But keep that resume updated because it's a very tenuous situation to be in as a leader. We're in the part of the podcast that I really want to talk about the, let's put aside the slowly rolling and picking up size and steam and speed and, and, and lethality snowball. Of cognitive dissonance in leadership for a second because I want to ask you as a enterprise coach When you spot these characteristics of these like oh, like i've encountered a person in the program or a person in a partner program or whatever i'm trying to like deal with like i'm trying to knock down dependencies across the org And you deal with these people who just clearly have this, this a fixed mindset about a fear of failure. Like they're, they're completely not going to learn from failure. Hopefully you are aligned at a leadership level where you can say look, you can either develop these people and keep them with you. Right. They have some flaws, you might want to address them. Or you're not aligned at that level and you know there's very little that you can do. It seems untenable. Yeah, that's the right word. It is untenable. I think some people you can bend them away from the situation a little bit. Some others you can moderate the situation by saying, I see your plan. What degree of confidence do you have in that March 2025 date? If the date were to be July instead, Would your degree of confidence go up? Right? So you can try and do that, arriving at a point where there's a little bit more of a comfort level in the plan that they're putting together. But more often than not, what happens is these people are embedded in the organization. As a coach, you're a visitor. You're coming in, you're a catalyst, and you're going to be gone. So you can't really change that. You won't be able to, you know, win City Hall, right? So one of the things you can do is to say, We can have these plans, but let's have subsidiary plans. Let's have plans that say we'll pick up on when we get to, for example, let's say March. I can't remember. Anyway, let's say it was March 25 to be on Saturday. Let's wait till the end of January. And then we'll say, well, we're nowhere near on that plan, on that trajectory. Right? What do we do? Well, can we examine this other trajectory that has us getting out there in November instead of March, and given what just happened, that we shifted from March to November, do you really want to forecast November because it's further out, it's more ambiguous, you don't know stuff? So how about we say sometime, like, maybe next March? And we'll surprise people. If we go there sooner, I try and coach that kind of, you know, mentality, if you will, right. and give everyone a range, don't say Mars, just say somewhere between X and Y. I want to stay in the weeds for a second because I want to ask about budgeting. So like, what, what if they come back and you're like, Oh, okay. Oh, I see that you're targeting March or, but all of our budgeting is done 12 months ahead, but we need to lock that budget 12 months ahead in this many months. So like, really we're like 18 months out forecasting a budget for the next 12 months. Like, you know, the year is only like six months in, and we're already doing the budget for the next year. So like, What would you say if like they're using that against you to be like, no, no, no way. Like, I understand what you're saying on like, you know, you want to do your thing, but we can't do three months because we do our budgets 12 months at a time. And that's just organizational. That's just what we do organizationally. I mean, in that situation, ideally, the fallacy of annual budgeting for software projects, especially, if you're not going to be able to change that organization's Mindset and thinking from away from annual project level budgeting to product feature budgeting. If you're not gonna be able to do that, one of the things you could try to do is to say, Let's do micro budgeting instead. So 12 months. Okay, can we look at that? Can we do quarterly budgeting and have a milestones at a quarterly level that we can try and hit, right? It gives us the opportunity to pivot faster if we don't make that quarterly budget. And as the product manager here, your finance folks will resist doing quarterly budgeting because they'll say, Oh my goodness, this big budgeting activity, I got to do it four times now instead of one time. Yes, but it is much smaller. Yes. And if the gripes are, well, I can't break up my engineering spend because I only get the AWS bill once a year or whatever. First of all, you don't get the AWS bill once a year, you get it every month. So it's already broken up that way. And if you can't break it up by product, you have a different problem you need to solve, which you should solve anyway. But from a product perspective the product should have PNL, which cuts across all the technology. Yes, if the first time you break it up, it may be painful, but you actually become much more nimble in this process if you do it quarterly. I'll tell you what, another big benefit of doing it that way is this, if you're looking at a budget at a quarter level and you have things that you could be spending money on and you have, you have options, right? Sure. It allows you to switch between options a lot better than So, an example is, let's say you have three options that you could be spending your money on. You start down the path of option A because everybody agreed that was the right thing to do. You get into it a little bit and find, well, maybe that's not. Option B has more merit now. So, If you're doing quarterly you could say well, let's switch now and let's not wait until the budget runs out so that's the I guess the model that I try and explain to people Because they don't know what they don't know, right? unfortunately large organizations don't really Listen to that. Yeah. Well, I mean like it goes like earlier on the podcast we already talked about like large the large organization has large organizational inertia and Steering that ship is like, you know But pull the wheel a half a degree in to the right and then wait a couple months, right? You know that even the people at the top find it very difficult and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of dedication to sear that ship and they have to stay on it Because again, like just the inertia of the system will move it back to its natural course without constant pressure on the system. But it is possible to change the system. It's possible to change finances. I've done it more than once in my career. Like it's for product. I'm amazed that you don't do this. Well, especially for software products, because you don't have the expense and the pain of having to retool an assembly line. But what if they use the opposite? Argument on you and say, I can't plan more often than yearly because so much of our work is, unpredictable. So I just have to have this team and they're dedicated to this product, but I never know what they're going to do. So I can't plan at all. That's the opposite argument to the opposite argument because they are unpredictable. That simply underscores the need to plan more frequently, not less frequently. Because what if you plan something at an annual level or even six months and the team is going to do something completely different? You'd rather pivot as soon as you can. Right. So how soon is that? That's the question back to them, right? Well, the organization I'm thinking of right now is they had a, what we think of as like a keep the lights on team, but the keep, keep the lights on team. Wasn't really just to keep the lights on team. They did do feature development. It was like the product was in sunset, but it was like some of this weird state between maintenance and sunset. Like we did a podcast on this life cycles but in that. In that circumstance, they're resisting doing any planning. And I'm wondering, if in that kind of organization where they don't exactly know, when they're going to flex and have extra time when they're going to, be able to do feature development versus just fighting fires or whatever, what would your advice to that kind of organization be where they're not sure how they could have a sprint or two where they did make a plan. They had a goal for a month and then something blew up. Right. They had to like put everything on hold, fix the fires or whatever. maybe they only have a week of actual feature development done obviously investing in the product by throwing more money at it is the real solution, but. most companies try to avoid that until the bitter end at that stage in the product life cycle, they don't want to invest more money. So there's only two paths here, right? One is you hive off a team that is simply keeping the lights on versus a team that's building features. I don't like that as much. The uncertainty, the uncertain nature of incoming production issues. and the people that are in that KTLO team all they're ever doing is fixing firefighting, right? They're not learning new things. They don't have the luxury to do that. The other model that I like a little better is you have a team and you reserve some capacity in the team, in your sprint to do these fixes, you can look back. Half a dozen sprints and see again, you know, past performance is no guarantee, et cetera, but you can look back as a guide and say 15 percent of the sprint was spent on average for the last six sprints on bug fixes. So you could allocate 15, 20 percent of your team's capacity. So let's say you were 20%, right. And in the next sprint, you didn't have as many. It's not like people are sitting around idle. You're simply saying when. This stuff comes in, it goes at the top of the Kanban lane, right? In the kind of production issues lane, and people can work on that. And I like the idea of having any team member be able to swarm on that issue, as opposed to specialists that just do bug fixes, right? So that model works pretty well because you're not going to have idle time with team members. They're always working the 20 percent that I mentioned. If they don't use it. They feel free to pick up from the top of the stack of the backlog, pick up something, refactor, maybe learn new, you know, new tools or something, right? So they can always do something productive. That model, I think, is a better way to go. We were talking about the category of cognitive dissonance, and I wanted to save this category, because you said something on this podcast A lot of people in leadership, and I know for a fact, I've heard recruiters say this is well, past performance is the best indicator of future results and me coming from a software development background knows past performance does not necessarily in any way, shape or form have anything to do with the future results. The program I was talking about, they got a guy who was a dashboards product guy. And they brought him over to manage backend, data pipelines and transformation teams. And he completely flailed. He legitimately thought that he knew everything until he, until a failure started happening and it started rolling back to him and he started realizing, you know, obviously he would never say that because this, this was a very pathological organization, so he couldn't say it out loud, but by his actions, he knew that he had made a bad decision and he would quickly roll back and, you know, probably blame somebody or whatever. But that idea of, Oh, because you were successful here. I like I'm that's my identity. I am a successful product manager. I can take a program that's in chaos and whip it into shape and whatever. And then I go to somewhere else and I try to do that and now I'm totally failing. All right, so. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in large organizations where they're constantly moving people around when plans don't materialize, right? So they'll bring somebody over from another area of the business where they've been successful. Doing something over to here because you're needed here to you know, kind of propagate the success. Right. And it doesn't work out that way because the domain is different. So in this sort of situation, what is the right thing to do? If you're an individual who is being brought in like that, what should you do? I think you need to look at yourself in the mirror and say, am I aware of what I'm getting into? Right. Be bold enough to say that's a great opportunity, but no, I'm fine here. Or keep that resume updated because you will not be successful, unfortunately. And you'll just be another number. Like when you create a plan and expectation is laid down, like it was chipped in the stone, right? And like when that expectation meets the market reality, like that stone just dissolves and everyone was like, but it was chipped in the stone. It must've been permanent. And then it dissolves. And then we just can't like, this is the cognitive dissonance that like in, in my mind that I've seen before is. Everybody feeling that since, since we went through the planning activity, that guarantees success. And this is just, it's just the way that these, the people on that side of the business were raised to believe they checked all the boxes. They must be successful. You know, they never realized that like they built the vessel. What is the Deming book? They built the best vacuum tubes in the world that the world has ever seen. Yeah. You know, and they just happened to deliver them to market. In the time that transistors came out, whoops, you know, suddenly nobody needs vacuum tubes. I think the same thing about. Executives or salespeople, salespeople, we like to fight with salespeople, right? Salespeople that say like, I know what feature to build, build this feature or whatever. And then, you know, you build it, you bring it to market and they say, well, you built it wrong or you didn't deliver it fast enough. Or, you know, these grapes are sour there are some assumptions here. And some, some business risks. Gary was successful selling bicycles. He was. And Gary's now selling cloud services. At least that's what he told us. That's what he told us, yeah. Well, they brought him in because he sold enough bicycles in a quarter to, you know, make his quarter. So he's now selling cloud services, right? He doesn't have any. background in that. But he has credibility. He comes in with this perceived credibility that he can succeed because he succeeded somewhere else before. So yeah, I mean, look, there's plenty of examples like that. Marketing folks are like that as well, because it's very much a domain layer thing. If you're not aware of the domain you're in, and what the competitive pressures are in that domain, how are you going to be successful? Right? so if you're given a choice, just to underscore my previous point, if you're given a choice and you're on the fence about it then don't take that chance But if you're forced into it, they say well, no, we want you over here now. You're not given a choice in that, right? What do you do as an individual you're coming in and you're just asked to make these plans You could do a lot worse than trust the people that are there already, right? Enlist them to say what would your worst plan be? What would your best plan be and then go somewhere in between? Yeah. Right. I mean, that's the best advice I can provide at this stage. Figure out the rationale behind it. Try to tackle the issues rather than, you know, just coming in saying, well, I'm going to create a plan. You can't do it on your own to begin with, because you're in a different domain. So, you're going to have to rely on people that have the main knowledge and expertise. That may take time to develop those relationships. So every plan is a draft, first of all, right? And the plan Ends in making revisions to the plan, so we'll revisit this plan in three months as opposed to this is the plan because to your point it gets etched in stone the minute you say a date it gets, etched in, stone as expectation of guarantee This is it you said but you said right and you can't unlock that right because you did say that. Yeah so yeah, I mean those are things I can offer here, right? Just make a plan to revisit the plan We've had a lot of podcasts. Dealing with this, like where you're going now? I don't know. One 41 minimal viable product probably can help you too. But 72 was Gantt charts. 85. 185, what companies do instead of strategy, right? Yeah. Cause these are all ways to recognize, what's going on. I wanted to talk very quickly about uncertainty and ambiguity avoidance to point out the, Dutch management researcher Gert Hofstede about the cultural dimensions theory from 1980 the Hofstede cultural dimension theory It's a framework used to understand the difference in culture across countries It has six dimensions including power distance uncertainty avoidance individualism collectivism masculinity femininity in short versus long term orientation I'm showing it on the screen now. that's Hofstede's six dimensions of culture it has the additional Indulgent versus restraint that was added. I believe after his research But I wanted to to show this because the high uncertainty Avoidance index, the one in the middle that you see there on the screen high uncertainty avoidance index. You can ascribe that to cultures. I would argue corporate culture it's funny cause when you read his research, the folks with high uncertainty the folks with the avoidance of high uncertainty, so the folks that were not okay with ambiguity he described them as highly emotional in their framework. So that was interesting to me. I was interested to read the paper. I'd be interested to read it and talk more about it, but like being okay with uncertainty, like I just bring this up to show you like there are frameworks out there to analyze and kind of categorize these cultural. Just functions of the, I dare say dysfunctions he's just, he's just like this framework, for example, that we found is like, he's just pointing out facts. Like it's just a thing. It's just what it is. It kind of makes sense to me that people that have a high uncertainty avoidance index are more emotional because they've probably will feel like they're uncomfortable at not being able to defend things that are asked of them. Right. That's yeah. I'm a manager. That's my identity. If you're challenging, Oh, I don't think that these six teams under the one manager is the best organizational design. Maybe we should, you know, give teams autonomy to do. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're attacking my identity as a manager. I think you're the problem. So yeah, that's exactly right. That's why they're, they're emotional. I'd like to talk about some of these other ones at some point, but maybe not on this podcast, because there's some good ones there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like power distance index, more about that. Well, I'll have to find the original paper, 1980 paper on this, and read it, and then read the, it's been picked up several times by different researchers. So maybe we'll look at that on a different podcast. And, if you actually know about Hoffstead if you actually know anything about the research, like comment below I would be interested to be schooled on this topic. always willing to be schooled. But something I don't need to be schooled on is the concept of the meritocracy and the Puritan work ethic mythos in American culture. The idea that if you just hustle, if you just work harder, if you grind, if you just grind, if you hustle culture and you will get ahead, the problem is not. It's not that these plans don't properly capture the changing in the markets and the ambiguity that we're, it's just you didn't plan enough, you didn't work hard enough. That's right. You have more than 24 hours in your day, so you need to be able to work harder, harder, faster, faster. throw a rock in any of these glass houses online, and you will hit. You will definitely hit one of these people telling you that like, oh, this, you just didn't plan hard enough. You didn't spend enough time planning the sad part of this is like the leaders, executives, directors, whatever you want to say in the organizations. These, there are tons of people with this. If you failed, it's because you didn't plan deep enough or spend enough time or you didn't forecast this thing in the market that we didn't know about. You know, you didn't forecast that everyone was going to start stealing mp3s., your 8 ball was too fuzzy. You didn't polish it enough., unfortunately, those that say that probably never had to do this level of planning themselves. Or maybe they did and they failed and kind of got promoted to their highest level of incompetency. you could spend twice as long as you've spent planning where the plan didn't work. And the probability of the plan now suddenly working out. That is not any greater, I don't think, right, because you don't know what you don't know. I don't have a lot of time or patience to spend on things like this and the nice thing about being advanced in my career, I'll put it that way. Yeah. Is I don't have to take this point seriously anymore. Right. Whereas early in my career, I did have to take it seriously because I will look at this, and wonder whether the person I'm dealing with is just a narcissist. Or the person I'm dealing with is trying to deflect blame or whether the person is just in over their head and they don't, you know, they're feeling like not out of control. They're feeling like they're out of their depth. And they're, you know, they need to take some control back by blaming somebody else, you know, that kind of thing. Feeling threatened maybe even. Feeling threatened, yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, like, there's so many, like, when I hear this, you know, or someone is ascribing to hard work and positioning what actually came from luck. So it's like, Hey, you know, look at me, I worked hard and I've got all these houses and all this money, you could have all these houses and money too, if you were just born 30 years ago to rich parents, if you really peel back the layers and you're like, well, what exactly, like the product manager on the podcast, if I really take apart the situation and start putting the variables of like, we want to, we like, this is not an art. We want to make this into a science and I really start peeling away your success into science and I have full This is where this is where it starts becoming fantasy, right? I have full inspection of the truth 100 facts, And I can start putting these things of like well, you know, you were in this market before everyone else You really didn't know what you were doing. you know, it happened on chance, you know, how many times does that happen where somebody plays golf with somebody and if you called in sick or had a hangover that day or whatever. You wouldn't have played the golf game or, you know, luck, there's some luck involved. There's definitely that element, and it's not insignificant. Overall, I'd say. I'm not saying that's the majority of it, but overall, that is a key component, one of the key components that gets overlooked, because nobody wants to give you credit for being lucky. On the other side of that, people will move mountains, they'll move heaven and earth to hide luck from the equation of success and, all these people online that talk like this, that are trying to sell you something they're not gonna tell you that they were in the right place at the right time Or how they just like choked it down and dealt with a narcissist for long enough to stay in one place That's the nice thing about listening to the arguing agile podcast is like all the nasty little things and whatever like we're not glossing over No And that the nastiest of the nasty is narcissists. Narcissists, my goodness. Now remember, this is the tyranny of plans and again, I can talk about this as if it is a fact because there are plenty of studies that say the people with the psychological traits to make it to the top in corporate America just happened to align with all of the traits of narcissists. Let's just pick a number out of the air. Let's say 10 percent of the corporate America workforce. I happen to think that that number is bigger than that. But anyway, it doesn't matter That's a lot of people overall in terms of just sheer numbers I'd say also those people happened, they won't say they were lucky, but they happened to align with like people. So if you think about a leader and you can definitely say, Oh yeah, I can pigeonhole that person as being a narcissist, they're successful. Chances are they came up working for a narcissist. If you disagree, great, let us know. But that's what I believe, right? Because a narcissist will reward a narcissist. Thanks. that's what I firmly believe that they feel, they feel like that is the way to work. That is how you work. That's what they recognize. Everything else gets, you know, Oh, well, all of that stuff, psychological safety, all that touchy feely stuff. Nah, I don't care about that. People are here to work. The blanket statement to make here is a narcissist has an inflated sense of control and influence over the environment and they will seek to push the organization in this direction towards the tyranny of plans and planning and away from this distributed control that we know works, even the military uses this kind of decision matrix. So we know it works, but they will. When the decision is successful, they will claim the credit for it. When it's not, then they will push the blame down. But you don't get to do one without the other. It's hard to separate those two out. And I also think that it's the kind of thing that feeds on itself. if they do this and they are, Successful They will continue to do more of it, So they'll continue to feed on that way of working. And they will foster those kinds of traits in people that work for them because they want to be successful too. Have you ever run into one of these people in a program as an enterprise agile coach and if you have, What strategies would you suggest that I employ should I run into somebody like this as like a product manager in the organization? I have run into them several actually. And the second part of your question is harder to answer because it's situational, right? But here's what I will say. If you're coming in as a consultant, you're not beholden to them, right? So you should definitely. Do it in the right way, but you should definitely challenge what they're pushing, but challenge it in a way where you're not challenging the person, right? Always tackle the problem, not the person. So I would go in and say, well, I see this as a problem. Not I see you as a problem. I see this as a problem. We're planning way too far in advance. So why don't we do this? Let's try. Planning a little bit of a shortened time horizon. But what we'll do is I know, you know, you want to see an 18 month plan. How about we do a six month plan and before those six months are up, we'll come back and reevaluate this plan and adjust it for another six months. Going forward because it's going to allow us to pivot which is where I want the organization to go so yeah, definitely you can do some things at that level without alienating the person. Oh boy as a narcissist I like I like the idea like where you're going with is is a whole nother podcast And I already have the title. It's playing with fire Dealing with narcissists because like what you just suggested was find out, find out a way where you can make the narcissist your ally on this one particular issue. And now you're basically using the power of evil for the purpose of good. you're, you're building trust with that person, right? Theoretically, yeah. I'm with you but wow, like you do that while keeping that resume updated at the same time. For sure, if you're a consultant, you're always doing that anyway, but yeah, I agree with you. Keep that resume updated. If you're an employee that's in that situation. Definitely try some of these things, but you know, at the same time, yeah, keep that resume updated, folks. Well, I mean, we went all around the world on this podcast. We sure did. It's been a long time since we did an hour long podcast. We have one that's very close to this arguing agile 184 the illusion of control Which is a like a quick 33 minutes So, you know 20 20 to 20 minutes on 1. 5 speed or whatever, you know 15 18 minutes or whatever that one's worth listening to. and of course the Taylorism, I mean, a lot of what we talked about today, it's the specter of Taylorism other than the personal stuff of like people were just raised in chaotic households. And now they've got this thing. They just can't get over you personally. That's the one that we talked about today that I am I would struggle with because I just don't have any good suggestions Other than like just don't work for those people. That's not great You know, but other than that one you can steer the ship. You can make little changes. Sure. Just like, your suggestion for dealing with narcissists, like, meet them where they are, and then try to agree with them to change one very small thing. And then from that one small thing, maybe, You know, you can expand. I think that's a good way to do it. people that have kind of grown up with it like that, you know, it is harder, right? Because they will not instinctively give you that trust that you need. But, one of the things you could pivot to is to say this environment that you're in now is safe. It's okay to fail here, right? We're not going to fail. But here's what I need you to do. Come on a journey with me. If we fail, that's fine. I'll own that, right? So they can feel a little bit safer coming out toward you, right? That's what you need to do with that. It's gonna take longer. Cause that person is really, that hurt is deep with them. So yeah, it's gonna take time. All right. So plans are worthless. Planning is everything. I think it was Eisenhower that said that. Yeah, it was Eisenhower. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, definitely get into planning, but do just enough. Just in time, just in time planning. Also, I feel the modern form product management. That's the whole reason it exists. It exists to knock down the Marty Kagan for risks. And you know, like business viability. is one of them. You know, is this something that, that our business can do? That's, that customers will use and, you know, all the rest of the categories, can we technically do it? You know, all the categories, they, they exist for this reason. You want to go to the next milestone and no further than that, because the cost. Of going beyond that is just astronomical. Oh, we want to land somebody on the surface of Saturn, , okay, well, let's tear apart the assumptions in this idea and talk about it. There's so many assumptions built in that plan That need to be knocked down. Like I guess you could build a plan that way Where it's like here's all the assumptions that we have We're going to build a knock down the assumptions plan but modern software development is not done this way in terms of like Assumptions that roll up to actual features that roll up to actual, you know, business goals. That would be cool though. It would be cool if we had a system that luckily, luckily we don't. Sorry, I was going to say luckily Alex is listening and he's ready to, he's ready to build that in. But anyway, if you like this podcast, it was not brought to you by Jira... Just like none of our other programs, just like none of our other podcasts. Like and subscribe down below, please and if you like this podcast, please share it with a friend or an enemy. Share it with a friend or 10 enemies or a sea anemone. Some of those will become your friends. Yeah.