Review: You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them

You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them by Olivier Sibony
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake is a book about why organizations make bad decisions, and how to create processes and environments where we can make better ones, understanding the value of process and collaboration over any specific individual’s leadership.

Much of the advice here will seem familiar if you have studied ideas about how we make decisions but the context of strategic decision making is new.  The audience and examples are geared towards strategic business decisions, but this will give you insight into how you and others make decisions that might not be optimal in all aspects of your life.

The advice is obvious and common sense in retrospect, but obvious and common sense doesn’t always mean visible and common. I’ve come across few groups that follow even the general principles here, much less the entire framework. 

Sibony references agile organizations, and while his meaning isn’t the same as “Agile” in the context of software development, If you are familiar with Agile Software Development practices, many of the concepts, and some of the practices may seem familiar. Agile Retrospective frameworks, for example, follow a process framework that helps teams avoid many of the problematic decision making biases. 

A recurring theme in the book is the importance of process and collaboration over any specific individual’s leadership. In my experience process can make the difference between success and failure for a team, and this book drives the value of process and collaboration home. And Sibony notes that circumstance plays a role: The same good plan can succeed or fail depending upon factors beyond your control, and the same bad plan might work surprisingly well if one is lucky. Sibony tells us how to set up processes so that our big strategic decisions factor in these factors so that we have a reasonable sense of risks involved.

A key part of a good decision process is the definition and role of a leader.  Sibony points out that much of the advice he presents goes counter to the model of the certain, definitive, action-oriented leader. For better decisions we need to to step away from that idea. While final decisions may rest with an individual leader,  the process to get there must be collaborative. 

The book ends with a summary of the key concepts, and good bibliography, and notes. You may well find your self finishing this book with a much longer reading list than when you started.

Whether you are a senior manager, a team lead,  or active in a volunteer organization, the principles in this book will help you create frameworks to enable better decisions. And as an individual you will gain insight how to understand how others make decisions, as well as how you might think about how you make important decisions.

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Review: Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business Growth

Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business Growth by Jurgen Appelo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Though I’ve never been a founder, I’ve been an early member of startup companies and internal ventures (such as  being a founding member of the, at the time new,  Boston office for Fitbit )  so I was curious to read Jurgen Appelo’s book Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean and Agile Business Growth, and see how relevant it was for me. It turned out to be very much so.  Appelo combines lean and agile principles with a model for business development that is relevant for both an entrepreneur starting a company, and an intrapreneur, leading a product initiative or a team.   

Since the book weaves many agile concepts and processes, such as backlogs, burn down charts, and retrospectives, into the process,  I was tempted to title my review something like “Agile for Startups” or “A Startups with Agile values.” But those names would misstate two key take-aways from the book. First, agile themes like “Inspect and Adapt” are just a really good way to start a venture, as new ideas require that you get constant feedback and adapt to it. If this weren’t the case and you knew what would work and how to do it, it would not be a venture. Second, this isn’t just about startups companies. Appelo addresses these idea in the context of an entrepreneurial startup or any intrepreneruial internal venture. In either case, you need to demonstrate value to secure a continuing funding source, or fail. And the feedback loops agile approaches like experiments and retrospective are essential to building that value.

Reading through the book I was struck by how often Appelo makes points that are both obvious and iconoclastic.  At one point he asserts that “growth” should never be a goal in itself,  but way to achieve  success, such as delivering value to more customers, which seems counter to common business thinking,  but which makes perfect sense. Similarly he describes how teams often frame cultural fit as being “similar” rather than “complementary” -- which is to say that a new person fills a gap on the team.

The book covers everything from funding, and planning to hiring. The hiring ideas are reminiscent of the ones I learned from Johanna Rothman in Hiring Geeks that Fit, albeit with slightly different terms, which are in essence, figure out how to what qualities you need in an employee, decide how you measure them

Appello’s Witty, irreverent  and humorous style make this one of the more entertaining business books to read, and the style reflects a perspective on business that might make you want to reconsider things you took from granted.  At the very least you’ll be tempted to explore the supporting materials that are linked at the end of every chapter

Whether you are in a startup, involved in building a new product for an established company,  of just curious about how businesses succeed, Startup, Scale Up Screw Up is an enjoyable, informative, and actionable read that will likely generate many ideas of things to do or learn more about.

Review: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I hadn’t planned to read this book, but since it came as a bonus in a Next Big Idea Club box I gave it a read, and I was glad that I did. Gladwell uses stories of situations gone wrong to illustrate how our our interactions with strangers sometimes fails, and why. Through a number of stories bookended by the tragic Sandra Bland incident, we see the challenges of interacting with people when we assume that we understand their motivations, the downsides of our default to trust people, and the risks of being being too suspicious.

The two main themes of the book are that transparency (the idea that you can “read” people) is rarely reality, and that“defaulting to truth” (basically trusting people) has pros and cons, but the pros outweigh the cons. Gladwell uses stories of spies, terrorist interrogations, and policing to illustrate how things go wrong when we misunderstand how transparency and trust work.

In terms of Transparency, these stories put something important in the context of my personal and professional life into a larger context: It’s hard to guess what people are thinking based on externalities, and acting based on them without checking yourself-- especially when you have an opportunity to ask -- is a good way for interactions to go down hill. It can be difficult to guess what a spouse, colleague, or neighbor is thinking, even when you share a common context. When interacting with people you never met from different cultures and/or backgrounds it’s probably impossible, and curiosity is more likely that not the best approach.

Defaulting to Truth, the idea that people generally believe what others are saying is accurate, is more interesting. Gladwell give us a number of examples of how being too trusting let spies and other bad actors evade detection, even in the face of (in retrospect) obvious clues. On the other hand going the other way and being overly skeptical can lead to dysfunction, and bad things. While sometime bad things happen when we engage in Truth Default behavior, it is also necessary for us to function as society, community, and in interpersonal relationships.

My two main take-a-ways from the book are that, while Truth Default can sometimes lead you astray, the alternative can be worse , and that transparency is a myth, and curiosity is better. We need to understand when to apply healthy skepticism, both of others, and of our own perceptions to thrive as a community. With endnotes and footnotes for those who want to dig deeper, Talking to Strangers is an engaging book that is very topical. Anyone who wants to think about how to build better interactions, at any scale, should find this book valuable.

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Review: Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick by Wendy Wood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Having read The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and more recently, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, I was skeptical that there was much more I could discover about habit and motivation by reading another book. I was wrong. Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick by Wendy Wood is an insightful exploration of science behind how and why habits form, and how we can use this information to improve our work and personal lives, as well as our health, told from the perspective of someone who has studied the subject from a scientific and social perspective.

Wood describes habits as a kind of automation, which allows us to focus our mental energy on more “important” things, as well providing us for default behaviors in times of stress. In some cases the habits serve us well, in others our habit behavior can be the wrong thing for the moment. Wood Explores how habits help us move forward, how they can lead us into “ruts” and how to use our tendency to form habits to our benefit, and for growth rather than letting them keep us static.

A recurring theme in the book is the relationship between habit and “context”. Those who do well on avoiding distractions and deferring immediate, if not beneficial, rewards (“The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control) succeed less because they are actively ignoring the temptation, than because they are good at setting up contexts where they don’t notice temptation. The relationship between context and habit provides useful guidance in how we can create good habits and change bad ones; by setting maintaining (or changing) our contextual triggers, we can affect our automatic behavior.

With examples of how habits apply in the workplace, our personal lives, and in our relationships, Good Habits, Bad Habits is an engaging book that can help you think about how you do what you do, and how to influence yourself and others to form productive dynamics. For those who want to dig deeper, there are many end notes pointing to research, as well as a good bibliography. We all have habits, and our habits, and those of those around us affect the quality of our lives, so it is worth understanding how they work. Wendy Wood’s book gives you that information.

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Review: Indistractable

Indistractable is an exploration of the reasons why we get distracted and strategies we can use to avoid the distraction. Based on research on motivation and compulsion, the information in the book is similar the things I learned in Drive and The Power of Habit, but from a different angle: being mindful of habits and motivators that take our focus away from important things. Or put another way, the things same inner mechanisms that motivate us, and encourage productive behavior can also have the opposite effect. The key, Eyal tells us, is to focus on the triggers.

I like that the book starts out by saying that technology is not the problem, even as we often place blame on the accessibility and draw of electronic devices. This resonates with me, as I can recall times when, as a child, the newspaper or radio was a way for a parent to ignore me, and now as a parent, when my child was able to ignore those around him while doing “good” tasks” like reading. The historical record bears this out as well, as the book quotes an article bemoaning the impact of the Gramophone on the ability of children to focus. There will always be distractions, and while strict rules about avoiding them can help, it’s more sustainable to solve the core reasons for why you are distracted.

As is appropriate for a book on the subject, the chapters are short, and thus easier to feel like you are making progress as you learn to manage your distractions. The book is both inspiring and actionable. After working through the framework there are sections dedicated to how you manage distractions in your various life domains, including work, relationships, and children. The section on making Indistractable children is particularly worth while (though will be more valuable if you read the earlier sections).

If you are an employee, manager, parent, or any combination, you are likely to find value in this book.

Book Review: 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change

Having known Esther Derby from conferences, her writings, and having participated in a problem solving leadership workshop she led, I knew that she was an expert in helping organizations work better. I was thus looking forward to this book. It exceeded my expectations. “7 Rules” is a concise, easy to read book full of useful information . In addition to the “Rules” you will learn about a variety of ways to model organizational dynamics so that you can identify patterns that inhibit change.

This is a very actionable book. Chapters wrap up with things you can do and with a summary of key points. This book can be as much a daily reference as a tools for learning to be a better change agent.

While 7 Rules is about organizational/corporate change, concepts in the book are also helpful in helping you to navigate tricky issues in community and family life. For example, the relationship between congruence and empathy underlies being an effective change agent, and the book can help you understand these concepts better.

The lessons in the book will help you understand how to make changes at any level, from small things like encouraging unit testing to larger things like a better dev process.
The book provides useful advice for managers, scrum masters and those leading sprint and project retrospectives. Since change can happen at all levels anyone who has found challenges at work that they want to improve should consider this book.

Review: Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Loonshots is an engaging analysis of why some organizations nurture innovation while others seem to sabotage it. With a mix of history, organizational anthropology, psychology and even physics, Bacall makes the case for how culture and organizational structure affect innovation. He also explains how to structure teams to support innovation while still providing for a value stream.

I appreciated how Bahcall emphasized that culture isn’t just an afterthought, but rather something that shapes how your organization works. While some of his advice might be more relevant to larger organizations, the themes are helpful to consider in a company of any size, and any stage of growth, from startup to larger company. Relatedly, some of the phrasings for the "rules to follow" sometimes lose subtlety, but the text fills in the details

This book is worth a read is your are interested in teams, organizations, entrepreneurship, or the history of innovation.

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A Contract for One on One Meetings

One on One meetings between a manager and the people being managed are an useful tool for effective management. While “good” one-on-ones can have a variety of dynamics, and “bad” one-on-ones share certain factors. The easiest way for these meetings to go off track is to start them without a clear shared understanding of their purpose and format. We all have different expectations of what a “One on One” means based on our experience and knowledge. Being explicit about the key aspects of these meetings can help you to avoid misunderstandings and make more productive use of your time.
One way to establish common expectations is to create and agree to something akin to a Contract for One on One Meetings, either at the start of a new management relationship, or at a time when your meetings seems to be becoming less effective. Like any long-term agreement, realize that it’s subject to change as situations change. If “contract” seems too formal, think of it as an outline for a conversation.

Having been on both the manager employee side of the conversation, I’ve found the following to be the key points to agree on at the outset. Your list may be different, but I hope that this is a good starting point.

Key Agreements for One on One Meetings

A one-on-one agreement should address the following points. This agreement should allow for situational variation, but if you consistently stray too far, consider having a conversation. For some of the sections, who does something can vary. For simplicity, I specified either manager or employee in the example.

Purpose

While it may seem “obvious” why you’re having one-on-ones, there are enough obvious reasons that it’s worth spelling them out. Are these meetings career focused or project focused? Often one-on-ones are focused on career conversations rather than project work (though project work might provide context). Being explicit and clear is the important thing. If you have only one conversation about one-on-ones, this is the one to have. An example of a purpose statement could be:

The purpose of these one on one meetings is to provide a regular time to check in with each other about career goals, and to understand how we can work together to help the employee achieve her goals, and for the manager to get information to help her manager better.

Scheduling

Agree on how frequently you will meet, who will schedule the meetings, and in what format you’ll meet. Since business and personal commitments might lead to missing an occasional meeting or two, discuss how to handle those situations. The point here is to establish responsibility for scheduling time, and to establish the priority of these meetings. For example:

The manager will schedule one on one time every two weeks (as agreed). If schedules make this hard, the manager will provide notice and try to reschedule. If we miss more than 2 scheduled meetings, we will plan to meet in person, or via video as soon as possible.
The employee will make time for the one on one meeting, and give as much advance notice as possible if there are conflicts which make attendance difficult.

Content

This is a statement about the general agenda and how much preparation to expect. Err on keeping this to general themes so that you can keep to the format over time. It’s useful to include the following components:

• Manager Items
• Employee Items
• Feedback (both ways)
• Career development
• Action Item Review

The Manager will come prepared with items to discuss. During the meeting the manager will offer constructive feedback, follow up on action items, and ask for feedback, and accept it in a non-defensive manner.
The Employee will come prepared with items to discuss. During the meeting the employee will provide follow up on action items, offer constructive feedback to the manager, accept feedback from the manager in a non defensive manner and commit to raising any issues that are, or may be, concerns.

Follow up

Most short meetings will result in work to be done by the participants. This section describes what will happen after the meeting to capture and follow up on action items.

The manager will summarize action items (for both employee and manager). We don’t need meeting notes or minutes in most cases. Each party will make a best effort to follow up on action items.

Summary

The idea of a “contract” for a routine meeting might seem a bit heavy weight, but some form of agreement is essential. My hope is that this can be a framework for a conversation about what a good 1:1 is, even if the details vary.

Excitingly Well Run Meetings

The group of people huddled together in a room “until the job is done” is often used as a demonstration of virtues like “diligence” and “commitment.” And these scenes are often the stuff of dramatic moments in popular culture. We rarely, if ever, see any effusive praise for the well-run meeting that ends on time with a useful outcome. The former is more compelling. The latter is often more valuable and much harder to do. And while there are times that the former is the right thing to do, more often than not, it’s an indication of a problem. Well run meetings are useful meetings.
While it seems a bit pedantic to talk about meetings and schedules, and teams often present a ‘meeting-free culture’ as an ideal, the reality is that software development is a collaborative activity and we need to interact with (or “meet”) with people. When you need collaborate with more than a couple of people — perhaps from different teams — scheduling a meeting is inevitable. People have other commitments and time constraints, and respecting these commitments is good for the organization and the individuals.

Respect

There are many reasons for keeping a meeting on schedule. Starting late or ending late, wastes people’s time, which has a financial cost. But the primary reason keeping to schedule from perspective its it is respectful, and not honoring a schedule shows a lack of respect. By starting or arriving late you are disrespectful to the attendees who might be on time, by not ending on schedule you are being disrespectful to anyone the attendee was supposed to meet after a meeting and anyone who needs the room (or other resources) you are using. Of course, it is OK to you extend a discussion by mutual agreement, but you also need to agree on the basic ground rules.

Meeting Principles and Protocols

There is much written about good meeting structure and facilitation, and if you are in a role where you need to collaborate with people (as most of us are) it’s worth the effort to learn a bit about the subject. An effective meeting has, at minimum, two things: a reason, and a schedule.

A Reason

In general, a meeting worth having should have:

• A reason, which attendees understand.
• A goal, which you can decide if you have met or not.
• An agenda, to help everyone understand if they are on track.
• Attendees who understand why they are there.
• A start and end time that is sufficient to have the discussion you need, and which allows for people to meet their next commitment.

All of these items can have more or less definition depending on the culture of the team, and the nature of a problem, and how close you are to having a common baseline of understanding. A Sprint Planning Meeting might have a more well defined reason, goal, and agenda, than an “explore design options” meeting. But it is important to be able to express these things.

Start Times and End Times

It’s easy to think of meetings as being (say) 1 hour long, starting and ending at hour boundaries. This makes no sense if you assume that anyone else has to be somewhere else after your meeting. It’s helpful to have a protocol where you allow for a buffer at the start and the end of the meeting to allow for transitions. There are many options. for a 1:00 - 2:00 meeting you could:

• Start at 1:05 and end at 1:55
• Start at 1:00 and end at 1:50
• Start at 1:10 and end at 2:00

or any variant. Pick what works for your organization. In my experience the first option seemed to work best, as people tend to be more keyed to “round” boundaries. But as long as everyone is consistent, people will have time to regroup and move between meetings.
Be sure to plan the agenda to include time before the end of the meeting to review what you all decided, what followup is necessary, and to decide who will do that followup.

When “Until we are done” makes sense

The opposite side of watching the clock is the idea that you don’t want to cut short a productive exchange of ideas. Ideally you would have allocated enough time to allow for opportunistic conversation. If you do that, you will need to take care that a non-productive meeting doesn’t expand to fill the allocated time. In some cases you can’t do that, and “in the room until the problem is solved, regardless of schedule” is the right thing to do and makes sense but when certain things are true:

• The issue under discussion needs to be resolved soon.
• The issue is the top priority for everyone in the room who is asked to be there, and everyone understands this.
• If you are using a shared resource, such as a conference room, the issue at hand is the top priority for the organization, and you have priority for using the resource.

All of these things are rarely true at the same time. Most people have other commitments, and in many organizations, meeting rooms are a scarce resource. It’s worth taking the time to solve the hard problem of how to get useful work done on a schedule (and to identify what problem fits in that schedule).

Next Steps

While “meetings” may always have a subtext of “something that distracts from work,” if you make the effort to be respectful of people’s time you’re likely to get more done. While having a company culture or guidelines that supports this approach is good, you can establish these guidelines are part or your working agreements at any level of scale.
Regardless or what guidelines you use, the most important thing is to be mindful of the goals of the meeting, and the reality the people may have other commitments.

Grit with the Nuances (Book Review)

The headline version of what Grit is and how it is important to success doesn’t do the concept justice. That hard work and persistence are as much, if not more, important to talent for success is both appealing on the surface and simplistic. Many subtle details get lost in the elevator pitch, and reading Grit answered many of my questions, and gave me some guidance on how to be more successful in reaching my goals, and how to give my child tools to do the same.

Duckworth draws on the work of people like Cyzmenthaly (Flow), Seligman (Learned Optimism), Carol Dweck (Mindset), Adam Grant (Originals, Give and Take ) . I’ve followed the work of all of these people in my quest to better understand how to help teams be more effective, and also how to be a better parent. These concepts are more widely applicable than you might initially think. Flow first came to my attention via Kent Beck, and Learned Optimism via a reference in a book by Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0) Team and family dynamics have a lot in common.; Gerald Weinberg often refers to the work of Virginia Satir in his writings on quality management.

Through a combination of summaries of her research, stories, and discussions of things to do Duckworth both helps you understand the nuances of grit, and give you ideas for ways to understand and improve the level of grittiness for yourself and those in your charge. Parents, managers, and leaders will find this book an inspiring read. Well written and easy to get through quickly, and you will find yourself wanting to refer to your notes and bookmarks often.

My favorite line from the book is “before hard work comes play” which summarizes the concept that to be gritty you really need a goal that engages you, and it may take some time to discover that. While some of the headlines on grit left me wondering about were how much torturous hard work was involved in being gritty as opposed to just having fun, Duckworth’s use of the phrase “play before passion” was both comforting and intuitive to me. It takes a while to understand what gets you interested, and only once you find those things can you apply yourself in a way that doesn’t totally wear you down.

If you’ve read Mindset, Originals, or Give and Take, there will be some familiar moments. Flow, Learned Optimism, Growth Mindset, and Grit compliment each other; one can lead to another. That I’ve read many of those books over the years in my quest to better understand motivation and engagement (and thus try to be a better manager and parent) may speak to my “Grittiness”

Duckworth also speaks to the issue of practicality. Some passions aren’t practical pursuits, but she gives examples of people who incorporated seemingly impractical passions into their more pedestrian careers to be both successful and helpful. Likewise she relates stories of people who do seemingly mundane things (managing a subway system, managing a janitorial company) and find it extremely rewarding. Since you can only have so many goals that you can focus on, finding commonality between goals is also helpful. For example, many of the things I learn about being a better parent are applicable in people management, and vis versa.

Along with a non-academic description of the theory of Grit, Duckworth discusses how you can better understand and develop your Grittiness and help your children develop it. This book goes into more detail about what Grit is, resolving many of my questions about what Grit really meant and how to improve it (possible) and measure it (not simply). This is a very clear discussion of what Grit is, and is not, and also a pragmatic guide to finding your passion, and develop your skills. If you are a parent, a manager, of just someone trying to master a skill, Grit will inspire you and give you much to ponder.

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Giving, Taking, and Being Successful

I’ve been making good use of my commute time recently, catching up on reading, and in particular, the stack of physical books on non-fiction topics that are somewhat relevant to my work. I was making good progress, only to have new, interesting stuff cross my path. One Sunday morning in December I caught part of an interview with Adam Grant on On Being. I wasn’t familiar with Adam Grant before this, but I’m extremely glad that I caught the show. I soon got a copy of Give and Take by Adam Grant, and I read his next book Originals shortly after it came out. In the spirt of giving, and of the serendipity that led me to learn about Adam Grant, I’ll also mention some of the other books Give and Take brought to mind.

I read Give and Take by Adam Grant as last year ended. This is was a great book to end one year and start another with, as it got me thinking about the value of generosity, not just to others, but also to your self.

Grant explains how givers (as opposed to takers and matchers) get ahead in the long run and also help their teams succeed. Teams which have people who have a positive attitude towards helping others in small ways often do better in the end, and in the long run the helpers are more successful too. This goes contrary to the idea that the way that you make progress is to focus on what you need to do. The reality is that for most complex knowledge work, you can’t do it all yourself. As Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist says, the best creativity is inspired by the work of others. Helping others both enables the larger unit to make forward progress, as well as making it easier for you to get help with your work when you need it.

The idea of people who make the team better, even when their short term contributions don’t seem as significant brings to mind "Catalysts" as mentioned by Tom Demarco in Peopleware.( Slack, another book by Demarco, also came to mind because of it’s discussion of the willingness of volunteers to contribute to efforts). This book also brought to mind another recent book, Invisibles, which discusses the “invisible” people who make things happen, and who are happy to be out of the spotlight. I don’t know if I can say that all invisibles are givers but I would not be surprised if that were true.

Giving can have limits. Many people struggle with how to balance the idea that being helpful and generous is good, while not overcommitting themselves. Grant explains how to be a giver and not overextend yourself. Likewise, givers often have a hard time taking care of themselves by leveraging their tendencies to advocate for others. Both approaches involve an an “otherish-strategy,” which is one of the more interesting (of many interesting) concepts in the book.

To those familiar with Jerry Weinberg, this will seem related to the Airplane Mask metaphor in Secrets of Consulting. Grant gives a more detailed model of how to think it through. Weinberg’s metaphor is still good to keep in in front of mind though.

This book resonated with me on many levels. There are lessons here that will help me in my roles an agile software developer, manager, member or my town community, and member of my UU church community. The information here resonates with, and explains, many things I've learned from Gerald Weinberg, about technical leadership (as in the book Becoming a Technical Leader, and Gil Broza about the agile mindset, and many other useful things I've read about how to be an effective team member.

This book will help you to understand why that's true, how you can be a more effective giver, and how to encourage others to give, so that you can be part of a more effective team or community. As Adam Grant says, we need more givers.

update March 28, 2016: Fixed reference to the correct Tom DeMarco book. I mentioned Slack. I meant Peopleware.

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How Mindsets can Help or Hinder Learning (Book Review)

It was inevitable that I would read Mindset. Having recently read two books Give and Take by Adam Grant, and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough) which referenced this book, and having heard mention of it in other contexts as well. As promised on the cover, Mindset provides advice that you can apply whether you are a manager, worker, parent, teacher, or some combination. Carol Dweck does a great job of explaining an idea with a lot of research behind it in a popular book, without glossing over too many points. There were a few places where I thought the book dragged a bit, but those sections were brief and far between, and on net it was a quick enjoyable read.

The point of Mindset is that people have one or two mindsets: fixed mindset which is premised on the idea that you abilities and qualities are carved in stone, and the growth mindset which is based on the belief that your basic qualities are cultivated through effort. The 2 mindsets in Dweck’s model provide a powerful framework for understanding how people approach challenges. Those who approach situations with a fixed mindset are likely to see failure as a reflection of their value. Those with a growth mindset are more likely to see a set back as an opportunity to learn and improve.

People can have different mindsets in different aspects of their lives (work, relationships, artistic, technical). Dweck also explains that mindsets are “just beliefs” so you can change them if you want. Mindsets are not just a way people are. From the names you can guess that the growth mindset is the one that can lead you to better things. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the discussions about you can develop (in your self) and nurture (in others) a growth mindset.

While the fixed mindset v growth mindset concept seems simplistic at first glance, it is seems extremely powerful. While reading I found myself thinking “so maybe that is why I do that…” or “maybe I should consider the mindset model when dealing with a colleague.” Since the book wraps up with a focus on education, it led me to consider my approach to encouraging an motivating my (as I write this) third grader .

Since mindsets are not innate, one might ask why anyone would stay in a fixed mindset. The discusson of why that happens lie the most interesting lessons for self-improvement. Your mindset can be re-enforced early in life, and like all things that connect back to childhood experiences, the messages you get early in life are hard to get past, even if they are slowing you down. Dweck shares both data and anecdotes of how various mentors tried to help students ended up moving from a fixed to a growth mindset, with various degrees of success. That all of the stories are not “fairy tale” success stories grounds the concepts in reality. All change is hard, and not everyone can success absolutely. But you can benefit from trying.

Dweck discusses the application of mindsets in many realms, including business, relationships, and education. The book ends with an explanation of a program for elementary schools to help develop growth mindsets, which is appropriate given the focus of Dweck’s research and the value of improving mindset early on. The area that is most interesting to me professionally is how the mindset model relates to leadership approaches.

We often think of leaders in terms of raw ‘talent’ … and that “effort” is for those who don’t have talent. In reality it takes both effort and talent to be continually successful. Dweck explains that more often than not great leaders are the people who were constantly trying to improve, and who don’t have all the right answers starting out. What leads to success is willingness to make a effort to improve. Raw talent helps, to be sure, but it can’t sustain success.

One thing that the book didn’t address for me, though perhaps the answer is obvious, is the question of sustainability. If a growth mindset is good, and is all about meeting challenges, would a growth mindset lead to you overextend your self? Is what we might call “knowing your limits” a manifestation of a fixed mindset? I suspect that the answer is no. There’s a difference between having a perspective that obstacles can be overcome, and having the energy or bandwidth to meet all challenges head on.

There are number of lessons I felt that I could apply immediately to understanding my personal life, helping my (as I write this) third grader, and understanding how to work with teams and people at work. Mindset can inspire you to meet challenges with more confidence, and help you to better understand your interactions with others.

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Books mentioned in this article:

Team of Teams: An Unexpected Source of Agile Inspiration

One can find insight in unexpected places. Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal et al is a book about dealing with organizational complexity, written by a general, which uses the war against Al Queda as a common thread. I was somewhat skeptical that I could find information here about software teams that I'd find immediately useful, regardless of how interesting it was. I was wrong. In addition to the advice I was expecting to read about team dynamics, I gained some insights that I thought would be immediately applicable to scaling Scrum Teams.

Fairly early into Team of Teams the authors explain that this is not a war story. While it's true that the common thread in the book is how General McChrystal worked to get the army more able to adapt to a decentralized, agile enemy, there are are also stories from commercial aviation, NASA, and corporate America. While there is a fair amount of military history in this book, there is also a discussion of the history of manufacturing process improvement, office space, and even personal stories about gardening.

The message in this book is that command and control structures don't work in complicated, information rich environments that deal with complex problems. He defines complicated as "having many parts" and complex as having many interactions. To get things done in this kind of environment you many need to cast aside what you are used to thinking of an efficient approach.

McChrystal draws a contrast between being resilient and being robust: The more you optimize a complexy system for a specific goal, the less resilient it becomes. Likewise efficiency isn't always better than adaptabilty: you can build a system that is good at doing things right, but is too inflexible to do the right thing. Redundancy and overlap can enable adaptability; an efficient system that does the wrong thing doesn't add value.

Had McChrystal been delivering this message in the context of a corporate enviroment, you might dismiss this as another instance of someone who is in an environment suitable for agile singing the praises of agility. That he's talking about battle command situations, the canonical top-down environment, gets your attention. As with Turn the Ship Around this provides evidence that an "agile" approach can work in more circumstances than you might guess.

At the core of the book is the philosophy that too much control of information and decision making slows down a group's ability to react to situations. The situations described in the book were ones where the risks of acting too slowly are higher than the risks of competent peope making judgment calls. Automomous decisions are usually good as long as they are visible and shared. While most business decisions don't have the same life or death implications of those made in a war zone, slow decision making can have a business cost, and potentially a morale cost if people feel undervalued and micromanaged.

McChrystal advises us that it's not enough to "empower" people in name only. Automony and delegation only work with a clear understanding of a common purpose. Communication channels and shared information are important to both sharing the common purpose and giving people the tools to act in a manner consistent with that purpose. One technique he used was to provide for open office spaces. McChrystal acknowledges that open office space only improves team productivity when everyone is working on related problems, and that open office space as a way to be "space efficient" is productivity inefficient. Video conferencing for his troops was also important, as his teams needed to communicate with others in remote places. As someone who works in a company with people in multiple locations, the stories of the challenges of setting up video conferencing sounded all too familiar. That they were successful in a low bandwidth war zone situation was encouraging.

The book also had some insights about scaling teams that had an implication for scaling Scrum. While it's appealing to think of projects at scale as hierarchical, each level of hierarchy hides information. That can be fine when everyone knows what other teams need to know and not know. But that kind of knowledge is rare. McChrystal's approach to scaling is that everyone needs to know someone on every team so that information will flow organically.

I found both inspiration for seeking ways to improve, and practical advice about how to structure teams and be an effective manager in this book. While not about agile per-se, I think that there are lessons here that apply to those trying encourage agile adoption in a non-agile situation, and also for those looking to scale agile.

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Turn the Ship Around: Agile Lessons from a Submarine Captain

I was not expecting a book about working on a Navy submarine to provide insights I could use to help a team be more agile. Having heard recommendations for Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by David Marquet from both a colleague at work and people in the agile community who I respect, I decided to give the book a look anyway. I’m glad that I did.

I thought that this was be a quick, enjoyable read with many lessons I could quickly employ at work. The chapters are all short and focused, and the author repeats the key themes often enough that they stick. Each chapter is centered around a story, so it’s easy to see that the lessons in the book are based on experience and not just theory. My focus is on working with agile teams, so I found that the lessons applied to that context. Even if you are not doing "Agile, this book highlights the value of an agile, adpative, self-organizing approach can have in any organization, regardless of the overall process.

The book is easy to read, with one key point per chapter, and with chapters being short enough that one could almost always find time to read a complete chapter (and thus gather a coherent lesson). This wasn’t a perfect book. Certain aspects about the writing style I found a bit jarring. While some repetition of key points is helpful, there is a bit too much of it at times. And I found the author’s use of ALL CAPS as a mechanism for emphasis to be a bit jarring. Over these stylistics decisions don’t take away from the value of the book; they just made the reading experience less than ideal. But it’s not hard to get past that, and the engaging stories that the book uses to set the stage for its lessons keep you reading.

The ideas in the book should be familiar to anyone who has spent time studying agile teams. That the author talks about how bottom up, distributed decision making (an aspect of what the author calls a leader-leader approach) can lead to a more effective operation than the traditional (to the Navy) , top-down leader-follower approach that many military and other organizations follow. Processes and checklists have as place to simplify decision making, but only in the context of rational though about your goals. Command and Control has a place, in particular in a military organization, but a more limited one than you might think. Even in critical situations a leader-leader model, where people are applying their training to do what works, rather than working by the book, or blindly following authority, can solve the problem better.

What I particularly found compelling was that this book is full of stories of how a more botton-up, empowering model of leadership can be a better way to work. That this can be true even on a submarine – an environment that is both literally and figuratively high-pressure – , should be an excellent counter to those who argue that we can’t do (agile, self-organizing teams, etc) in my organization. An agile approach is not the best solution for all problems, but agile techiques are more widely applicable than many think.

This work does not exist in a vacuum. The author frequently cites Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the writer of the forward to the book, and also provides some pointers to other resources. Whether you are a manager, scrum master, or just someone involved on a team (agile or not) that doesn’t seem to be working well, reading this book will be a quick and enjoyable path towards finding help in identifying things that might be getting in the way to effectiveness, and also give you a sense of optimism that things can get better with the right approach.

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The Human Side of (Agile) Software Development

In  the Sept/Oct 2012 issue of IEEE Software Linda Rising writes on the role of sterotype and collaboration in teams and explains that i t was only late in here career that she came to the realization that the "people side" of software development is both really important and really hard.

This is an important point, as it is quite easy to think that it's easy to ignore people in a project while you have more important things to work on, such as code, and tools. There is an intersection between people and tools; tools like Software Configuration Management systems, Wikis, issue tracking systems (be they software based or index cards on a wall) can improve or detract from the effectiveness of collaboration on your team. But it's easy to get hung up on the tools and not think about the effect of the tools on the really important thing: How the tools help (or hinder) the people on your team from collaborating to deliver business value.

I was fortunate to have had the importantance of the people side of software brought to my attention early in my career when one of my first managers suggested that I read The Psychology of Computer Programming. Over  time I  discovered more of  Jerry Weinberg's books, and all have had a had a great influence on me. A particular favorite of mine is Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach.

It seems like, with resources like this around, and a focus on agile software development, it should be easier for developers to understand that people and teams are as important as they are. But acknowledgement of the humans side of software is not universal, even as we're starting to acknowledge parallels between software development and other endeavors such as artistic performance.

Fortunately there is a excellent recent book by Gil Broza, apltly named The Human Side of Agile, that explores the relationship between people, tools, and processes in software development. I posted a review on Techwell.com, but in brief,  this book is a great agile-focused addition to my list of recommended books on how help teams be effective. Reading this book early in your career will give you a good start on understanding an often neglected aspect of software development. Those who understand it already can benefit the guidance the book offers about how to help others understand.

Reading any (or all) of these books will help you understand how to be more effective, and how to help your team be more effective in turn.

Books mentioned in this post