Org Design and Culture

Team design

J. Richard Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, 2002. Amazon

Team effectiveness is mostly set before the team starts: a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive context. Hackman's rule of thumb was 60% design, 30% launch, 10% coaching. It's a heuristic, and the underlying studies weren't on software teams, but it's the reason to check the role before the person.

Used in Most performance problems are design problems, Handle a performance problem.

The system and the worker

W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1986. Amazon

Most variation in a process comes from the system, which is management's responsibility, rather than from individual workers. Deming's figure was 94%. Software isn't manufacturing, but the direction holds.

Used in Most performance problems are design problems.

Organizational culture typology

Ron Westrum, "A typology of organisational cultures," Quality and Safety in Health Care 13(suppl 2), 2004. doi:10.1136/qshc.2003.009522

Pathological cultures shoot messengers, bureaucratic ones neglect them, generative ones train them. The three types are defined by how information flows and how failure is treated, so the one-question culture test is "how is bad news received?"

Used in Two kinds of conflict, Communicate bad news early, Diagnose what's broken in an org, Run a blameless postmortem.

Blameless postmortems

John Allspaw, "Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture," Etsy Code as Craft, 2012. etsy.com

Sidney Dekker, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability, 2007. Amazon

Engineers who expect punishment stop reporting mistakes, and the org loses the information it needs to prevent recurrence. Ask what made the action reasonable at the time, and fix the system that made it reasonable. Blameless is not consequence-free; it separates learning from discipline.

Used in Trust, agency, and latency, Run a blameless postmortem.

Five whys

Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, 1978 (English 1988). Amazon

Ask why about five times to get from symptom to cause. A single chain produces a single cause, and incidents almost never have one, so run it from several starting points.

Used in Run a blameless postmortem.

Team Topologies and Conway's law

Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies, 2019. Amazon

Melvin Conway, "How Do Committees Invent?", Datamation, 1968. melconway.com

Organizations ship their communication structure. Shared code with no owner and services with two tech leads produce conflict regardless of the personalities involved, so check the team boundary before concluding two people just don't get along.

Used in Resolve conflict between two people, Diagnose what's broken in an org.

The directly responsible individual

Adam Lashinsky, "How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup," Fortune, May 2011. fortune.com

Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple, 2012. Amazon

Every task and agenda item at Apple has one named person accountable for it. The tech lead role here is the same idea: one name on every initiative, owning the spec, the schedule, the risk, and the delivery.

Used in Drive ownership.

Intent-based leadership and mission command

L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!, 2012. Amazon

US Army, ADP 6-0: Mission Command, 2019. armypubs.army.mil

Push decisions to the people with the information, give them the intent and the constraints, and let them decide how. Both sources are explicit that it fails without competence, which is why hiring and delegation are the same decision.

Used in Trust, agency, and latency, Drive ownership.