Why work does happen at work

Posted on by Brian Hughes

In his talk “Why work doesn’t happen at work,” Jason Fried criticizes what he calls “M&M’s”: managers and meetings. But is his harsh attitude justified and/or helpful?

For workers in really toxic environments, I’m sure this is refreshing stuff. He says, (and I’m paraphrasing) “Managers just preside over work, so they like to call meetings to see what’s being done… and effectively halt real work.” And this paves the way for his new (repackaged?) ideas:

  • He proposes “no talking Thursday afternoons” as a strategy for allowing a whole organization to “focus on getting work done.”
  • He arrives at some potentially helpful ideas about using “passive” forms of communication (email, instant messaging) rather than active forms (tapping someone on the shoulder).
  • And lastly, he encourages folks to “just cancel meetings.”

The Book Deal

My past colleague Eric Buth has a theory about how people make “book deal” pitches for popular, business-oriented books (and, by extension, the related speaker circuit). He thinks there are three main elements of successful pitches:

  1. The author proposes an “absolutist, contrarian perspective”
  2. This perspective is backed by anecdotal and/or skewed quantitative evidence
  3. And there is a sense of urgency for spreading the author’s solution(s).

So, does Fried’s talk fall into this pattern?

1. Absolutist, contrarian perspective? You bet.

2. Anecdotal and/or skewed quantitative evidence? Yes again (implied, or at least unsupported).

3. A sense of urgency for spreading the author’s solution(s)? Well, you know, either you’re willing to run your business/organization into the ground, or adopt Fried’s ethos. It’s your choice.

A Middle Ground

His message serves as a reminder to generally be productive—a good message. For small businesses, Fried’s message might make a lot of sense. For folks who work in and for larger organizations, maybe less so.

Maybe it’s easier for everyone to collaborate in smaller organizations. (Among other factors, it probably depends on the communication skills of the participants.) But in a larger organization, with several hundred employees or more, how long can individuals and teams go without checking in to a larger group? A week? A month? A good old fashioned meeting might be a refreshing time to reconnect with colleagues and talk through important project details.

I spend time in meetings coordinating people and projects. Every week. Sometimes my colleagues and I don’t make clear progress, but a lot of the time we make decisions that affect the day-to-day work of our colleagues (for better or worse). They are often valuable, and Fried clearly doesn’t disagree. In the end, his solutions are very sensible. The upshot of his claim seems to simply be: not all meetings are good or useful.

Though Fried’s talk serves as a guidepost, I’m interested in more subtle ways to bring unproductive meetings to a halt.

Design Process Essentials

Posted on by Brian Hughes

What do you value in a design process?

At EdLab, our teams often have great latitude in structuring our design processes – indeed, we can change almost every aspect of project management, from inception to final outcomes (and ongoing documentation and reporting). As a consequence, the teams I am a part of – creating diverse software, video, and exhibitions – all work a bit differently. What are the good and bad effects of this freedom? What amount is worth having? To paraphrase Stan Lee:

With great freedom comes great responsibility.

In my everyday work at the lab, I often feel and see the emotional and intellectual effects of shepherding a project through a design process – and negative examples easily come to mind. In considering project work in this way, it is not always clear that it’s a design process per se that leads to each and every outcome (e.g., the emotional response of a team member who feels his or her idea wasn’t adopted), but it seems helpful to consider many (and diverse) aspects of a work environment as part of a design process. In doing so, I hope to assess what structures or freedoms can be articulated as being worth having with a wide range of desirable outcomes in mind.

Consider a common situation: when is a team responsible for documenting its progress on a product? – Every day? Every week? To what extent? And how? What is the cost of this? What is the purpose? What decisions will or could be made as a result of such documentation? A team that has more latitude when it comes to responding to the need for documentation can tailor it to fit the nature of the project. A ready-made rubric, on the other hand, might not allow for the nuances that the team can account for, but I suspect organizations often favor consistency over specificity. In doing so, I wonder what, on balance, they lose. But also: what is the strain on the team that is left to weigh many variables? Such a rubric is a good example of what kind of components constitute a more structured design process.

To better understand the cost of such structures (i.e., monetary cost, but also their effect on goals like creativity and innovation), I have found it helpful to reflect on characteristics of design processes that I value. A few of those characteristics:

  • Sustained Dialogue: Sometimes it’s hard to keep the conversation going. It’s natural to welcome closure – get back to one’s desk, grab a fresh coffee, check a few items off one’s to-do list. If these external pressures cause a dialogue to end too soon, a lot of momentum can be lost. Worse, the more difficult a conversation is – the more diverse the viewpoints, for example – the more a team might want to close it down. Keeping a dialogue open through (and past) the point where a maximum amount of progress can be made is a challenging task.
  • Emergent Perspectives: If the goal is to make a new thing (or even revise an old one), it’s often hard to understand what’s possible at the beginning of the project. It is important to have flexibility to learn as you go, though changing directions usually comes at the cost of revising past goals – goals that at least someone on the team is attached to. Perhaps the hardest part of holding up emergence as a component of a design process is knowing when to decide to “stay the course” and deliver a product as-is. There are many examples of how making too much room for change can go wrong.
  • Discipline: There are a lot of ways to be distracted on a project, but two extremes stand out: 1) being too focused on a small task, or 2) being too focused on the “big picture.” A disciplined designer knows how to weave between these extremes in an iterative, cyclical way. In my mind, he or she carries the weight of at least two traditions at once: a tradition that allows him or her to excel on a small task, as well as a historical perspective that connects the task to a larger purpose.

Short of following a structured design process, cultivating one, or attempting to cultivate one, I expect an organization would articulate habits, dispositions, and behaviors that are valued. But, I wonder, could these characteristic be understood as part of “a process”? And is it beneficial to frame them as such?

Taking responsibility for the impact of software

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Here’s Steve Jobs, from a recent email thread with Gawker’s Ryan Tate:

Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?

This last missive from Job’s is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple’s iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don’t look too closely, you might be impressed by it.

By now it’s well-known that Apple draws the ire of the free software community. But Steve Jobs take the time (here in a private email conversation) to clearly articulate his views and motivations. Really? A CEO taking the time to pursue an email flame war with a spiteful blogger? Very respectable. Admirable, even.

That’s what it seems to take these days to engage the public, especially in the software development space. And I like Jobs’ response and his insistence on participation: he asks (I paraphrase), “Are you at least engaged in similar work?”

But wait, is that enough? Tate started the email thread by criticizing Jobs’ abuse of the language of “revolutions.” Does Jobs offer an adequate defense?

Jobs’ response is related to a too-easy dismissal: “If you don’t do X, you can’t criticize it.” But I don’t think that’s Jobs’ attitude in this case. Tate’s criticism against Apple is steeped in deep knowledge of the software world. I think Jobs’ is asking for empathy, saying (again I paraphrase), “It’s hard to bring these new technologies into the world, isn’t your quibble with us a minor one? Why can’t this discussion be more civil?” Or even, “It’s a mistake to equate what we’re doing here with something important.”

But then that’s why Tate is right and Jobs is, ultimately, a corporate ass: Jobs isn’t taking personal responsibility for his company’s ridiculous (“it’s magical” and “it’s revolutionary”) claims. Jobs’ insistence on deflating the significance of the iPad’s implications for the software community flies in the face of Apple’s language describing it. Once you say it’s revolutionary, there’s no going back and saying that you didn’t mean “in a cultural or political way” (Jobs’: “It’s not about freedom”).

So, frankly, this exchange turns out to be as offensive as it is instructive. I’m glad Tate shared it. Sure, we can empathize with Jobs… it is tough making great things. Especially complex things. But the work of understanding them – seeing their implications, assessing their value, and measuring their impact – is a shared responsibility between both developers and consumers. Indeed, it’s part of the cost of doing business, though easy to forget.

So, how can a development group take responsibility?

  • Do an impact study and publish it
  • Build assessment into your development process
  • Perform ongoing data analysis and research, and share it
  • And, of course, talk openly with your customers (at least Jobs got that one right!)… with luck, they’ll engage you in a fruitful conversation about culture, politics, and the future.

Can (and should) generalists lead experts?

Posted on by Brian Hughes

When does one decide to become a generalist? When did I?

Seth Godin insists that “art” should play a central role in the workplace. In Linchpin, he argues that seeing work as art is not only good, but imperative. I believe, however, that Godin would be better off calling his linchpin a generalist rather than an artist. This shift also highlights a consequence of Godin’s view: namely, that there are really two (very different) roles for linchpins: at the top of the proverbial corporate ladder, but also at the bottom. (After all, while considering his great flight attendant-come-linchpin as a maker of “generalism” rather than “art” is less satisfying, I think it’s a more reasonable view.)

Godin doesn’t say much about the linchpins that are stuck at the bottom. The good thing for reigning capitalists: they’re cheap, and relatively helpless. Why? There are so many of them. Democratic education is designed to produce generalists – but a sad consequence of poor educational performance is that it leads to bad generalists. Isn’t developing expertise a natural response to this situation? Indeed, hasn’t this been the emergent role of “higher” education? But now the predicament: the milieu of abundant expertise has taken the glamor away from generalism.

So what’s it like to be a school-aged person in the world today? You don’t have to look very far to see an abundance of despair (or, perhaps more tellingly, decadence). I think the reign of expertise is at least party to blame: expertise is the new mediocre, and the media’s obsession with expertise obscures the role of generalists.

Linchpin on my mind

Posted on by Brian Hughes

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin offers repetitive and often simplistic arguments, and actually makes a difference. By the end I really couldn’t fault him for his mistakes. He crafts his story into a compelling meditation on life and work.

He throws a lot of words and ideas at the problem of how to be indispensable, but I think he nails it here: emotional labor is tough, and the value of this kind of work will increase over time. Well, at least I hope so (I’m not exactly betting on my knowledge of cooking). Expending emotional labor and “giving gifts” is tough. The emotional labor of selling an idea is tough. The emotional labor of working with a group is tough. It’s also fun.

I still remember my experiences in classrooms during my first year in grad school. I remember feeling, for the first time in my life, that I chose education – that I didn’t have to be there. It was such a freeing feeling that for the first time in my life I participated. I raised my hand. I spoke up. I spoke out. I challenged others. I tried to move the conversation.

Those interactions weren’t easy. They probably weren’t perfect either (hey, who hasn’t been snarky about the student who spoke one too many times?). But for the first time in my life I was really attentive to emotional labor as something that was worth doing. I think it came with the territory: if you aren’t going to engage others intellectually and academically in a class in graduate school, when are you planning to do it?

I found undergraduate classrooms more difficult to navigate. It sometimes seemed as if too many people felt they had to be there. At those times, the best I could do was carve out a niche where I could work alone. Maybe the opportunity to engage others was there for me if I worked for it. But I’m not sure. I’m sure it can work at any time – in the classroom and beyond – as it worked for me in grad school.

On unlimited wealth, or the dream of it

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I have begun reading Linchpin by Seth Godin. One topic I find interesting is Godin’s support of the idea of an “unlimited” market (“Limited or Unlimited,” p. 30). I am always struck by the optimism of this perspective. For on this view, one should not behave as if there is a limited market for goods, but rather as if there is no limit to the money to be made. To me, this seems counterintuitive. I guess I don’t fault Godin’s perspective – that it may be advantageous to act as if a market is unlimited – so much as I am skeptical of the alleged fact itself.

I suspect there are economists out there with some thoughts about this, but I haven’t run into them yet lately. So, let’s run a thought-experiment.

Modernized countries have populations that increasingly rely on the labor of poorer countries. We (my fellow middle-class Americans) buy a lot of stuff, but we’re also thrifty. So, for example, when we’re faced with the choice of expensive paper towels or cheap paper towels, we’ll go out of our way to find the best towel at the best price. (For many of us, this activity takes up a considerably larger amount of our time than we’d like to admit.)

And that’s how we get to the part about American auto-makers shuttering their doors, and whole regions of the U.S. bereft of jobs: production happens in China; consumption happens in America. This seems inherently unsustainable: no sooner do we learn about unions driving jobs oversees than we learn about unionization oversees. (To say that this kind of economic growth is sustainable reminds me of the explanation of how the whole universe rests on the back of a turtle.)

But Godin chimes in and reminds us not to worry – that if we’re good enough, there will be jobs for us. Here’s why I think – even counterintuitively – that he’s right:

There’s lots of wealth in the world. Now you’re thinking, “Of course there’s a lot of wealth in the world, Brian, but the point is that is may not be available to the ever-expanding middle class (especially if the ranks of the lower class grow thin).” But one fact (if true) could turn this worry on its head: that people – especially extremely wealthy people – would be happy to live lives of extreme asceticism if they experienced an equally good kind of social and community life.

Or something like that.

I’m not saying this is the case, but it’s the only way I’ll buy into the  vision of “unlimited markets.” On this view, trillions and trillions of dollars that are currently tucked away in capital (of one form or another) could be invested in labor, service, and industry (in the broadest sense). Without interest in widgets and dongles of every kind, that labor could be plied to strengthening good ol’ human interactions… and Godin could claim that his “linchpin” fits nicely within this system.

Perhaps the inner communist in me even hopes it’s true. If so, it certainly casts our obsesssion with material wealth and comfort in a tragic light.