22. Unknown Knowns and Contaminated Metaphors

Deborah Hartman Preuss on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Jessica Kerr on Legacy Code Rocks, Nir Eyal on Product Love, Dave Snowden on The Jim Rutt Show, and Mike Bowler on Legacy Code Rocks.

I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email [email protected]. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested.

This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting October 14, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

DEBORAH HARTMANN PREUSS ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ

The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Deborah Hartmann Preuss with host Shane Hastie. Deborah was once an Agile coach. She wondered why she didn’t have anything in her toolkit to help people with the discomfort they were feeling with the change Agile was bringing. She didn’t find the answer in Agile, but she found it in coaching.

Deborah says that one of the important things she does as a coach is to bring balance to the excitement of our dynamic lifestyles by helping us to slow down long enough to hear our own wisdom.

Deborah tries to ask the biggest questions she can come up with. Typically that elicits a “Huh! I need to think about that for a minute.” Sometimes she has to say, “Don’t think about it. Feel it.”

She sees her skill as being able to see what is in you, reflecting it back, and helping you notice what’s there. She says that when she can see herself clearly, she can stand in front of other people with less fear, more courage, and more love.

She says we have good methods to bring, changes to bring, and skills to teach, but if we are stressed out when we’re doing it, that becomes part of our message.

She says that for too long we’ve been told, ”Suck it up! Life is hard. You don’t have to love your job. The stress is part of the package.” In contrast, she believes that people who are not constantly stressed out can bring so much more to their work.

Creating a joyful workplace starts with authenticity. When you are not trying to conform to somebody’s idea of who you should be, all that extra energy is left over to simply do great stuff. Authenticity both reduces stress and frees your uniqueness.

Shane pointed out that authenticity requires vulnerability. Deborah says that is where leadership comes in: to create safety. A leader who doesn’t feel safe will have trouble creating safety for others. When we ask people to be vulnerable, it has to fall into a place of trust. That trust must be built first and that is a leadership skill.

Shane asked how one builds that trust. Deborah pointed to the book Liftoff by Larsen and Nies (https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Start-Sustain-Successful-Agile/dp/1680501631). We build trust, she says, by talking openly about things and being accountable to one another. She also referenced The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey (https://www.amazon.com/SPEED-TRUST-Thing-Changes-Everything/dp/1416549005) for building trust and repairing trust when it is broken.

Shane asked about the state of diversity. Deborah said that part of the state of diversity right now is, “Oh look at how diverse we are!” but this is not the same as everyone feeling welcome to contribute their differences. Inclusion is honestly welcoming differences and giving those differences a proper reception.

Shane asked about Ten Women Strong and Deborah described how the Ten Women Strong #WomenInAgile program lets women start from a common set of values from Agile. The group helps them to recognize their authenticity, celebrate it, and start designing to turn that into what they need. She described how the program helps women meet their own needs so that they fill the well and have more to give out to others.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/deborah-hartmann-preuss-on-creating-joyful-workplaces/id1161431874?i=1000449085542

Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-deb-priuss

JESSICA KERR ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS

The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featured Jessica Kerr with hosts Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford. Jessica has been a software developer for twenty years. One of her obsessions is how, as developers, we have a unique power to change our own environment. It gets even more interesting when we change the environment our team works in. 

They talked about symmathesy. It starts with systems thinking, where people realized that you can’t reduce a system to its parts, understand the parts, and expect that to extend to an understanding of the system as a whole. You need to understand the relationships between the parts. Anthropologist Nora Bateson took this idea further when she realized that it is not just that the relationships between the parts matter; each part is constantly changing as a result of its relationships to the others. She called this symmathesy.

Scott asked how awareness of the symmathesy of software development has changed the way Jessica does her work. Jessica says that if you look at a software team as a socio-technical system of humans and software based on mutual learning, the trickiest part is the line between the humans and software. The interface between the humans and the software is low bandwidth and this has made Jessica appreciate the value of tooling and how tools need to be customized for every different software system and every group of people.

Andrea asked how Jessica can explain those benefits to those who are in charge of budgets and in charge of predicting what will be delivered. Jessica says that people are starting to notice developer experience and developer productivity. For example, these topics show up at conferences more today than they used to.

Jessica related the symmathesy of software development back to Andrea’s article on technical debt as communication debt. When you have a mental model of the software, that software is alive to you because you can change it. But if you add another person who doesn’t yet have that mental model, that software is dead or legacy to them because, to them, that software is not safe to change.

They talked about 10x developers and how much of their productivity comes from being the original author of the system. Building a mental model from a system that somebody else wrote is much more difficult than writing a system yourself. 

Andrea pointed out that from the original system author’s perspective, the other engineers seem less capable because they are struggling to understand something that seems obvious to the original author. Jessica says to always replace the word “obvious” with “I can’t explain it, but...”

Jessica says she’s learned that whenever she thinks someone else is stupid, chances are they know something she doesn’t, and this is why their actions don’t make sense to her. Jessica is talking about avoiding the fundamental attribution error. She went on to talk about the difficulty of transferring knowledge.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/symmathesy-with-jessica-kerr/id1146634772?i=1000449136678

Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/symmathesy-with-jessica-kerr

NIR EYAL ON PRODUCT LOVE

The Product Love podcast featured Nir Eyal with host Eric Boduch. Eric asked Nir what inspired him to write his new book Indistractable. Nir says that Indistractable is a pro-human, pro-tech book about being able to control your attention and manage all sorts of distraction. Half the book is about how individuals can become indistractable and the rest is about how to help others or our environments become indistractable.

When Nir was researching the book, he was surprised to discover that all of our behaviors are driven by a desire to escape discomfort. He says that if you want to become indistractable, you need to start with mastering your internal triggers. 

We also need to be aware that the companies we work for are creating much of the distraction. If a company has the wrong kind of culture, that is, one that is high expectation and low control, it causes psychological discomfort. In these cultures, we strive for control by sending more emails, calling more meetings, and distracting ourselves and others.

Another surprise for Nir was learning that technology at work is not the source of distraction. Distraction at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional workplace culture. For example, group chat apps like Slack are considered distracting. If the technology was the culprit, he asks, shouldn’t the people who work at Slack and use it most be the most distracted people? Slack doesn’t have this problem because they have a healthy workplace culture.

This is relevant to managers because, unless you have three factors in your workplace, you will always have distraction. The three factors are: 1) an environment that provides psychological safety, 2) a forum for people to air concerns, and 3) leaders who exemplify what it means to be indistractable.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/nir-eyal-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-creating/id1343610309?i=1000449384509

Website link: http://productlove.libsyn.com/nir-eyal-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-creating-better-products-and-meetings

DAVE SNOWDEN ON THE JIM RUTT SHOW

The Jim Rutt Show featured Dave Snowden with host Jim Rutt. Jim asked Dave to explain Cynefin, the conceptual framework that Dave created to aid in decision-making. Dave says that Cynefin is based on a fundamental divide into ordered systems, complex systems, and chaotic systems. There is a phase shift between these types of systems rather than a gradation. An ordered system has a high enough level of constraint that everything is predictable. An example is such a constraint is how we all drive on the left in the UK and on the right in the US. This is called an “obvious” approach to order. The relationship between cause and effect is obvious.

Another type of order is “complicated”, where there is still a right answer and, for experts, it may be obvious but, for the decision-maker, it isn’t. You sense/analyze/respond and you may discover the right answer with less precision. It is the domain of good practice, not best practice.

If you over-constrain a system that is not naturally constrainable, sooner or later it fragments into chaos. If you fall into chaos accidentally, you no longer sense/analyze/respond, but instead you act/sense/respond. An example is Clayton Christensen’s notion of competence-induced failure: being so good at the old paradigm that you don’t see the change coming and the change becomes catastrophic for you.

A complex system is one that has enabling constraints. Everything is somehow connected to everything else but the connections aren’t fully known. One concept is the dark constraint, referencing dark energy, where we can see the impact of something without knowing where the impact is coming from. You may want to compare this to the notion of symmathesy from Jessica Kerr’s appearance on Legacy Code Rocks.

In a complex-adaptive system, the only way to understand it is to probe. One of Dave’s definitions of “complexity“ is: if the evidence supports conflicting hypotheses of action and you can’t resolve those hypotheses within the timeframe for a decision from the evidence, the situation is complex.

In Cynefin, you don’t try to resolve it, you construct a safe-to-fail micro-experiment around each coherent hypothesis and you run them in parallel. That, in turn, changes the dynamics of the space and a solution emerges.

The final domain is the domain of disorder. This is the state of not knowing which of the other systems you are in. It is a type of inauthenticity. If your natural tendency is to bureaucracy, you are likely to impose order when it is inappropriate. If your natural tendency is towards complexity and emergence, you may choose not to impose order when it would have been more appropriate to impose it.

The essence of Cynefin is to say, “context is key.” Dave got fed up with management fads that said things like, “business process reengineering is universal” or “the learning organization is universal.” None of these are universal. They all work within a specific context. So part of the function of Cynefin is to decide what context you are in before you decide what method you will use.

They went on to talk about Apex Predator theory, agent-based modeling, “anticipatory triggers”, artificial intelligence, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and many other topics. I particularly liked what Dave had to say about what people who work on artificial intelligence should be trained in.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep11-dave-snowden-and-systems-thinking/id1470622572?i=1000449087845

Website link: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/dave-snowden/

MIKE BOWLER ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS

The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featured Mike Bowler with hosts Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford. Mike has been writing code for thirty-five years. In the late nineties, he got frustrated with watching projects fail. He was working for a big bank and they would celebrate when they shipped something, but they knew it wasn’t what the customer wanted. Looking for something better, he found the XP community.

He decided he needed to get better at the “people stuff.” This took him into neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and body language.

He talked about Clean Language. Clean Language came originally from therapy. It was modeled on the style of therapy used by a therapist named David Grove, who himself never formalized his process.

Clean Language is a set of questions that don’t contaminate the metaphors of the people you are questioning. He used the example of a metaphor of a head “exploding” with ideas to describe how to avoid contaminating a person’s metaphor.

They talked about Judy Rees’s Lazy Jedi questions which are named that way because, if you only ask those two questions over and over, it is like you are using Jedi mind tricks. The questions are, “What kind of X is that?” and “Is there anything else about X?” If the metaphor is “my head is exploding with ideas,” the Lazy Jedi questions become: “What kind of exploding is that?” and “Is there anything else about that exploding?”

Some people tell Mike that, as a software developer in a highly technical environment, they don’t use many metaphors. Mike begs to differ. He says that the metaphors are so deeply embedded that they don’t notice any more. A bug is a metaphor. A cache is a metaphor.

Some metaphors are blatantly obvious, like “the band was on fire,” and some are really subtle, like, “I have a lot of bananas.” You aren’t using the exact definition of the word “lot” but are using it as a metaphor.

They went through a clean language exercise in which Mike asked Scott about what he is like when performing at his absolute best and, based on his answers, got deeper and deeper into Scott’s metaphor.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/unconscious-behavior-in-coding-with-mike-bowler/id1146634772?i=1000447835119

Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/unconscious-behavior-in-coding-with-mike-bowler

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus