Teams don’t self-organize unless you organize them to do so. - Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational / HN

People sitting side-by-side can communicate less than people sitting a continent away. Communication is a chemical reaction that requires catalysers, the thing you get by co-locating people is lowering the cost of the catalysers, but no setup creates automatic communication.

Within a development organization both good and bad communication exist, but they are not a function of politeness or rudeness, it’s much more a matter of clarity and goals. You need to learn what the good kind of communication looks like, find some examples and use them as a reference for everyone.

Fire people whenever you can. There’s often someone to fire, but not many opportunities to do so. When you are given a lot of opportunities to fire people, it is often due to a crisis situation and you’ll likely fire or otherwise lose the wrong people. People appreciate when you fire the right people, so don’t worry about morale. Also, the average quality of people tends to grow more when dismissing than when recruiting.

Hire only for good reasons. Being overworked is not a good reason to hire. Instead, hire to be ready to catch opportunities, not to survive the current battles.

It’s often better to lose battles than to staff desperately and win desperate battles at all costs (World War I anyone?).

Lack of vision is not agile, it is not data-driven, it is not about ‘taking decisions as late as possible’, it is not something that you should paint out in a positive light at all. It’s just lack of vision, and it’s not good.

Construction work is not a good metaphor for software/product development. Factory work neither. Allied junior-officer initiatives during the first week after the d-day in WWII is probably a good guideline, but it is still not a good metaphor overall and, anyway, not known enough to base your communication on.

Yourself

Train people to do all of the previous points. Including this one.

Don’t shy away from leading without doing, it is unavoidable, so just do it. Then do some work to stay pertinent.

If you are not able to hire and fire people, leave. Or stay for the retirement fund if you can stomach it.

The Sith are right, rage propels. But the Jedi are right, you must not let it control yourself. What nobody tells you is that the rage game is intrinsically tiring and rage will take control as soon as you get too tired, so stop well before.

Ask questions to people in order to make sure they understand. Trust people who do the same to you. “Do you understand?” is NOT a valid question.

Avoid having people waiting on you. Don’t create direct dependencies on your work or decisions, make sure people feel that they can take decisions and still stay true to the vision without referring to you (hence the importance of point 1).

The time you spend with the people you see most potential in is endorsement enough. Avoid any other kind of endorsement of individuals. Unless you are leaving.

The Entropic Organization

Entropy self-selects. Hierarchical and other kinds of entropic organizations always favor solutions that survive within entropic organizations. Thus they will favor easy over simple, complex over difficult, responsibility-dilution over empowerment, accountability over learning, shock-therapy over culture-nurturing. This is the reinforcing loop that brings ever-increasing entropy in the system : entropy generates easy decisions with complex and broken implementations, which in turn generate more entropy. An example of easy decision with a complexity-inducing implementation: this scenario “our company does not have a coherent strategy, as such many projects tend to deliver results that are not coherent, hampering the organic growth of our capabilities.” will be answered by the most classic knee-jerk decision-making pattern “we don’t know how to do X, so let’s overlay a new Y to enforce X”, in this case :”Group together strategic projects into a big strategic program that will ensure coherence”. The difficult but simple option will not even be entertained : “let’s discover our real strategy and shape the organization around it.”

Having a strategy will only go so far when you face the Entropic Organization, since it will be only able to appropriate that strategy at the level of energy (understanding) they can attain, which, being entropic, is very low. This results in something that does not look like a strategy at all : ever seen a two-years old play air-traffic control? He got the basic understanding of “talking to planes”, but that’s it.

Growth-shrink symmetry. When an organization grows unhealthily (too fast, for bad reasons or through bad recruitment) it will also shrink unhealthily. When it grows it’s bold and confused, when it shrinks it’s scared and nasty.

Most of the ideas that will pop up naturally from the Entropic Organization are bad in the context of modern knowledge-based work, but possess a superficial layer of common-sense to slide through. Exercise extreme prejudice.