Statics, Dynamics, and Relativity

I have a regular meeting with some of the senior technologists on my team.  It’s a small, varied and global group.  They have little in common except their deep technical experience, a readiness to debate, and a strong tendency toward sarcasm (things that seem to transcend national and cultural boundaries among technologists).

During many of these meetings we discuss the barriers to change that Others (it’s always Others ;-) are erecting as we seek to change cause change in our environment.  Sometimes it’s change to help things go Faster.  Sometimes it’s to help improve Quality.  And other times, it’s to lower Cost.

The example last week was around our development process and how the Others were hindering the improvement of Scrum.  (In this case, it happened to be the need to have better quality and depth of product backlog.)  The team had plenty of commentary about what needed to be done and how Others needed to not be resisting the change.

From there, the discussion pivoted toward some work that other team members were doing on an automation platform.  In this case, a team had been working extensively with Puppet to accomplish cross-platform installation and configuration automation.  And (seemingly) “out of nowhere” another team started talking about the importance of Ansible.

The team had been used to hearing about the Puppet vs Chef debate, which seemed to break largely along sysadmin vs programmer lines.  However, they said, Ansible seemed to be swaying previous Puppet advocates due to its agentless architecture…  They added that there doesn’t yet seem to be a clear-cut winner in this debate.

From there, the discussion started to go meta as the participants began to observe that “this automation stuff seems unsettled.”  And then began to wonder “when is it going to get figured out."

Listening to the conversation, I could feel that there were tendencies, lurking just beneath the surface, to “wait and see” before taking on certain automation projects.  There it was... resistance to change.  Just which the team didn't want to see in Others.

And it was then that I realized (or perhaps was reminded) that for all of us, our perception of change is relative.  In the former case, the team felt the environment was too static and change wasn’t happening fast enough… in the latter case, the team felt the environment was too dynamic and change was happening too fast.

So in a time of change, remember that regardless of what side of the times we find ourselves, understanding the Other’s worldview will help to smooth the transition.

The gift of feedback: photos, video, and comments

I had previously spent some time going through our Customer survey responses.  Our survey is like many others:  it asks a variety of questions about our performance, provides an opportunity for written commentary, and is summed up with a question similar to "how likely are you to recommend?".  In addition to the quantitative scores, the survey team performed of sentiment analysis to summarize the intent of the comments.

My reactions were (unsurprisingly) varied: happiness & pride coupled with nearly equal measures of dissatisfaction and regret.

I revisited the survey results this week and the activity triggered personal reflection on the nature of feedback. And how different feedback mechanisms have varied impacts.

Take a stroll through some photos on your phone.  While they are primarily remembrance, they also provide feedback about ourselves and others, exactly as we looked in a certain time and place.  While they are precise and objective, they are perfectly still and quiet.  This allows our minds to use our memories to fill in the rest of the scene.

Video provides richer feedback, with movement and sound to augment the visual scene.  Which means video is also prone to more cringe-inducing moments than photos.  The viewer simply cannot gloss over the video's objective recollection of the event.

The feedback from comments is fundamentally different.  Even when quantified, it's subjective.  Even at it's most comprehensive, it's incomplete.  And it frequently lacks enough context for the recipient  to fill in the gaps.  Further, it's delivered unilaterally, preventing real-time questions and answers.

These differences from other types of feedback do not invalidate the feedback in comments. However, comments do require contextualization to gain the most value from them.  That is, working to place the comments back in the context from which they originated allows one to understand their cause.

Failing to do so makes it easy for us to make excuses for our behavior, actions and words -- or lack of the same -- and prevents us from getting true value from the comments.

It's often said that feedback is a gift.  I think this statement is true in a deeper sense than it's typically said: Like a gift, we need to take the effort to unpack feedback in order to get the true value that rests within.

Getting Outside

As one can tell, this blog has been dormant for some time.  Since this last post, my blogging activity has been confined to the typical internal blog.  And so some reasonably reasonable content has had a largely limited audience.

However, during the midst of a recent Crowdchat, Dan Hushon asked "who's blogging?"... and I answered that my blog was on our internal Jive site.  As it happened, Dan and I were in the same room for the Crowdchat and afterwards he said, "So... why not an external blog?"  A question to which I didn't really have a response.

I said that I used to have an external blog... I'd need to find it... but other than that, I didn't really have a reason.

Dan (and others at CSC) have been talking about the benefits of Outside-in thinking and its importance to both our company and others.  But it's not just about pulling information in from the outside.  To really benefit from the Outside... you have to be there and be part of the information exchange.  Blogging and tweeting are a big part of that.

This year, I've done a reasonable job with my tweeting.  And so as 2014 starts to end, I'll make an early resolution to move my blogging back here.