Wow, love it - Your writing is getting so incisive! And such clarity in voice and narrative style! Bravo! Ok, in terms of content and how it applies to the contexts I'm living... Part 2 was also making me wonder - to what extent your insights apply to management and teams when one is "building" something that is being applied, not building for use. I have always been on the side of using the technology in order to build, that is, the customer side of these tools. That said, we are "building" but it's not the tool itself, but building the ways for how the tool(s) will be used. Some of the same principles and management frameworks you're bringing up seem very resonant for what I'm experiencing - the tug and pull of some formal single specialization-forward process vs more cross-functional everyone-get-your-hands-in-the-mud team process... I think you've stated one of the most important benefits of the cross-functional team is to get to real solutions faster, with more sophistication and enabled complexity from the multiple specialist lenses. But it is, nonetheless, so hard to build shared understanding across these specializations and contexts. And once people have gotten bogged down by all those butting heads, then that's when the process mavens come out and say, "tsk, tsk, you should have planned better, you should have engaged the right process..." And I do not think they are wrong, just as what you describe here is that teams can also get overburdened by "the right process." Remember that Tim Brown article/book where he described the cycles of convergence and divergence, just like you've presented here? Despite such a simple dynamic, people struggle to apply it. Their own psychologies get in the way. Teams/companies still need "a real grown up" to step in and manage time, budgets, outcomes. But hey, keep going! I'm thinking a lot about these things these days, too... just a very different context and constraints on what it means to "build."
You have really great points, Linda. I think if you had asked me six months ago if I was a fan of process in order to drive better outcomes, my immediate response would have been an honest yes. My experience in the past is that without a overarching set of rituals that a team goes through in order to get an outcome, you miss things. Or different areas of capability are not well used throughout a project, which can lead to worse outcomes.
In some ways what I'm articulating in Context is the new process is just a new set of rituals that I think are now newly possible with the new technology and tools that we have available to us as builders.
Now can you apply the approach that I've outlined to more of the meta-level like what you're talking about to provide guidance on how to use the tools? Of course you can. But I think that given the newness of where we are with AI and with a lot of the new technologies that we can use to drive outcomes, it makes more sense to leave it open-ended for individual contributors to figure out how best to get the outputs that they want.
So at this stage of management, I think that we are better off providing a high-level set of rituals and not a more granular set and leaving teams open to more creative possibilities on how they want to work together to get desirable outcomes.
Wow, love it - Your writing is getting so incisive! And such clarity in voice and narrative style! Bravo! Ok, in terms of content and how it applies to the contexts I'm living... Part 2 was also making me wonder - to what extent your insights apply to management and teams when one is "building" something that is being applied, not building for use. I have always been on the side of using the technology in order to build, that is, the customer side of these tools. That said, we are "building" but it's not the tool itself, but building the ways for how the tool(s) will be used. Some of the same principles and management frameworks you're bringing up seem very resonant for what I'm experiencing - the tug and pull of some formal single specialization-forward process vs more cross-functional everyone-get-your-hands-in-the-mud team process... I think you've stated one of the most important benefits of the cross-functional team is to get to real solutions faster, with more sophistication and enabled complexity from the multiple specialist lenses. But it is, nonetheless, so hard to build shared understanding across these specializations and contexts. And once people have gotten bogged down by all those butting heads, then that's when the process mavens come out and say, "tsk, tsk, you should have planned better, you should have engaged the right process..." And I do not think they are wrong, just as what you describe here is that teams can also get overburdened by "the right process." Remember that Tim Brown article/book where he described the cycles of convergence and divergence, just like you've presented here? Despite such a simple dynamic, people struggle to apply it. Their own psychologies get in the way. Teams/companies still need "a real grown up" to step in and manage time, budgets, outcomes. But hey, keep going! I'm thinking a lot about these things these days, too... just a very different context and constraints on what it means to "build."
You have really great points, Linda. I think if you had asked me six months ago if I was a fan of process in order to drive better outcomes, my immediate response would have been an honest yes. My experience in the past is that without a overarching set of rituals that a team goes through in order to get an outcome, you miss things. Or different areas of capability are not well used throughout a project, which can lead to worse outcomes.
In some ways what I'm articulating in Context is the new process is just a new set of rituals that I think are now newly possible with the new technology and tools that we have available to us as builders.
Now can you apply the approach that I've outlined to more of the meta-level like what you're talking about to provide guidance on how to use the tools? Of course you can. But I think that given the newness of where we are with AI and with a lot of the new technologies that we can use to drive outcomes, it makes more sense to leave it open-ended for individual contributors to figure out how best to get the outputs that they want.
So at this stage of management, I think that we are better off providing a high-level set of rituals and not a more granular set and leaving teams open to more creative possibilities on how they want to work together to get desirable outcomes.