How to deal with Organizational Debt?
Or what to do with Conway’s Law
In last week’s blog post, I explained that products are shaped by the structure of the organization building them (Conway’s Law). I call a suboptimal organizational setup “Organizational Debt”. Of course, the follow-up question is: How to pay it back?
Let’s start with looking at our playing field. What do we know?
Fighting an overly complex organizational structure does not go in one step. At the start, you do not know what is really needed and what is superfluous. Even if you are sure some specific rule or process can clearly go, there will be people whose job it is to guard them. Maybe even part of their career and current position is based on that. So if you just come with “this has to go!”, you can be sure to encounter fierce resistance.
Bureaucracy will not dismantle itself. First because, as mentioned, some people might fear for their job. Second, because systems (and bureaucracy is a system) have the tendency to work for their own survival. The proof that a process is no longer needed will never come out of the regular working of the system itself. Instead, there can be even a tendency to create new demand for the bureaucracy.
As a goal, “dismantle bureaucracy” is not a good guideline — in the same way that “lower the costs” is a bad goal to motivate the right steps. You want to optimize for the positive!
Remember that there are situations when bureaucracy is good! When done well, it serves as an abstraction layer that depersonalizes requests and guarantees the same rules for everyone, fairness and reliability (“If you provide input A, you get output B.”). That is much better than needing “personal contacts” to get things done. To judge whether it serves or hinders, it is important to be consider the time and effort spent on bureaucracy and to put it into relationship to the actual work to be done. Context matters: If you want to release your product 1–2 times a year, you will be ok with more steps than if you want to release every two weeks.
So how to find out what is supporting you and what is in the way? There are good models like John Kotter’s 8 Steps for Leading Change or Esther Derby’s Seven Lessons from a Top-Down Change. Apart from handling the psychological aspects (Start with “Why?”; cater for fears), for me it boils down to:
1. Get an overall, shared view on how (assumed) value is flowing through the system that is your organization. It does not matter whether you call this Kanban, DevOps or Value Streams.
2. Inspect this view with the people within that system. Try out ideas for improvements.
3. Communicate regularly. Celebrate every success.
Who is supposed to do this? Everyone in the organization is responsible for this. You co-create the company and its culture with your own actions. Leadership is accountable for this. It is their job to start with the right behavior. The decisions taken everyday ultimately form the values (What is important here? What is not?) and the culture (“This is how we do things here.”). While for managers it might be enough to optimize within a given system, leaders change the system, practicing double-loop learning. Organizational debt is accrued by the people in power — intentionally or not. It is better to confront it deliberately than to leave it on the side. One day, it will bite you just as uncatered Technical Debt, and those bites hurt a lot.
The Clash: I Fought The Law
