The Royal Yak
(continued from Trim Yaks; part of the Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series)
Talking to people is yak shaving; it is an intermediate task that helps you get your official tasks done. It’s usually seen as a separate way to “waste” time. I’m here to call relationship-building out as a productivity booster.
Conway’s Law says that our system architecture resembles our communication flow (approximated by our org chart). Indeed, the human relationship graph has a close relationship to our system relationship graph — and if it doesn’t, that’s going to be a dysfunctional hunk of software.
Those interludes of chit-chat while you’re pairing? They matter. Especially on a remote team, when we don’t have chit-chat in a kitchen. Here are three crucial objectives for talking to people at work:
The more we know about what people know, the more we know whom to ask for help. This is the first thing I ask about when I meet a new person in the company. If my service interacts with another one, it helps to know who understands that one and can expound on its history. If I need to change nginx config, it helps to know that person who likes it.
Asking for help is a beautiful thing: it gets you help, and it gets you friends. Counterintuitively, people like you more if they have helped you, if they feel like you owe them one. This is great, especially with people outside the team, whom you can’t all maintain a close relationship with.
We need to know what our teammates don’t know. In particular, on a close team — and this is why a close team is limited to 7 people — we need to track what each other person knows and doesn’t, so that we can tell them the pieces of information they need. We have our own mental model of the system, our model of each other, and our model of each other’s models — all this is necessary for close coordination. This is how we avoid the potholes of communication failure. This is how we get distributed decisionmaking with trust: because we can predict each others’ actions. For smooth work, we need to know each other this well.
Let our teammates know that we want to know what they know, we want to hear their input. Psychological safety. We each need to feel safe suggesting ideas and asking questions. Google found that this is the #1 determiner of team effectiveness. So part of generativity is making your team a safe place for everyone to contribute. Do this by asking people for input and listening carefully to what they say. We don’t to agree; we have to welcome the information.
Social yaks are yaks. Get to know people, find out what they know, and make them feel safe. Keep them up to date on what you know.
One way I do this is with my own slack channel, #jessitron-stream. I use it as a notebook. I throw error messages in them when I hit them, and record what I did (especially when changing infrastructure). I track my own yak stack. People can pop in and answer questions if they want, or I can @ them and then they see the context of my inquiry. Lots of other Atomists have started their own stream channel; we have #radio-russ and #kipz-corner and #sylvain-stream and #hoffhaus and #arrrrr-day. It’s one way to work in public from the privacy of our own homes.
Don’t neglect the Royal Yaks. Hold court in Slack or in the kitchen. Interact with each other. Find out what is useful and what is in the way of other people, and you can prioritize your own yak shaving. These conversations, when they get interesting, might even lead you to the Golden Yak (ooooo).
