How to prevent your quest for teams’ autonomy from turning into chaos…
VP of Engineering in a European scale-up for which the concept of autonomy (of people and teams) is more and more a matter of survival, Thomas continues to share experiments and lessons learned collectively on this theme at Agicap.
After a french podcast and a talk at Devoxx France which transcribe the main issues and the first steps of their approach, Thomas today addresses a crucial and decisive point in the success of this empowerment by the teams of the Lyon scale-up.
This morning in the subway, I am standing in the middle of a crowded train. When people decide to massively get off of the train for a station that is not mine, I am stuck by an outgoing flow of people on my right, another flow of people going out on my left, and a central pole in the back. I can’t move in any way, only shift slightly to let either the right flow or the left flow pass faster. In this context, a person from the right flow who would like to get out even faster, begins to moan the French way (the famous “Rrrrr!”) and to look at me as if I were incapable of understanding that I had to shifts even more to let people out of his line faster 😆
Until I openly pointed it out to him, this grumbling person had just forgotten that I also had to deal with another line (and a central pole).
The importance of having a global vision
This miscommunication in the subway makes me think a little about some problems that can occur when trying to promote autonomy in a structure that grows quickly. This is the case with us, which left the rank of startup to become a scale-up (i.e. a startup which validated its MVP, its business model and which is now growing intensively).
In such a context, the autonomy of people and teams is an essential vector of efficiency and commitment. But very complex to set up.
When we approach the subject of team autonomy, everyone naturally thinks of the importance of top-down communication from top management. It is true that without up-to-date information on the global context and on the company’s strategy, it is impossible for anyone to make relevant local decisions. And without taking relevant local decisions, the organization will not be able to go very far or very quickly (I let you imagine the effectiveness of a consistent organization which, on the contrary, would have every local decision validated by the top management…) . This point is pretty obvious to everyone.
On the other hand, few people are really aware that the other teams around them are just as dependent on their communications.
Autonomy, a more complex concept than it seems
Autonomy is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp in the end. Very often, we only take a self-centered and very narrow view of this situation.
It is easy to confuse Autonomy with Independence (or even Isolation).
Like: we take information, and we go to work alone in our area. It is not so.
Autonomy is ultimately a never-ending issue of transparency and synchronization for everyone.
Indeed, in a constantly changing world, it is essential to stay connected with each other and to be able to constantly adjust.
But without knowing what others are doing, how can you best adjust?
I often use the metaphor of boats on a lake with my teams.
Imagine that each team is one of many boats on a lake. We all know the objective that was shared beforehand: “we have to go to this island at the other end of the lake”. Now we just have to go, together.
Well if I suddenly decide on my boat to turn violently to starboard without warning my colleagues around, I most certainly risk capsizing the boat which is glued to mine in this direction. If in addition they are taking selfies on the edge of their boat, I even risk dropping more than one in the water on the way. Whoops.
A new shazam: “I intend to…”
In the “Turn the ship around” book, which was very useful to me since my arrival at Agicap in order to support this movement towards even more autonomy and collective efficiency, David Marquet explains that the systematization of “I have the intention to…” was an essential prerequisite for the empowerment of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fé.
The “I intend to…” is what allows the concerned teams to intervene at the right time to avoid drama or mess.
The absence of response or opposition following such an intention expressed widely, therefore corresponds to an agreement. This avoids everyone having to validate each decision before acting (once again for the sake of efficiency and autonomy).
Let us now resume our story of boats. If before turning violently to starboard, my team indicated: “We intend to turn violently to starboard within 10 seconds”, we would suddenly allow the team of the boat which sticks to us to starboard to acknowledge our next move saying, “Okay. We’re going to slow down to let you turn and pass in front of us”, or else a “uh… absolutely not! We have rocks on our right and a boat sticking to us just behind… We are stuck and ask you to wait a bit or take another direction please!”.
All this little game of transparency allows us to synchronize and align ourselves on a waterbody where a lot of things can happen.
Avoid chaos
Applied to a more concrete case for us: if a dev team does not express as soon as possible and clearly: “we intend to prepare a complex hot-fix on this key area of the software”, they deprive the other teams around to react either to avoid a mess (“no need, we’ve already been on it for a long time and are almost done” from another dev team for example), or even a drama that the support team could avoid by reacting (“ok, but above all no hot-fix this Thursday afternoon, because we have a huge investor demo that we would like to secure in this slot”).
Without these many “we intend to…” from everyone it is not autonomy, it is chaos.
Boats colliding, annihilating their efforts by blocking their way without knowing it, “Us v.s. Them” relationships that emerge and lead far too much unnecessary waste and frictions in an organization that needs to grow quickly and efficiently.
A Three-Body Problem
This problem of autonomy and empowerment has several aspects:
An educational aspect first, to make everyone aware that autonomy is not “after me, the flood” (“après moi le déluge”) or isolation from one another. We are not libertarians!
Since most people consider this obligation of transparency as an unbearable constraint (and which seems antinomic to them with the notion of autonomy), you will have to define the proper steps for this change management.
In particular, to put in place very early the conditions of psychological safety essential to this transparency (so that people do not feel in danger when they express themselves) and also to allow initiatives to be taken (allow people to make mistakes and learn from their mistakes).
Secondly, a practical and logistical aspect. You need to organize the modalities of all these exchanges and communication channels so that the concerned people can all easily hear the “I intend to…” of the others, and have enough time to then react. For this, we decided at Agicap to be consistent with the autonomy approach, and to think together about the best ways to achieve this (eg: naming conventions for specific channels in slack, SLA of teams, gather.town organization, etc.). This is still an important topic for us, and we will surely have plenty of other things to share on the subject soon.
Finally, the third and probably the most important aspect: the cultural aspect, the impact of the current culture of the organization towards this issue. When going from a startup to a scale-up, there are changes that may seem difficult to consider for some people who are still very attached to the initial operational mode. The heroic mode where everyone knows each other, works side by side, where it feels like everything is going faster and where you can feel your individual impact very directly.
People need to come to understand that it is less the individual impact than the collective impact that it is necessary to aim from now on. Because if we don’t switch our startup paradigm with a scale-up paradigm, we will have serious delivery and efficiency problems.
Fortunately for us, Lucas Bertola, the CTO and one of the 3 co-founders of Agicap, was already convinced of the interest of changing gears and of the approach towards more autonomy (a theme, moreover, discussed at length with him during my 1st job interview). But this is not a sufficient guarantee for the success of such an enterprise.
To achieve this, everyone must be able to question themselves. To be able to hear that others can influence us and our actions. That another boat can sometimes make us deviate from our ideal trajectory. And that this is not an anomaly. This is normal since there are many more of us on the body of water.
For me it is also linked to our maturity: people who are new to this journey towards autonomy will be essentially centered on themselves and their own problems, their own individual effectiveness. They won’t see the systemic side at first or will have less interest in it (be careful also not to encourage them in this egocentric direction with bonuses & individual objectives).
As very often, moreover, it comes down to a matter of Culture (the one that “eats strategy for breakfast” as Peter Drucker brilliantly said once). If you want to avoid stalling collectively because some people don’t play the game, you’ll have to support those people who have remained very attached to the previous operational mode: the startup one where “we didn’t have all these problems and where everything seemed simpler”.
The chance to have startups within the scale-up (which we call Product lines) allows us to find interesting places even for the most reluctant people to embrace that scale-up change. That is nice because we can offer them positions and time-to-market constraints that suit them better (e.g.: return to MVP & startup mode). Everyone’s a winner, but you still have to realize first, that this is what blocks some people…
As far as I am concerned, it is precisely to solve this kind of scaling up and collective efficiency challenges that I decided to join a scale up as ambitious and talented as Agicap.
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