Be humble; you’re probably wrong

So you’ve worked for 15 years in several companies and positions in Earth Observation, IT and education. For 15 years you’ve been working and learning, and always came to the conclusion: my boss is a nice guy, but he’s wrong. Sometimes wrong in very obvious ways, but mostly not so evidently.

And then, suddenly, you have your own company. And you are the boss. So you know one thing for sure: “I am wrong”.

What to do?

Exploiting the teachers paradox

This blog series is about our company, the people that work here and about me. It is inspired by the manager readme of Oren Ellenbogen, curator of one of my favourite tech leadership newsletters. Although I like the idea of the manager readme (write your own User Guide), I don’t really like the static aspect of it. So I decided to make it a bit more dynamic by turning it into a series of blogs.

I will write about me, what makes me tick, how to rub my fur the wrong way and how we are growing a team, company and culture at Satelligence; the coolest company in the world.

Something I learned in my second job at an e-learning consultancy: learning is most effective when you do something (action learning); the person that learns most from a class is not the student, but the teacher. So if you want to learn how to be a good boss, start your own company.

How to start a company

During my career I have mostly been in IT teams. Consequently, I picked up my share of scrum, lean, kanban and other agile ninja techniques that promise to deliver smooth operating dev teams cheered by a horde of happy customers.

Obviously, I have been influenced by those concepts, but too often, I have seen the process turned into a goal (more on that in my next blog). Scrum for scrum’s sake, kanban for lean’s sake or useless debate about semantics, wording, labels. In the end, all these concepts have similar goals:

• How to handle complexity and variance;
• How to maximise learning;
• How to minimise waste.

They are all based on an iterative, incremental method that focuses on exploiting feedback loops.

Feedback loops. Loops? Doing things over and over again? But I’m a lazy guy! I don’t like doing things twice (which got me into programming) and I don’t like it when things depend (only) on me. Besides that, I’m allergic to bureaucracy gone wrong, extensive policies and I’m very flexible. That sounds like a contradiction but it really is not.

It’s all about keeping things simple, be transparent about your premises and live your beliefs. All this previously acquired knowledge I tried to use when we were setting up our company.

Photo by John Salvino on Unsplash

Don’t make me think

We started with the following conditions:

• Minimise protocol and policies;
• Maximise a culture of getting things done and continuous improvement;
• No premature optimisation;
• Let structure emerge rather than be defined;
• Introduce and leverage bottlenecks (eg no sysadmin, no office manager, lean operations).

In addition to these conditions within which we let the company grow, we built on these three pillars:

• Clear and simple structure;
• Clear principles;
• Clear values.

Structure

We started with a simple two team structure: customers and engineering. After a few months, one of our colleagues noted that that didn’t reflect the tasks in the company well, so we adapted paper to reality, three teams:

• Customers (sales, marketing, business development);
• Data science (operations);
• Engineering (R&D).

We work in 2 week sprints with daily stand-ups. Each team has its own bi-weekly planning meeting on Thursday. On Monday there is a plenary demo.

During the sprints we handle day to day issues and aim to reach quarterly (high level) goals which are set for each team, inspired by the gist method. Quarterly goals are drafted by management but discussed with the teams.

Higher level concepts and ideas are discussed during workshops, organised when needed.

On top of that, we have a quarterly review with every employee (instead of the classic 2 in The Netherlands):

• Q1: informal, reflect on you and your own development, you and your team and you and the company
• Q2: formal, salary increase is awarded or not; employees are given a small assignment to reflect on their position;
• Q3: informal, free and open discussion about whatever is relevant;
• Q4: formal, interview with external consultant to have an outside view and possibility to reflect on management.

This simple structure already has many feedback loops from which the teams and company learn. Mainly because of these feedback loops, the company and teams evolve to more efficient structures. Sometimes naturally, sometimes a bit of coaching and encouragement is needed.

However,there is still room for improvement; we can learn a lot faster than we do now. A way to increase learning is to define all work as falsifiable hypotheses like advocated in Scaling Lean by Ash Maurya. Realising ‘everything is a hypothesis’ is one thing, making it second nature is another. It’s great that ‘You learn from your mistakes’, but what do you do when you do things right the first time? And we are often still too eager to show ‘how busy we are’, whereas it really is irrelevant if you’re busy or not. The key is: ‘did you do the things you planned to do?’.

Principles

Following are the principles and values of our company. We work in the structure described above. Every time you face a difficult decision or situation, the principles and values can help you test your assumptions and premises.

You enjoy your job

Whatever you do in your life; make sure you enjoy your job. At Satelligence, you are obligated to enjoy your job. If not, talk about it to your colleagues, management and we’ll see how we can change things to make you happy. Happy employees are intrinsically motivated, make other employees happy. Your employee happiness, in return, will also reflect on your customers. Always think about your colleagues first. Make sure they are happy or fail as a company, boss, person.

You know what your colleagues are doing

You are not working on your own. You should know what your colleagues are doing all the time so you don’t waste time and can make informed decisions without consulting a ton of people. Knowing what your colleagues are doing helps reflect on the efficiency of the structure. Are the daily standups, bi weekly sprint demo’s and quarterly kickoffs enough to get everyone in the know? This principle also implies for everyone in the team to take responsibility to make it easy for other people to know what they are doing: communicate clearly, manage your calendar, delegate, collaborate, be open and explicit.

One step ahead

Always try to think one step further than necessary. This is a huge waste killer: be clear and SMART in your communication. Think about ‘what if I had to do this 1000 times instead of 1?’ to get and idea of scalability. Think about the true reason behind a customer’s request; don’t extinguish fires, turn off the gas.

Everybody does field visits

We focus on emerging markets in SE Asia, Africa and Latin America. We specialise in natural capital risk and performance products. That requires processing tons of data for which we need quite a few programmers. A programmer should know what a tree looks like on the ground. A data scientist should talk face to face with the people she interacts with on a daily basis. It is very important to realise, especially for engineers and data scientists, that they are contributing to solve a human problem. Solving a mathematical equation, increasing algorithm speed by a factor 10 or displaying a map in 3D is all completely useless if it doesn’t contribute to solving the human problem.

Everything gets reviewed

Reviewing is about learning, feedback loops, efficiency and also about being ‘one step ahead’. Everything (everything!) improves after having been reviewed. Reviewing code, pitches, proposals, job ads, film scripts website copy has several positive effects:

• Get rid of technical errors like spelling, syntax, grammar, punctuation;
• Improve content;
• Knowledge transfer;
• Create support and shared responsibility;
• Get things done on time.

The last three are usually underestimated, or even overlooked. You often hear the argument that ‘I didn’t have it reviewed, because that saved me a lot of time’. That is a ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ fallacy.

Production is not person dependent

A colleague once told me: “make yourself obsolete as soon as possible so people don’t notice when you’re not there”. This is one of the most valuable lessons I ever got in my life. You do not want to be the key person for ‘shipping next months’ order’, ‘debugging that brilliant script’ or being called on holiday to be asked where ‘the key to the monkey house is’. No cowboy code running wild on servers, no scripts that only one person understands, no documents that live only on that folder on your laptop.

Values

Our values are what we are, live and aspire. They are very much interconnected. To each other but also the company principles and even structure.

Conscientious

Don’t be an asshole. People are making important decisions based on your work. Be aware when you provide sensitive information that people could use it ways you did not intend to.

Innovative

Don’t be satisfied with the status quo. There’s always a better way. If you aspire to be better tomorrow than today, find a way to do so.

Friendly

Be friendly. Even when you are right and the other person is wrong. Being right is irrelevant, it’s about moving ahead.

Confident

Have faith in that what you are doing is the right thing and that it will pay off in the end. It might take more time than you expected but you should be confident that you work in an environment that helps you make the best decision in the current context.

Inspiring

Inspiration works two ways. First, be inspired by the world around you: your family, your friends, your team, your customers. Be open to new experiences and opportunities to learn. Second, be an inspiration to the world around you. Be open and approachable when other people reach out.

The dude abides

There you have it: I’m wrong. But that’s ok. It’s ok because there is a structure with nice, fun, smart people providing me with feedback allowing me to grow. I don’t care if I’m crap today, as long as I am better than yesterday and as long as I will be better tomorrow.