The Agility Series — 7 — A Leaders Golden Opportunity
Know this:
Inefficient cultures create inefficient systems. Inefficient systems reduce profits.
Great cultures create great systems. Great systems increase profits.
If we learn anything from Conway’s law, it is that the shape our systems are in is a reflection of the shape our organization is in. When things go bad, as they often do, it is easy to place blame on the other departments we don’t work in, but the reality is, we are all on the same team even if we don’t get an official assignment.
Leaders have an opportunity here.
Calling out a company is easier when no one is to blame, and everyone is to blame. You as a leader, if you are in fact the leader, have a golden opportunity to coalesce with the people involved and empower them to transform together. If your leadership empowers you, then you can even stop incentivizing the behaviors that divide these groups and start incentivizing behaviors that bring unity.
Please don’t mistake my words as though I am promoting that all 5,000 or 10,000 company members are on the same physical team. There is a healthy division of labor and while some departments are clearly and naturally delineated by profession and the charge to get something done that is different than the rest of the company, that only works half the time in technology.
The more we dive into our domains, the more we learn that communication is the key to our success. Communication is both languages based, and messaging based. We have no value in language if we are not sending and receiving messages.
In fact, the person credited with the invention of Object-Oriented Programming, Alan Kay, is quoted as saying this:
I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
When we consider this idea that messages need to be clear and accurate, then we begin to likely understand the motivation for the Bounded Context concept of Domain-Driven Design. And once we put that out there on a map where we divide the business solutions up by the languages that are spoken, Bounded Contexts, then we can see a pattern for grouping teams for efficient communication internally as well as efficient communication between these teams. “Team Topologies” is a great resource for this pattern.
If we can empower these teams with domain experts, then the language and the solutions can be modeled efficiently. The important note is that we are trying to build efficient systems. That means they not only run well, but they transform and grow faster over time.
If you have systems that are not growing right along with the business, you have an inefficient system. You might want to use the pain of the system to start highlighting a new era of team. Start the culture shift from the status you are in now, to a new cultural norm where everyone is providing value as a series of language separated yet interconnected teams. You will want a domain-driven designer along with a distributed architect to help your people craft quality systems in those contexts.
If you need help with this let’s talk.
Thanks for reading,
John Connolly
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrconnolly/
