The Law of Attraction
What we focus on expands
One of the challenges or opportunities I have is to motivate people to focus on what they want to achieve and not on the things we don’t want more of.
To give you an example, If we primarily focusing on having zero defect tolerance before launching to production usually we end up with more defects and increase our lead times. You receive what you look for.
Build, provide value and it will come
We usually have a tendency to first focus on the things we don’t want much and we get surprised that the result becomes exactly as we predicted and didn’t want. Don’t have these activities as your main focus it’s part of your scope, yes. Of course we don’t want defects and we want to have minimal lead times to customer as possible but focus on the main value.
If you want something new you need to be prepared to let something old go
And now the scary part. If you strive for change, it could mean that you need to let something old go, I would even argue that you need to let something old go. It could be anything like a process, way of working or a tool even.
Let say you have spend a lot of money, time and effort in a process, strategy or even hardware and don’t get the result you want and still go at it in the exact same way. Isn’t that the definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
I get this answer a lot when I suggest change, we support you to do this as long as you don’t interfere with [place what you want]. This due to the fact that we usually assume that all changes starts with something negative and not the other way around when we are under pressure.
Rubber dinghy
I’m a big fan of using analogies not saying they are good, but still …
If you try to cross the Atlantic ocean in a rubber dinghy and it starts to leak. Of course you patch the holes with silver tape and you keep doing that until you cover all the holes and the rubber dinghy stops leaking. But in the end is it the dinghy or the silver tape that took you cross the Atlantic ocean? Some times it could be a better idea to raise your eyes and see the yacht beside you.
Summary
Focus on the things you want because the will expand and don’t focus on the negative and scary things, because guess what, they also expand.
Software development done right is when the teams make them self accountable for the entire process regardless what anyone says. Give them a clear mission and let the team set the goals (backlog) to fulfil them.
We are just at the beginning. A glorious future!
