Surviving organisational politics with John Cutler
Listen to Surviving organisational politics with John Cutler
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In this episode, John Cutler talks about surviving the current tech environment. We discuss how layoffs and blame destroy trust, create fear and conflict and stop people from providing the feedback that leaders need to make good decisions. We discuss whether our workplaces are a meritocracy or highly charged political environments. And we explore strategies for surviving such as going with the flow, picking your battles, building alliances and creating narratives. Join us to learn how to navigate corporate politics more effectively.
Welcome to the No Nonsense Agile Podcast. I'm Murray Robinson.
Donna: And I'm Donna Spencer.
John: And I'm John Cutler.
Murray: Hi, John. Thanks for joining us today. We wanted to talk to you about your survey of product managers, what you found from it, and how do you survive the environments that you're finding are coming up in that survey?
Meet John Cutler
Murray: So let's kick off with a bit of an introduction from you about who you are for people who haven't heard you before.
John: Sure. My backgrounds in product management and UX research with some sort of business analyst type roles or just general tech roles thrown in for good measure over the years. I write a lot about product management, product development. I've drifted between different communities. I spoke at agile conferences and product conferences and design conferences. I'm speaking at a service design conference in a couple of weeks. So I float between these different communities.
Exploring the Sense Maker Survey
Murray: Let's talk about this Sense Maker survey. Who were you surveying and what sort of questions were you asking?
John: The basic idea is that you're eliciting anonymous stories, and then you're asking the people who respond to the survey to reflect on their story and tag it. So if I told a story about struggling with my cross functional collaboration in my company, then you might ask is this story more about relationships, tools or power? And it's based on the idea that if you have a researcher tag, all of the feedback themselves, it's going to bias it to the perspective of the researcher. So a collective sense making activity. And the goal was to explore this question. What's going on in tech at the moment? It was easy for us to feel like something was happening, but we wanted to get a bit out of our own head and have other people engage in that discussion.
Diverse Feedback and Asymmetric Experiences
Murray: What's your reading of the results so far?
John: So the first thing that strikes you is just how asymmetric the feedback is in different places. There is a question that says, are things generally better or worse right now? And it is worse at the moment, but you can actually. Look at the people who say that things are better and zero in on those folks. And you'll see things like there's lots of interesting things happening in the technology we're using. I'm joining a startup. It's very exciting. There's a lot of growth in my particular area. And then if you zero in on the people who say that things are generally worse, there are some pretty thorny stories about internal politics, about layoffs. Folks who believe they've maybe hit their last job of their life that are going to be leaving tech. That was one thing that struck me.
Donna: Is there any geography element to the worse and better or is it across the board right now?
Geographical and Demographic Insights
John: In the United States, people say things are worse. People felt that some kind of status quo was collapsing. People are questioning the playbooks that maybe used to work for them, the playbooks that it took to get employed, the playbooks that took to stay employed. The playbooks about negotiating the environments that they're in. And so there's definitely a lot of stuff happening at the moment for people out in the workforce.
Murray: what sort of people have answered the survey?
John: So it is fairly diverse. It is a bit skewed towards design and product. It's probably underrepresented in terms of engineering. The leader story is underrepresented because there's fewer of them. The new startup representation is pretty high because there's a lot of startups and they're very vocal and they're trying to network and you tend to see fewer, senior vice president and more of frontline folks or consultants, contractors, and, or people who have startups.
Murray: Yeah. I can see that there's probably about 70 percent of people answering it have more than 10 years experience. Mostly full time employed and overall the vibe of the stories that people are giving is 75 percent negative to very negative, 10 percent neutral and 15 percent positive.
John: Yeah.
Metaphors and Heavy Sentiments in Tech
John: We asked for a metaphor of what it's like to be working in the field in 2024. And, That's, heavy. If you want to explore that an extinction event. Being in prison, depressing, working at a circus, Emperor clothes where tech is the boy and director is the Emperor. Swimming upstream.
Murray: Being arse raped in prison by people who are significantly less talented and super dumb.
Donna: Having 20 divorced parents who all have competing expectations of you.
John: Yeah, it's pretty heavy.
Murray: People answering this survey are saying that they're experiencing really out of touch leaders demanding very unreasonable things. Real short term focus on immediate outcomes And yet, not providing people with anywhere near enough resources or support to get the things done that they're being asked to do.
John: Yeah.
Trust, Psychological Safety, and Leadership Challenges
John: Curious what you think, Donna, when reading that?
Donna: I noticed exactly the same thing. The competing priorities, being told to do things. Reacting all of a sudden to something that happened on the weekend, and having your priorities shifted, and I can see the same things there that I've been hearing elsewhere. Everybody feels like everybody else is incompetent.
John: It's very tribal at the moment and my sense is that when times are tough, you get this infighting, you get these heavy asymmetries of experiences within companies. And just to use the example, people talk about Toyota a lot, or talk about continuous improvement. That occurred in a society, and at a time, when there was a strong collectivist focus, and a long term focus in what was going on. And, when you look at companies that have strong cultures, they tend to take this sort of long term view. They maybe had some early employees that believe things should work a certain way or shouldn't work a certain way, and, it worked out for them. But I think that when you have these situations that we're having right now where there's these asymmetries in outcomes you start to see this collective distrust and lack of loyalty.
And, it's really forced me to question a lot of the stuff we would talk about at agile conferences. Were we just chasing rainbows? Was this a very utopian view about how companies and corporations are existing that benefited from low interest rates and these rapidly growing tech companies and things are working.
Maybe
Impact of Remote Work and Organizational Distrust
Donna: pre COVID, when we were primarily working in offices with other people, there was an invisible glue of networks, of running into each other, having coffee with people in different departments. A lot of loose networking glue. Maybe with a lot of people working at home you lose that connective glue.
John: Some people mentioned that explicitly. It's funny though, because I think what happened in some cases, COVID actually brought a lot of teams together. For some teams, they were making incredible effort to make remote work. And I get the feeling that if things were still on the up and these companies were growing and there weren't these massive layoffs across all these companies, people would still continue to figure out how to make that work.
But if you're in an environment where people are not trusting each other and you have to make that extra effort to build that relationship. And let's say you work in a company where people are spread across the globe and you start thinking to yourself, Oh, I wonder if the people in X country are going to take our jobs or, I wonder if they have as much skin in the game as we do; it starts to create distrust. And there's a quote, from a friend of mine at one of the top five famous tech companies in the world that frequently people in the agile community point to as some kind of beacon of all the goodness they've imagined companies could experience.
But they said, my read: how are people feeling? Scared. .
Me, that's pretty heavy for you to say that.
This is them talking. My read is that everyone feels on the potential chopping block right now. And they know finding another cushy job like this is going to be hard because they've learned to optimize for this environment. And my read is that cutting the fat, it's making people more and more scared. And only those that are not scared of losing their job are willing to take the risks they need to do meaningful work. And besides the old timers with F you money, that's very few, which is creating a giant execution gap. And my read is that this is happening everywhere, but people are mistakenly blaming it on remoting. The remote thing is maybe exacerbated it, but it's one of those convenient things to blame in these organizations.
Murray: Yeah, it's really coming through very strongly that there's no psychological safety. People are afraid, there's little trust, little respect. And it's coming from the top down because it's coming from cuts. This is a side effect of firing 10 percent of people and saying it's because they're poor performers. My theory is it comes from Elon Musk, because Musk has been championing this idea that a tech company like Twitter can run with 20 percent of the staff that it used to have, because everybody else was a waste of space. But basically I think that there has been an enshittification of the professional workforce around product development, in order to extract value for shareholders.
Donna: Yeah.
Murray: Every leader is demanding things from their teams in product design, development, and management. And the teams are saying, we don't have the resources to do it. We don't have the cooperation from other teams to do it. And they're just saying, do it or you're fired. And yet 10 different leaders in the organization are saying the same thing with different priorities. So everybody's feeling under intense pressure. And who's getting the benefit of that? It's executives who are trying to hold on to their jobs and perhaps shareholders are trying to extract value.
John: It's not just the leaders. If you're working in those companies, it's also people fighting each other and undermining each other. I've had people say to me, all they want is the current stock price to double so I can sell the stock. Get out of it. I don't really care. I don't really trust the people in my company much anyway to do this. And they are also appropriating this rhetoric. I don't know what half these people are doing. Turns out at my company, only 20 percent of the people are adding 80 percent of the value. Oh, there's the doers and then there's the middleman. Why do we have these massive teams of UX researchers? UX research, product, agile coaches a lot of glue type roles or people who span boundaries and organizations and connect things are the target. That's not just the leaders saying it. That's also the opportunistic people on the front lines.
It'd be one thing if it was just a classic story of the investors extracting the value and the senior leaders keeping their job. It's even worse than that. It's people fighting. Is a level of tribalism within companies as well as people get more and more scared
Murray: It's like a village that's going through a famine and people are fighting over the food. The people who are already wealthy can have plenty to eat and then the rest are fighting over the scraps. People lower down who are saying all these things, I think they're just parroting it because this is the way to get on board with the power hierarchy now.
Donna: I could imagine in this scarce resource environment where people are worried about losing their jobs being a more visible doer who produces artifacts It's probably easier to say, I do things, but middle management, agile coaches, they don't do things.
And look, when there was money and teams were hiring roles but all of a sudden, there's a downturn. They're like, we're important. But it's sometimes invisible work.
Murray: Reading through people's responses people were saying, there's a big pressure on us to deliver outputs but they weren't really saying as long as I hit my numbers I'm fine. It was deliver more with less.
John: To be outcome oriented, you need to have high trust unless you're in a situation where you're dealing with highly deterministic outcomes. Because the things you do that might help you in the next year, might not help you three years from now. The things that you're doing to help you three years from now might not help you. Not all the metrics that you pick for success turn out to indicate what you think that they're going to indicate. So people imagine that if you are outcome focused, it's going to be the ultimate tie breaker. That teams will be able to be independent because they've got an outcome. The dirty secret is to be outcome oriented you actually need way higher trust. You need way higher interest in experimenting unless you're in a business where you need to pound a certain number of nails during the day. But in product, I heard reports of teams spending 60, 80 percent of their time just working down tech debt but saying that percentage was only 20 percent because they were incentivized to say they were spending most of their time on the new value added thing. If you don't have trust and psychological safety, it's very hard to be outcome oriented in product development.
Donna: When you say trust there, do you mean that management need to trust a product team and allow them to focus on those outcomes or do you mean that the team needs to be internally trustworthy or everything?
John: I was thinking about both. But what I also mean with this is that you need a certain level of trust that maybe the team might pick a metric that quarter, which they believe to be the one that's the one. And that let's say it doesn't turn out to be the one or you get new things that you have to trust that they're moving in the right direction.
A better way to explain maybe what I meant is that so much of how we work in corporations is built on this idea of mission command. And all these military leaders talk about, this is how to empower people. You paint this big objective and then managers present context to their teams and you trust the teams to figure out the solutions for you. And, you also trust that they're going to circulate feedback if they experience trouble or something changing. If you look at when militaries have fallen apart, it's usually because the supply chains got too long. The people on the front lines weren't getting the support they needed from the central military command. And they started to doubt why they were actually fighting the war to begin with. And once that happens none of the feedback can work its way up and then broadcasting of challenges and difficulties breaks down.
And in talking to senior leaders they are as confused as the next person. They're saying, I don't know what's happening. I say that they can trust me. I try to demonstrate that they can trust me, but no one's telling me what's going on. Whenever I enter the room, everyone is saying things are great. And then you leave the room and then things are falling apart again. I think one of the reasons why they moved to these layoffs is, it was the only thing that felt real.
The fog of all this incoherence had built up to the point where the only thing that felt real was to say, well, at least we've got the right number of people and our investors are happy at the moment.
Leadership Responsibility and Strategic Misalignment
Murray: But this environment you're describing is one that leaders are responsible for. They're the ones who have made that happen. If we reflect on Mission Command and have a look at the survey results, one of the things that came through very clearly is that there's very poor strategic alignment in organisations with different leaders having very different ideas. They don't know what to do, so they ask for a hundred things. That's the opposite of mission command. And then there's poor communication with low transparency that people are seeing from their leaders. And then there's resource shortages, unclear roles, rigid bureaucratic organizations, short term focus, high pressure, leaders out of touch, politics and favoritism. This is all the opposite of what mission command is supposed to be.
John: Yes. I think leaders have a lot of responsibility on that. But once that lack of coherence starts to snowball, it becomes very difficult to lead. It becomes very difficult to turn that thing around.
Murray: But if leaders are out of touch, and not hearing the bad news early so that they can do something about it, It's their fault. I've worked in organizations like that, and the reason that happens is because people are afraid. And they're afraid for a very good reason, because when they do give the bad news, they get punished. They get publicly reprimanded. They get a dressing down. So of course, they're going to be reluctant to, tell the executives the bad news. And there's a whole middle management whose job it is to hide everything so they can try and recover somehow before it gets up top.
John: I guess one way to maybe frame what I'm saying is during large economic collapses, like in 2008, 2001 after the second world war, whatever, there was a much more collective response to the situation. And you tend to see leaders say okay, team, we're in this together. Senior leaders are going to take a pay cut here. We're going to try to keep everyone that we can. This is going to be a difficult situation. We're going to get through this because we need to work together to do this.
What you're seeing now is a highly asymmetric response where the leader, like the Intuit CEO is saying, everything is great here at Intuit. We are now raising the bar on performance. Therefore, we're laying off 10 percent of the people who no longer meet our bar for performance, but we're going to do amazing things with AI, everyone. And investors, you don't need to be worried about what's going on here. And I think we could say that's bad leadership. I think it's even worse than that. It's the breakdown of these institutions in these companies that you're seeing.
Murray: I think there's also some inherent structural problems for glue people. Because glue people have a lot of responsibility and accountability but they have no authority and often no resources. And it's not just product managers, it's project managers, it's ux people, designers. So much is expected of them and yet they very often have very little formal authority at all.
Donna: I certainly saw that in skimming results, skimming the way that people are talking about that feeling of I have to do this thing, but I can't do this thing, and I'm just told what to do, but actually I have a skill, and why won't anybody listen to me?
Murray: Yeah, I think the job is a blame magnet. Project management is similar and it's interesting to compare how the project management community have dealt with it by implementing lots of processes and paperwork, project charters and budgets and
John: it's always funny when you see teams say, okay, we're going to do scrum now.
And then you say well why? What's it going to do?
Because now it's going to be impossible to hide.
Hide from what? You think it's going to be impossible to hide?
No, because we're going to do this thing and everything's transparent and I've heard that if you do this thing, it makes it transparent for everyone. The truth will come out and the low performers are going to be so obvious now we'll be able to take care of them.
And then I'm like, I hate to break it to you but if someone wants to hide, it doesn't matter what process they're doing. If they don't trust you they are going to find a way to hide. And then there's somehow surprised when six months later, none of that has materialized.
Murray: I have seen that work well, but it does take management's willingness to deal with the issues coming up from the team. So if the team is reporting, we're blocked because the test team refuses to collaborate with us, because you've put them in another structure with different incentives to us. And that's why we can't get anything done. Then a higher management need to say, Okay, let's put you all in the one team. But if they respond by saying, No! You're the problem then nothing's going to improve.
I want to move on to talk about, what you can do about this.
Survival Strategies in a Challenging Environment
Murray: So you're one of these product management developers, designers, researchers, project managers, agile people in this sort of environment, which is really awful right now. What can you do to survive? What's your advice?
John: You're seeing what people are doing. They're just laying low. They're not putting themselves at a lot of risk and they're playing a bit more of a long game.
And I think that, one thing that I can say is a lot of people expend a lot of energy on things that have no chance of working. If you're in this environment and you say, I'm going to keep pushing for us to visualize all the work. And we know in a low trust environment, no one's going to want to visualize all the work and it's going to become a political nightmare if you do that. That would be a good one to sit out. Because you know that the odds are against you in this particular environment.
So one thing that I think anyone can do is don't make unforced errors. Don't engage in things that have a pretty low probability of working out for you. And I think that for a lot of people, that's hard to do.
Another example for someone would be you've been maybe championing some kind of change effort for the last couple of years. You might want to rethink that. It's not going to materialize in the next year or so. You might as well save your energy to create bastions of goodness locally on your team to establish trust.
I've been thinking about this idea lately of what's the size of group that even in this haywire corporate environment can actually trust each other and do good work. And I think it's around 30 or 50 people maybe with two or three levels of hierarchy. And I think that maybe in this environment for many people, that would be a major success of just building this sort of container of goodness.
Murray: What about engaging in the politics? Cause the politics is there, whether you like it or not. How can you use it to your advantage?
John: Most politics in a corporate environment is just shutting up. Sometimes you need to be extremely opportunistic, but I think a lot of it is staying in a sort of noncommittal observance space for longer than would normally be natural to you before you take any risks. And I think a lot of change agents are people who fall in the agile community who normally would be the first to speak up about something, or maybe it would be the first to assume trust. I think that maybe they fall victim to their own desire to help. Where I've noticed that a lot of the people who progress in organizations, aren't the top performers, but they're the people who just don't make any big, obvious mistakes on being on the wrong side of an issue .
Murray: Work out where the wind is blowing and go that way.
John: Yeah. Or I've been using the idea of currents lately and thinking about navigating rivers . Some rivers are troughed and some have a crown ridge. So troughed rivers have, the center of the river is where the deep water and fast water is moving. Crown Ridge rivers have two deep sections one on the left and one on the right. If you're in a trough based organization, just hang out in the middle of the current and let it wash you down the river for a while.
Navigating Risks and Strategies
John: Don't make too many risks. Another strategy is to go near the edges that are a little bit out of view. That's where you can do interesting work and where you can find things. So I think both are a valid strategy.
Murray: Don't try paddling upstream though.
John: Oh, there is an exception to that.
The Concept of Fairy Gliding
John: There is something called fairy gliding. So fairy gliding is not pointing your boat straight upstream, but pointing it just a bit diagonally and using the energy of the river to project yourself across a river very quickly. So I've been thinking about that metaphor too, where yes, do not paddle straight up the river. But if you angle yourself against this, oncoming pressure, you can actually use it to jet you across the river . So in short, use the energy of the river.
The W.O.R.M.S. Analogy
John: There's a great analogy called worms, which is water, obstacles, route, markers and safety. So you got to know where the water is moving. You've got to understand where the obstacles are both the ones you can see, but the ones lurking underneath the water. You have to plot a route across the river or down the river. M you have to keep your markers visible so you don't go off track and S is just make sure that what you're doing is safe. You're safe from obstacles. So worms that's a good tactic for this.
Murray: So this advice sounds like go with the flow and avoid conflict. Just keep your head down.
Balancing Authenticity and Alliance Building
John: It's a weird situation because, at least in the United States, we're very individualistic and everyone wants to be great at their career. And so people embrace this executive presence or how to move through the politics of your particular organization and get ahead. If you say to people you need to regulate yourself and not be your authentic self at work, that's such a hard thing for some people and other people, it comes very naturally. They'd say, would anyone be their authentic self at work?
There's a great book by William Urie. He wrote getting to yes. But he also wrote the book, getting to yes with yourself. It's about how we negotiate with ourselves, walking into these situations. He was this great facilitator and mediator for conflict.
He would go to South America and try to mediate conflicts between dictators or other people. And he has this phrase of going to the balcony, which is where you get to yes with yourself. Where you have to go out to the balcony and come to a certain level of peace with yourself about how you're gonna operate and then going out into the fray.
Murray: If I reflect on my career, the people who have done best rising up the ranks have been the people who haven't been experts in their field. They've been people who are pretty good. But once they got to the point of being pretty good they focused their effort on building alliances with executives, building alliances with peers, even building an alliance with the team. And then those alliances pushed them forward. But you can have a favorable relationship with a senior executive, but then if your peers are upset with you because you stomped on them to get the results that the executive wanted. Those peers can stop you from getting the promotion or the extra things you want. So I think alliance building is super important. In order to build alliances, I don't think you can be your authentic self from what I've seen. People like that are very emotionally regulated.
John: Yeah.
Murray: They're very confident people normally. They're very good at getting other people to do what they want.
Donna: There were certainly a lot of people like that in federal government departments. And I think that was their bloody authentic self.
Murray: Well, maybe some people are just like that. But people like J. D. Vance is a chameleon. He's whatever you want him to be if that's a benefit to him, I think. And you can see he's flip flopped on all sorts of things. And yet I reckon people like that do super well in these sort of chaotic environments.
The Importance of Narrative in Tech
John: I think what makes tech a little bit weird or different with this is that people will swear up and down that their environments are not political or that their environments are highly meritocratic. In tech, often there's this effort to make it seem not like that, but I think realistically it is. And then at the same time, I think there is a bit of a choice, you can have a pretty successful living, not necessarily having to get to those levels.
One thing people need to keep in mind is if you're a frontline manager, you're not insulated from this. It's don't make any big, obvious mistakes here. Try to build a bastion of trust around the folks that you're working with. Be aware that optics do matter but hold true to yourself about the results that you're trying to create with your team and what you're doing. And maybe just general understanding that the situation at the moment is sensitive and you need to be aware. .
Murray: But would you agree that alliance building is very important.
John: Yeah, alliance building, but just also not alliance killing. A lot of it is just don't say that thing in the meeting in a context free way that submarines that other team's efforts. And then you're just on some shit list. So yeah, alliance building and alliance keeping and avoid alliance destroying.
Donna: I just think that tech product is probably different to tech inside an org that does other things like banks and insurance and real estate and all the things that I see around me most. And that's where I think the alliances probably make a lot of sense in building alliances with what we loosely call the business.
John: That's a great point. I think the funny thing to me is I think that tech companies are actually far more political in some ways recently. If we think of politics as negotiating, navigating around narratives and the negotiation around power and legitimacy . People who think that tech companies are free from politics are sorely mistaken. Whereas in those organizations less impacted by the zero interest rate thing. They've been just plugging along at growing three to 5 percent every year, and maybe didn't over hire. There is politics when people are trying to negotiate the change narrative and the blame narrative. And so what you're seeing in a lot of companies when things haven't worked out, is this sort of political maneuvering is largely around which narrative are we going to stick with about why this happened, who was to blame. And why the people are still left in this company are the right people to be still be left in the company.
Constructing and Telling Stories
Murray: How can people working in this field become better at constructing and telling stories? Are you just gonna stand out of the way and let other people control the narrative? Or are you going to create and promote a narrative which advances your goals and your team's goals?
John: I'm really good friends with an amazing architect who works at a company in Europe. And one thing that she found is that she'd worked so hard to expose the opportunities that existed with the re architecture that they're trying to do. But had failed to paint the larger narrative about why the time was right for the company, why this was the right effort. So she fell into that trap of where she just framed all these issues and all the models behind them, but didn't necessarily come in with a strong narrative. About why the company should do what they need to do.
So I think one bit of actionable advice is if you're prone to be more a collective person who's hoping to bring a lot of other people along for the ride and not necessarily take the lead now is probably a good time to practice telling a good story. Why does it matter for the people there? Why does it matter for customers? Why does it matter for the business in general? What are the risks involved? I think that there's almost like basic pitching. I say that as a product manager, because that's all we do all the time. We frame these narratives about why we should do what we should do and what my recommendations are. And, here's the data to support it , but I've noticed that other roles often haven't practiced selling.
Donna: I wrote a whole book on presenting design aimed at designers for that reason, because I was watching designers just not know how to communicate their ideas and communicating their effort instead of communicating their findings and rationale. So yes, I totally agree with that one.
John: Yeah, I'm all ears.
Donna: Tips are set context, give people jobs when you're telling them a story. So give them a thing to listen for. So it's I'm going to tell you what we found. I want you to be listening for how this affects your context. And don't describe your effort. So don't say I did this and this and this and this and this and then it was hard. And I changed my mind, blah, blah, blah, just say, this is the end. And I can tell you how I got to the end, if that matters. And for designers particularly don't say, do you like it?
But ask for concrete, proper feedback related to your role or the job that you were given. They're my designer specific tips. And a bunch of those apply to general narrative telling.
John: A lot of people focus so much on the problem and the perception they have among leaders and everyone is someone who's just completely still caught up in that problem. They can't stop talking about the high work in progress. They can't stop talking about how we should do this or should do that . And so one bit of advice I try to give to people is if all you achieve is to be associated with the problem, because you've been trying to yell from the rooftops, this is a problem. This is a problem. This is a problem.
Even if you have been bringing potentially good options and ways to move forward. People just don't associate you with that message. And when I've been in that situation, when someone gives me that feedback, I'll say, Oh, I've been trying to do the balance of 50 50. I do have solutions. I do have options of ways that we can move forward. And then they'll say, but the perception is that you just want to keep repeating what a problem that we have going on here.
What I realized is sometimes you focus so much on the problem when really you should just create a compelling attractor, like a bastion of goodness that people then can buy into and be the hero of their story, moving out of it. So if you just frame an idea to managers, you say, Oh, work in progress is so high. We're not getting anything done, all you're doing is you're putting people as the byproducts or the villains of an existing narrative. It's basically oh, my God, we all screw up all this year is every leader just a complete idiot.
And I think that people don't realize that they inadvertently do that. Whereas going and finding one team and you say, Hey, let's just run this experiment and see how we're doing here. And they just try something new and there's some good news pulling it forward. That sometimes can be way more powerful than some diagnosis of the current situation, yelling from the rooftops and saying, you see how messed up it is. We should fix it. Then you become the bearer of bad news.
Murray: I've found that stories that don't have a problem don't have any stakes. So if you just say, here's the solution and here's the benefits, it doesn't really seem very believable because, there doesn't seem any problem to overcome, so why would we do anything?
So I think a story has to have problems. It's got to have a goal. It's got to have a current situation. It's got to have some elements of how we're going to get there. And then the benefits we're going to get from getting there.
John: I guess what I mean is that an analysis of the causes of the current problem often isn't nearly as powerful as people think it is. Just take the high work in progress example, you could say read this book by Don Reinertsen it's going to tell you all about queuing theory. And this is the problem we're having. This is the problem. It's the high work in progress is the big problem we're having.
That's actually very different from saying, I've been chatting with some folks. And lately, it's just so hard to get a lot of focus on this initiative that everyone really believes in. And because of all the different demands that they have on them people are feeling their morale drop. And they're feeling like they can't get that really valuable thing over the line. I've noticed in the comparison of those two stories how different it is, right? One is trying to say, we've fallen for a trap, this high work in progress . The other one is just talking about the problem in terms of how people feel. And so as someone who loves the theoretical side of it, that's something I've personally had to think about a lot. That's often not nearly as impactful as I think it is. Even though it sounds smart to me in the moment.
Feedback and Communication Techniques
Murray: This is a classic feedback technique for giving feedback to staff or anybody really. Which is When you do X, I feel Y, and the results are Z. Like, when you come in 15 minutes late every day, I feel frustrated and annoyed because, I'm having to set up the cafe and serve all these people without the help I need. So can you do something different next time? And I feel is unassailable. Nobody can say, no, you don't feel like that.
John: Yeah, I think one thing you bring up is that there's being a Machiavellian political player, which I think most people would say I'm not like that. I'm not Machiavellian. I'm not gonna be that cool and calculating. And then I think that for many people you can actually get reasonably good results with how you communicate, how you discuss challenging news how you build the alliances, invest in the time that you do that. And so whenever I think about this stuff, I just imagine it on a spectrum of not caring at all one bit about anything, about anyone around you. Just blurting out whatever you want in any second, all the time, just because that's the authentic you. And then the other end of the spectrum being Machiavellian, and being incredibly calculating with everything. And I think that for a lot of people, they can still stay true to themselves without necessarily becoming Machiavellian , or just blurting whatever they want out all the time.
Murray: Yeah.
Summarizing Key Points
Murray: All right maybe we should go to summaries. Donna, do you want to be the summary person for us today? What do you think? What have we got?
Donna: We started talking about what's going on in tech at the moment and John's sense maker survey. And the general feeling of the industry. We talked a lot about people being scared. How that can cause distrust in teams, distrust cause more scaredness. Layoffs make people worried and when you're worried, you don't take risks. Murray blamed Elon for saying that teams can be like 20 percent of the size. And I think there's certainly something in that. And then we talked a bit about the enshitification of the workforce.
We talked about not only team members who are feeling the pinch, but management also lost and confused and not knowing what's going on. Then we started to talk about how we can deal with this. How can people survive in the current environment when tech is tough.
And that a good solution right now is to do what you can not lay low and be passive, but just like be a little more considerate. Pay attention to what's going on in your environment. Look at the long game. That would have been very useful to me in a lot of my career.
And I really liked the river current metaphor the deep trough, like staying in the middle of the river, the crown ridge. Going to the edges and like seeing what you can do around the edges. We talked about gliding across the river to get to the other side. And we talked about building alliances in organizations and how and whether that is important. And ultimately that may be analyzing the causes of the problems and talking about this is a problem this is a problem may not be as important as we think but really thinking about the narrative of what's going on, how it's affecting people rather than the theoretical problem. So certainly for me, the highlight was do what you can to stick it out without being disingenuous to yourself. And, realize that the currents change.
Murray: Yeah, you had a big theme on avoiding unforced errors, I thought. If you're people like us, you're frustrated with how things are now, and you know that they could be a lot better. So you say, look at this thing we're doing wrong. We should do this thing that could be a lot better. That could be an unforced error in many situations because the people you're saying that to might take it as an attack on them.
John: Yeah. I think there's an optimistic interpretation here, which is that out of the chaos that's existing in some parts of tech at the moment or in business or whatever, something will emerge. I believe the companies will not survive if they get decimated from the inside. This low loyalty situation, people not trusting their leaders and leaders, not trusting their people. I don't think it's sustainable. However, something might emerge and the companies that are doing a better job of it and keeping folks at their company will attract people and we'll have good stories to tell.
The other thing that's interesting to me is I think it's a huge opportunity for the non digital product selling companies. All these companies that are growing 3 percent year over year who haven't gone through all these theatrical layoffs and all this founder mode Elon mode crap. I've heard a non trivial number of people who say, I don't care if we move quite as fast as I was moving at Xco because really we weren't really even moving all that fast anyway. I want to go and work somewhere where I'm going to stay there for four or five, six years that has a good culture that is open about the problems that they're having where people communicate freely about things. And I think you could actually see situations where some of those companies. Are able to advance way faster than one might expect in this particular environment.
The number of these non digital product companies that reach out to me, to do product chats and talk to their teams and have a product guild and are trying to figure out better ways of working, it's those companies. All the Super skilled tech companies are too busy to do anything like that. So this tells me that there could be a bit of a flip in terms of the ideal companies to work for.
Murray: Well, I've worked for telcos and finance companies and they also have all this politics and distrust. There's still a lot of politics in these non tech companies. It's just that they're not facing the severe eat your own situation with layoffs.
John: Yeah. On one hand, these big lumbering larger companies have very entrenched bureaucracies. It's a different type of political landscape to navigate. And then on the flip side, you get these very fast moving tech companies, is very brutal, these layoffs, a lot of finger pointing at everyone about what they're doing. It was just interesting to me how those are two sides of the same coin. It is in both cases about people trying to preserve power and people trying to preserve status and people trying to navigate these environments. They manifest in very different ways, but the heart of it is largely the same
Murray: yeah, I agree. I think narrative storytelling, alliance building, picking your battles, and going with the flow is going to benefit you anywhere.
Donna: Yeah. Pick your battles, Donna. Let's go back ten years and teach me how to do that.
Murray: It's often the most creative, smart people who are the most disruptive and then get kicked in the head.
Recommended Reads and Final Thoughts
Murray: Before we go, have you got any books you would recommend that people read that could help them with dealing with these sort of situations?
John: I do think that getting to yes with yourself is a really good book. There was another book that I read recently called Collaborating with the Enemy by Adam Kahane, that was just fascinating. I thought that book was really good. There's two books that are much more cynical that I read. So there's a book by Jeffrey Pfeffer called Power. Another one called leadership BS also by Pfeffer and one by Phil Rosenzweig called The Halo Effect. The leadership BS book is look we say that authenticity and all this stuff is what's rewarded in environments. Look, the data just, does not demonstrate that. In fact, inauthenticity is how you get ahead in many ways. And The Halo Effect is all about how instead of the ways that we talk about working, causing good results, it's actually good results that cause good results. You look at Good To Great or you look at all these books about what the best teams do and how they're trusting or psychologically safe. And it's no, actually, None of those studies really held any power to them. And then also none of them really explored the idea of what, why are there so many companies that are not psychologically safe doing excellent? You want to get cynical and question your own biases on those, that those would be some good books to do, but maybe start with the more hopeful ones, like collaborating the enemy.
Murray: Alright, John. What are you doing these days? How can people engage you?
John: Yeah, I'm actually starting a new job in a week which I'll tell people more about. Although I've enjoyed this year running my course and everything. That's exciting. And doing consulting, but I always like being part of a startup.
Murray: So does this mean you won't be running your course anymore?
John: I run a course on prioritization. It's fun. And I'll try to do it once a month still.
Murray: And how can people find out about that.
John: That course is on Maven. Probably the best way to stay in touch is to sign up for my newsletter. The beautiful mess. Yeah. That's what they should try out.
Murray: Hey, it was great having you on again. Really appreciate it.
John: Yep. My pleasure.
Murray: That was the No Nonsense Agile Podcast from Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson. If you'd like help to create high value digital products and services, contact Murray at evolve. co. That's evolve with a zero. Thanks for listening.