I almost forgot to come back to an article that I wrote a year ago. My words from the beginning of January were:
The beginning of a new year invites to all kinds of fantasies of what will change and what we will change. As a change agent, I am not a big fan of New Year’s Eve resolutions. They usually serve as an anti-pattern for how not to change but keep wishing.
So instead of trying to predict what we will see change (sometimes known as wishful-thinking-driven prediction), I will make three assumptions on what will stay with me (and my professional network) throughout the whole year. Making it explicit means I can be proven wrong (and I wish I will).
This is a great idea to repeat! Before doing that, let's first look at how much my assumptions came true. I considered all three to be relatively safe bets.
1. Outcomes over output
It is easy to understand why this matters. However, it is very hard to make this switch into reality! This was the main meta lesson during the OKR Forum 2024. Even with years of practice, it remains a challenge.
Even worse, my perception is that even continuous delivery of outputs is still a hurdle to take. (Remember that just like "outputs", "delivery" is considered a bad word!)
In other words, we are far from done. The biggest progress I have seen in 2024 is people with lots of experience confirming with a smile how hard it is.
2. Empiricism
Here we have some good news: In 2024, the EBM book got published. "Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management - Satisfy Customers and Improve Organizational Effectiveness" is great reading material about making decisions informed by evidence. I believe the authors - Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, Ryan Ripley - are exactly the right ones to write about EBM. In hindsight, I was even wondering why it had not happened earlier. Do not get distracted by the book being part of The Professional Scrum Series. While EBM is 100% compatible with Scrum, it works independent of it. As I wrote earlier, nowadays I would start the conversation about agility not with Scrum but with EBM.
As a consequence of writing the book, in May the EBM Guide got an update as well. Only while writing this blog post I discovered that there is an online version - very practical to quickly search for terms!
We are certainly not short of sources indicating the need of evidence to base our decisions on. Just like the aforementioned "Outcomes over Output", "Powered by Insights" is one of the principles of the Product Operating Model as explained in Marty Cagan's book Transformed that also got published last year.
That being said, reality is still a different one. Politics, vanity and pride stand in the way of making this come true, and many workplaces are not safe to admit that you were wrong (or even could be wrong in the first place). In this setting, empiricism is a danger for careers. Changing this would require priority and commitment from the very top of the company, and the people at the top rose through the very mechanics that they would need to change.
I have some hopes, though. There are techniques and practices that everyone can apply, introducing empiricism guerilla-style through a non-threatening, step-by-step way. I read about them in the context of Product Discovery. The book "Continuous Discovery Habits" by Teresa Torres turned out to be a great discovery in itself.
3. The overall picture
This is the most depressing one. Just like with empiricism, politics stand in the way of the bigger picture - or even learning about it. By default, managers want to avoid looking bad or trying to solve problems that are outside of their direct influence. Therefore, "divide and conquer", everyone reigning his own territory is still considered a good paradigm. Every problem that falls through the cracks remains unsolved.
In contrast to that, Patrick Lencioni's "The 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team" explains why executive teams need to work as a real team and have shared goals. I see very little of that having become spread, accepted and enacted knowledge. Traditional ways of management are having a renaissance - after never being really away. I believe that most "change" is only theater if management at the top does not change first. My article "People are smart, organizations are not", written in 2022, has aged pretty well, even without sprinkling the now fashionable "Product" all over it.
Now let's look forward. I will not go cheap by repeating the same ideas, although I could reuse them easily.
1. The Complete Product Experience
Like "Outcomes over Outputs", this is one of a handful of concepts that my Agile Coach colleagues and me have been showing around for years. The idea is from Brian de Haaff, and the earliest article I could find is from 2017. You can do variations of it, adding other categories/components. The core remains true. It is the overall experience that matters.
The interesting thing is that Agile practitioners have been passing this around for some time. However, I was surprised to learn that for people having he word "Product" in their job title and several layers of hierarchy below them, this was not common knowledge, and their understanding of a product was more narrow than that.
Of course, "The Complete Product Experience" is an example of the bigger picture. Understanding how you all need to work together, no matter how necessary and obvious it is, is not attractive for everyone. Some people will continue to prioritize their career and prefer to believe in single heroes. While I believe that it is essential to look at the overall picture, I do not have high hopes that the message will land this year.
2. Continuous Learning
Here I admit that I am strongly biased, because life-long learning is one of my personal values. So why would I choose a topic that I will probably take more seriously than others and still argue that it does not get enough attention, when it is easy to challenge its importance by the person who brings it forward?
People are hungry for making sense of their world, for understanding what they experience everyday, for seeing a purpose. You cannot get this if you stop learning after school or university.
Now "learning" in itself sounds good, so why would anyone disagree with it? There are surprisingly many arguments against learning around.
Learning is seen as a cost or waste instead of an investment for the future. "Why would you need to learn this?" Imagine a farmer arguing that his child would spend time better helping on the field than sitting on a bench at school. What brings more value? The answer seems obvious. But this imaginary farmer thinking is present in many offices. Just wearing a white collar does not make us better in thinking in long-term, abstract value.
Learning is seen as a weakness. You must not admit that you do not know everything. Hence, learning is not openly lived by management, and therefore, it becomes something for “low status people”.
Learning is handled as an exception that you do if you cannot avoid it any longer. It is tolerated as long as needed, and then the people need to get back to work. (Compare this to why I do not like Hackathons.)
Learning gets a too narrow focus on the topics with immediate value. When something is at this stage of relevance, it is usually learned too late and you are only running after the rest.
Learning is avoided. The phrase "training on the job" serves as a euphemism for "you do not get time to learn".
Learning gets measured on unrealistic standards, as if it needed to provide instant and simple answers, or work as a standalone without any practice. The popular dissing of proxy metrics of learning progress ("certifications are useless") is one example of this. Contrast this to Sjoerd Nijland's idea of "validated learning".
Continuous Learning requires discipline and dedication. Not everyone is up for an honest look at where they are, where they are not, where they could be and making it a priority to get there.
In other words, there are many anti-intellectual, anti-learning, anti-education arguments out there. I am sure lack of learning will still be a problem at the end of the year.
3. Focus
This is an evergreen. In a world with so many options, it is hard to limit yourself to only a few at a time. But this is exactly what focus is about. And it is not about finding the few right opportunities among the many wrong ones. As Felipe Castro wrote: Focus means saying no to phenomenal ideas. Klaus Leopold argues that focus is a far more acceptable term than using the Kanban-based expression "limiting work in progress". Limits are uncomfortable. They create the fear of missing out on something. But they are essential to experience anything.
Why is "limiting WIP" a good advice, although strictly speaking, it is not a universal recipe for improving flow? Because most of the time, in the world of work, too many things (however you call them) have been started. Saying "no" is hard at any level. Politics push for half-baked compromises where everything gets done a little (and nothing gets done in the end). Executive team members avoid healthy conflict and all keep their own pet projects running in parallel.
Although the value of focus is far higher than its costs, for reasons of the human nature and the settings of many workplaces this will be a topic that will stay with us for a long time.
U2: New Year's Day