With no clear goal..

So what do you expect when many people of different trades get together to brainstorm for a few hours with no clear vision of the result?

I expect a great loss of time and money and no result at all.

Everyone will have an opinion about what to do and everybody will say that their field of expertise is of utmost importance and must not be forgotten. In the end you you have a list of important things to remember all only loosely connected.

So what is needed?

I asked for a methodology. Anything that helps to structure this workshop by setting a clear goal and providing time boxes to get there.

Creativity can happen in small timeframes. Just a few minutes and a key question are enough to get ideas coming. If you get your timeframe too long you will end up with the same number of ideas but each one will have matured as people like to go into detail once their hooked on their own idea. And matured ideas will be defended heavily and can not easily be dumped.

For me the key ingredients to a successful creativity workshop are:

• vision – tell me what has to be the result
• questions – guide me towards the solution
• time boxing – small intense sprints that allow dismissal of ideas

There are various methodologies that provide more or less all of the above but in different flavors. I guess any will do if it suits you well.

It didn’t go well..

As analogies go they’re flawed and never fit a hundred per cent but this one I think was quite accurate.

He told the editorial team of a magazine website that the advertising business on a content website was similar to a restaurant.

The editorial team were the chefs in the kitchen preparing the meals.

The advertising partners are an old fashioned couple where he has the money as he represents the advertiser but she decides where they spend it as she represents his advertising agency.

The marketeers (like himself) are the waiters going back and forth between the couple and the kitchen to present the coules wishes.

The chefs then prepare the meals that is asked of them of course within reason. They won’t do a burger with chips or Sushi when they specialize in french cuisine.

The editorial team wasn’t happy with it. In fact they were outraged as this story compromised their work ethics.

Still I thing this analogy fits pretty well. The brutal truth within it however wasn’t mentioned by either the marketeers nor the editors.

The website visitor is the meal.

Now replace the term pavement with hierarchical organisation.

As I mentioned before we are in a long process of reorganization right now. And already beaten tracks start to appear. Predictable as well.

Any organizational structure enables the people working within to perform certain things while other things are impossible to achieve from the structure alone.

Looking at what these people are supposed to do, looking at their goals you will be able to see where the pavements given by the structure are too long or simply won’t do. So people will start approaching others directly even in other departments where there’s no defined process or line of communication.

The same principle applies to tools. Sometimes companies tell you what tools you need to use. A development kit or an office suite. Most people will quickly switch back to their favorite tool.

You begin to wonder if a re-organisation would have been more efficient when foreseeing these beaten tracks right away.

I’ve chosen Google Docs for it.

I did this before. In fact I automated reportings for as long as I started programming. Often the reports had to be done in Excel which is a fine tool but using VBA for automation is the most nerv wracking thing ever.

In Google Docs we have spreadsheets as well which are good enough for reportings anyway. The best thing though is that the script language to use is javascript so it feels very familiar.

Connecting to Google Analytics for example or any other data source that serves JSON or CSV or anything you can parse is a matter of only a few lines of code. It’s a charm to work with.

A colleague of mine just said I wonder if I ever need a console and server anymore for automation?

And here’s how to deal with it.

Shifting responsibilities is so easy to do on a sheet of paper but in reality it can be quite a different thing. Just because someone gets new responsibilities he doesn’t necessarily get a good handover on the first day.

You can easily end up in a situation where your new job has you responsible for something that you don’t have a lot of info on. Your predecessor of course probably knows all about it but might not be in the company anymore of if he is he might be having a new job as well leaving little time for a handover.

There is no golden rule here to follow that makes everything work out right away. However he are the steps I try to follow:

Communicate!

The information you need to do your job might be all over the place and in a lot of individual heads. Meet them and ask them for their advise. Also offer your help to those who are now responsible for what you have been doing before.

Socialize!

Build up personal relations to the people around you. Obviously not the ones you don’t like. Be honest. But allow time for a chat about family, hobbies, free time, anything other than work. Be authentic. It may sound stupid but that’s how people work and it will get you much easier access to information of help if you relate to each other and if you offer help yourself.

Don’t emphasize hierarchies!

Asking your boss to ask the boss of someone you need some information from is never a good idea unless everything else is tried and tested. Not speaking to people below you in the hierarchy won’t work as well. Understand that you’re working in a position but that you are working with people who deserve to be treated like everybody else. Don’t play superiority unless it can’t be avoided.

Here are the top 4 signs that help you to spot it.

First of all please let me clarify that I don’t mean to make fun of autism and if anyone is offended by the term process autism I am honestly sorry. That would not have been my intention.

Process autists can be a nightmare to work with especially in situations when you need a solution to a non-standard situation. Fast. Those people seem to be the opposite of pragmatic and put processes over everything else.

Now processes are important to make the handling of standard situations more efficient but too much of them in the wrong situations can slow everything down and even prevent solutions at all.

These are the signs to spot it early.

1. No sense of relevancy – When you ask them for a solution the first thing they do is to explain their process in greatest detail
2. No sense of interaction – In process autistics environments people start communicating only by their processes and wait for the next scheduled meeting with even the most urgent question
3. No sense of practicality – When people working with a process want to change it as it seems impractical process autists will still defend it especially if the process comes from a higher authority (like a book)
4. No sense of urgency – When a situation is close to catastrophic and solutions are needed a.s.ap. they still want to hold on to their process and conduct meetings

The interesting question is how to deal with these people. I usually try to work around them or if that can’t be done to get in a situation where I am in the lead establishing a process that has them to do what I say. Both are not the ideal solution and won’t work every time so I chose to challenge processes in times of no urgency to keep everybody flexible in their thinking.

How do you deal with them?

I spent the last few days with writing strategy papers for several brands. There isn’t much time and even less data to base my conclusions on and the easiest option would be to write down my own vision from scratch.

However I prefer to get people on board.

I didn’t have the time really and it costs me several hours on top of each working day to do this but it is important to me to know those people behind the strategy who will later have to work with it.

This approach by now resulted in a series of really interesting talks with a lot of insights and information that I couldn’t have come up with on my own.

The support of this paper is more important than the sum of my own ideas so I happily agree to dump a few points and make compromises knowing that when we finally are going to implement our strategy there is a team doing rather than questioning it.

Updating the document is killing me but so far the effort is really worth it!

And we had to stop people from selling it!

There isn’t a golden rule for when you can sell something – at least none that I know of. But there certainly are times that are totally wrong.

You can sell an idea too early and create frustration until you finally deliver at which point the acceptance might be low.

You can sell a product too early when it’s not yet developed and in the worst case find a buyer and increase pressure on your timeline which isn’t going to go well with quality.

You can sell a service too late when you had to invest up front a lot and create frustration before the hard work shows what it’s for.

Maybe there is a golden rule after all.

Sell something as soon as you can see it getting ready. As soon as you develop a good feeling for it’s delivery. When that is unclear you mustn’t announce it.

Apart from many things we covered we found out that management is about language too.

I have always been a fan of great speeches and people with fabulous language skills no matter if in English or German. Stephen Fry is always the first person that comes to my mind for this topic hence the image.

As soon as you start to go into managing you’re really going into politics. The further up you go the more increasingly so. On my level politics are present but avoidable for good deal of time. Politics isn’t much else than many people with many different ideas and incentives working within a structure that knows areas of power and projects that cross the borders of them.

As soon as more than one person have to agree on something and agreements might cause shifts of power and influence you get politics.

The weapon of choice in politics is language. Expressing precisely what you want within the bounds of your power. And more importantly going out of bounds in your subtext!

If you ever happened to chat with someone who was good at expressing his or her raw opinion without ever explicitly saying it you know what I’m talking about. I marvel at those skills and absolutely admire people who can bend words in such a way that they don’t bend themselves but take a stand.

I have always been a person who likes to talk a lot which you might have experienced at some conference I talked at. And I was always able to enjoy listening to excellent word smiths even if the topic didn’t get to me.

I would advise that if you’re thinking about going to management you should ask yourself whether you enjoy language or you don’t for without the love of words you probably won’t get very far.

Because this team was great!

Yes, we had a great product and a brand we all liked to work with and could all relate to in some way. But there have been ups as there have been downs just like you can find with any job out there.

Still this team was great!

Developers are often introverted and like to stay in the closet of their own comfort zone and be around like minded techies all the time.

But this team was great!

Managers often tend not to care about the details and the people implementing their requirements. They often speak about figures and like to have ridiculous demands.

However this team was great!

Thank you guys!