by on

I read the story of stone soup when I was in primary school, I did not understand how someone made soup with a stone. It was too deep a concept to understand as a kid. It is about moving something from 0 to 1,  from then on there are plenty of ways and people to take care to take it forward.

running-498257_640Why is it hard to move something from 0 to 1? Our brains are hardwired to be anxiety neutral. It hates ambiguities and new things to do, that is why things like driving becomes a sub conscious activity by becoming motor memory, once we start driving often. On a day to day basis you can observe your tendency to be anxiety neutral, it may take up only 15 minutes a week to clean a table but it is too difficult to get started with it. When that thought is going on your mind, if someone starts cleaning it up, then you are more likely to join the task and get it done.

My last post was about getting started with something and getting people to join. The first person who does something new is perceived to be the lone nut, there is a fear of judgement that prevents people to start something. This was very evident in a aum meditation session where there were only few of us and we need to chant aum but every person was waiting for the other to start, I took the lead after the first two half hearted attempts by being the first person to start the chant and the rest followed.

There are two things needed for people to start doing new things,

  • Provide an environment which helps them to shed their fear of judgement
  • Be the lone nut and start something which someone else has in mind, it is for sure that someone will follow.

The first point is not easy to address but it is too easy to be someone who starts doing things to facilitate change. We should shed our fear of judgement and be okay to do something that will be criticised. The results are surprising, what might take days to nudge someone to do something from scratch is way too easy to make them pick up a rough draft and take it to completion. Making stone soup is not deception, it is a tool to help people come out of their anxiety neutrality.

 

by on

Getting anything started in a group does not work easily. It often tests the patience of someone trying to introduce a change for good. Getting someone out of status quo is a tough one, then there is also a group mindset that someone will change first so wait until it happens. What really works is the one who wants to introduce the change, changes and finds some followers. If there is a big bang approach of getting everyone on board at once, it will be a big disappointment. Peter Senge talks about in his book ‘The fifth discipline’ as one of the laws – ‘The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back‘

We used to screen learning videos in our cafeteria every Friday lunch time at ThoughtWorks, one of those days I happened to watch this video below which reinforced the fact that success of an initiative depends on your followers. Getting the first few followers matters and takes time; the rest will fall in place. Watch this video to find out how one guy leads an entire group to dance but not until he gets two courageous followers. Till the time he got a follower, he was a lone nut dancing.

 

by on

I was cruising down the highway around 110~120 kmph, though the car was capable of running at 150+ kmph I chose to keep it below 120 as the thought at the back of my mind always says it is not going to stop quickly or control the direction well in case I need to. When I am very sure that I have an open & straight road, I test the limits of the car, but will quickly pull back to manageable speeds when a turning comes in sight. During one of those high speed bursts of 160 kmph, a sports car overtook me. It did not just overtake, instead it zoomed past and disappeared out of sight. Enjoying speed was not much about the road, it was the control available in a vehicle for a driver. Sports cars don’t just go fast, they turn well, stop quickly and have lots of safety bits to protect occupants from a crash. You could ram a sports car at a high speed into a wall and walk away from the crash. If I use my passenger car downhill at 200 kmph (which I still can), that is insanity; it is not going fast.

It was when I had these thoughts that I stumbled on an article pointing out that developers who are eying for speed often compromise the safety aspects. In software development there are plenty of aspects to take care. In simple terms it is taking a problem and solving it using computers by people with various skill sets. You have analysts, developers, designers, operations etc. The very nature of different people getting involved means there is lots of communication, if there is lots of communication between people of different skill sets then there is translation loss. If there is translation loss then there will be misunderstanding and rework. If you need to rework often, then the speed at which you can code matters. If speed matters, then better be safe.

Test harness consisting of unit, integration and functional tests, static analysis, performance checks, automated deployments, coding practices all together form the safety package for software development. As the code base grows and the number of people increase the more important the safety checks become. It will always be tempting to avoid the process and get something out quickly but the price to pay will be bad. There is nothing prudent in crash landing.

Another aspect of speed that is also often compromised is sustainability. The common example given to agility and speed is Cheetah, Cheetahs can maintain its top speed only for about 90~120 seconds followed by a long dip in physical activities. Any activity that requires a spike in the output is followed by a dip. There is nothing called sustainable peak performance.

Violating safety or sustainability of speed removes control out of the equation, it makes sense only if we are crash worthy and have the energy and resources to get back to normal. Speed for the sake of speed will thrill and eventually kill.