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I have never seen anyone dead from crossing a deadline at work. In literal sense, deadlines are deadly; people die if they cross it yet we use it in our everyday work lives to indicate ETA. I see a persistent need for people to use war metaphors at work to install a sense of urgency. Some examples – Setting up a war room, which is nothing but a cosy meeting room where all stakeholders are present to take a quick decision. Info from the trenches, which is simply getting information from people doing the job. Fire our first salvo, which is releasing the MVP.

War is ugly, even when it has a winner many at times it is pyrrhic. I had interacted with people who had done duty in the military and refugees who have been displaced by war. One word to describe, it is – horrific.

  • War kills and maims people. The worst part is that a good portion of people die or are maimed because of someone else’ decisions. Collateral damage is inevitable
  • There are no rights/justice in a war zone, you get to lose everything and often get displaced if you survive
  • Even basic needs are not available, starvation and diseases are common

Long term ill effects of using these metaphors at work is getting primed to respond only to threats and urgencies not anything else. Many of the workplace issues are because of poor ways of working than poor intent to work from the people.

How to go about work then?

My favourite answer is embrace XP, which treats work as work and people as people. XP helps complex and big goals achievable in simple sustainable and repeatable ways. I also show people the Cynefin framework. It clearly marks how decision making works into 5 different domains. Starts with Clear and progresses to complicated -> complex -> chaotic -> confusion. Below is the image from wikipedia for reference.

War belongs to the chaotic domain, the priority is damage control. Focus is on act and then respond based on what happens, where we learn how to limit our damage. Majority of the work on the other hand either belongs complex or complicated domain. Complex domain is used when building user experience, where we learn what user wants. Complicated domain is used when building automations, where we know what user wants.

By thinking in chaotic terms and using those metaphors we are forced to think of limiting damage not be productive, so ditch the war metaphors at work and start using the terms and metaphors appropriate for the problem domain we are in.

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The recent news about overwork death in one of the organisations ,reminded me of some episodes overwork health issues in my work and my friends’. Given a choice everyone wants to get things done quickly, so that either they have a lot of time for leisure or can do a lot more in a short amount of time. When I transitioned to work from college, one major shock was the amount of time that I have to spend at the office even when I did not have much to do. Presenteeism was encouraged, people walking around visibly unwell, staying long hours, eating fast food at desk for lunch.

What people did was just hustle, when what they really wanted was to expedite work. This resulted in chronic overwork, under productivity and poor health (both mental and physical) which was impacting businesses far negatively. When I went to Europe for an assignment, I was so surprised when my client had working hours of just 10 to 5 including lunch and breaks yet that was one of my most productive stints ever.

As orgs grow, workplace dynamics become very complex. A nimble startup growing too fast will lose its nimbleness, it becomes an empire from a small tribe. What contributed to a startup’s success was expediency and fluency.

Expediency is the ability to find a quick way to address a solution which is simple, effective though not a complete one. Richard Gabriel talks about this in Worse is better, it is particularly very helpful in first mover advantage situations and product market fit cases. The simplicity of the solution will also make it easy to amend and extend based on the feedback. Communication and shared understanding across the entire group is the key to expediency and that is where a small team always excels at.

Fluency is the capability to do the right things fast. It is the ability of the people to do things repeatedly without getting fatigued or bored by a healthy blend of capabilities of people, process and engineering. If the team has a robust continuous delivery pipeline, they would not worry about making frequent changes to production. If the team members are highly skilled and disciplined you need less management oversight to make them to follow the right things. If the culture is established that visibility of work is a right and people have a good degree of control/autonomy over how work is done then we have a lot of motivated individuals to realise the goals.

A lot of leaders like expediency alone and it gives them results, they are not able to build on top of it because of poor investment in fluency. This results in a hustle culture with declining return on investments and creating fatigue. On the other hand, leaders focussing only on fluency will create a lots of bored and frustrated teams. Scrum though intended to bring teams to a productive sweet spot is misinterpreted and often ends up creating fatigued teams or indifferent ones. A good focus on the value and intent behind the agile practices like XP and constant questioning & improvement is the key to ensure that the teams are both fluent and expedient.

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I read the book Maverick by Ricardo Semler and learnt that every one wants to do well by themselves instead of a supervisor telling them what to do and watching them closely. It was a very new concept, though I was not able to influence my managers, I was able to follow this for people whom I had to lead. The results are often that people end up punching above their weight most of the times, people who try to game are often exposed within a few weeks and they themselves are not able to continue to work with our teams. I also stumbled on his second book The seven day weekend, which was more thought provoking on how to approach life in general and not to differentiate work and life as two different identities.

While I was in college, I learnt a lot and read a lot of books even though I spent a good deal of time commuting and playing. When I moved to be a full time worker, I found that my time for reading and learning quickly dried away. My managers insisted that I spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in order for me to meet expectations. What I observed was that most of the work got done within a heads down time of 3-4 hours. If I was stuck, no matter how hard I tried, I could not make headway until I got some focus time away or sleep. My attention span also varied throughout the day and throughout the week.

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In the course of time over a few work years, I also forgot about leisure reading, arts/crafts and exercise/sports. This led to only two outlets, food and media. No matter how hard I tried, I was always finding excuses to eat out and binge watch. One fine day, I got to work with a new team. The rule of the team was, we stop working by 6 and go out to play. This was different from what I was used to before, it worked wonders because it forced me to come out of the work mode and unwind and find friends in a non eating/drinking setup. The self formed XP team ensured that the peak productivity window as a team is aligned for team work and the rest individual contribution can come at a different pace.

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This blended work/life mode was unnerving as there was a feeling that I was not doing enough. At the end of a release we retrospected along with the client on how did we do? Our client said a similar complexity and scope that was delivered by 40 people from another team, this team had done it with just 11 people. As I grew in career, non linear working mode was the norm. I always carried a pen and paper with me, ideas struck me when I least expected, solutions appeared out of nowhere while waiting at traffic lights, cooking, gardening, having coffee….

My experience was also validated when I read the book The pragmatic programmer where the author talks about linear mode and random mode in one of the chapters. Don’t listen to ideas like 996 working style and promise of progress that comes with it, they are not fit for collective knowledge work. It also drains the mind and the body, because of the constant war mode that an individual will live in. As I read in the books and experienced, I have not been able to separate out my life and work as two separate jobs, it is what I am. So instead of talking about balancing two different jobs, I look to plan my days as a whole.