Vision — Context, Alignment, and Engagement
I recently saw a post on Linkedin that criticized the use of a backlog in product development. It went along the lines of:
I was running fast but in the wrong direction.
I was executing the wrong problem in an extremely efficient way.
As a long time proponent of agile methods and having been dragged through ( and possibly responsible for ) the majority of anti-patterns at some point, I could relate but not agree.
Whilst the protagonist definitely had a problem, they were looking in the wrong place for the solution. The good news is their argument made this clear, they were able to build software quickly and to a high technical bar, just the wrong type of software.
As a tool, a backlog is form without content, if we are using the term synonymously with Scrum it is an inherent part of an adaptive and transparent continuous improvement process (framework if you’re a zealot). A full-up backlog doesn't tell you if your product is going to be good or loved or able to create a virtuous cycle of adoption, it tells you what your product is going to be. To achieve good you need to look at the system holistically, understand the impact of antecedent activities, and consider how you will continuously re-evaluate your team or organisation's ubiquitous assumptions against emerging evidence.
The delivery landscape has changed greatly over the last decade or two, as the methods and abstractions that bring together people, process, and technology have matured the inception point of uncertainty has moved. It is now found at global scale sitting between the company and its customers — you will be judged. And whilst agile methods give you the opportunity to test subtle changes to an existent product they will be less help in understanding if the new shiny, intended to be used at global scale (and is going to take 18 sprints to deliver and cost a few million quid) is going to be loved. In this respect the Product Owner isn't a prophet, they need support and method to achieve a continuous narrowing of the funnel of uncertainty and increase the probabilistic chances of success.
When you’re in an ocean of uncertainty, you need a bearing.
I have mixed feelings about the terms Vision (and North Star), whilst it's entirely possible to meditate on creating a better future and to articulate those mediations, it's peak hubris to assume without validation you’re right, yet so much literature is given over to deconstructing the behaviors and practices of run good visionaries. It's worth considering the Halo effect, have extroverted leaders created successful companies through vision or have successful companies with powerful teams enabled extroverted leaders to shine, thus perpetuating a myth that some are born with an innate ability to intuit success far into the future.
Vision is a future the organisation wants to be in, it's the outcome they wish to achieve after deploying the tools of good strategy and is fractal in its application, organisations need vision, products need vision, teams need vision. It is the narrative and motivation by which we achieve a few key outcomes; context, alignment and engagement, both internal and external.
“There are two fundamental sources of energy that can motivate orgnisations: fear and aspiration: The power of fear underlies negative visions: The power of aspiration drives positive visions. Fear can produce extraordinary changes in short periods, but aspiration endures as a continuing source of learning and growth”
Peter Senge
I’ve experienced companies with powerful and emotive visions and it works, they attract the best and most purposeful talent. People with a genuine passion for seeing how their profession can help change the world for the better. Some gain that satisfaction through the output of their efforts others through the journey of their efforts alone.
I’ve experienced companies that are run by fear too, they’re rubbish, no one wants to work for them.
Context
The context that comes from a vision is high level, it helps a team land in the problem domain, squint their eyes, and discern a way forward. Mark Shwartz articulates this well in The Art of Business Value:
”the organisation is responsible for helping teams succeed by giving them a context in which business value is defined in a way that produces the desired outcomes”
Removing ambiguity as to the good of the organisation and what a team's place is within that is critical if we want to efficiently empower teams to deliver. There is more depth to this that comes in the form of how we shape teams, their interactions, and the strategic impact that has on future architectures.
In Managing Flow, Nonaka addresses this depth:
“Vision is just a set of empty words, if it doesnt have a context and a concrete mechanism for turning the vision into reality. While the philosophy of rational idealism asks why we seek truth, beauty and goodness, pragmatic idealism requires the addition of practice to achieve the ideal”
Close the gap between reality and the future with structure, capability, method, and action, else become victim to the effects of unresolved emotional tension, be that goal erosion, satisficing or snap. In closing that gap the more dynamic the situation the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation the more proximate objectives on that journey should be.
Alignment
In the extremely complex diagram below you can see the difference between high alignment and low alignment. What this doesn't get across is that in a poorly aligned organisation as each of those arrows bumps into each other, traveling in the wrong direction two things are achieved. The organisation wastes a bucket load of money doing the wrong thing and someone somewhere has a really bad day, maybe an entire team, they’re trying to do the right thing but a lack of leadership has undermined their ability to serve the organisation in the best way.
Low alignment to Sun Tzu was tactics without strategy and the noise before failure.
Engagement
The final point to talk about when it comes to vision is engagement (there are probably much more than 3, but we like a good tricolon in the UK, our govt is run on them). We now have a workforce that understands where they need to look to find business value and what is the right, collaborative way of creating it.
Finally, we want our teams to feel engaged in their work and we want our customers to be engaged in helping us test our future before we spend all the money and time getting there.
In the theory of organisational knowledge creation, Nonaka frames the term “Ba” as a shared context in motion, an existential place where participants share contexts and create new meanings through interactions. Ba emerges at the point where environment, structure, and the agent intersect and interpenetrate to create new knowledge.
This explanation is one reason why philosophers rarely get invited out.
Putting aside the rhetoric, vision is narrative, is information and information shared and tested becomes valuable knowledge. When it comes to a battle of narratives what matters is not only the inherent quality of the story but the resources and actions behind it.
By creating Ba at internal and external interfaces we can test and develop vision, refine and improve probabilistic chances of success and ensure a workforce is engaged.
The segway now to strategy, taxonomy and tactics becomes clearer, and assuming I don't disappear down any other rabbit holes on the way will be my next post. For now, though we should refer back to the original argument and following in the footsteps of Cicero's structure utterly destroy it.
I was running fast but in the wrong direction.
I was executing the wrong problem in an extremely efficient way.
Whilst we have made no efforts to bring to bear the day to day strategies that will solve these problems, we can ask three questions.
Q1 — How does your backlog fit within the context of the overall organisation or product vision?
Q2 — How is your team aligned to contribute to the expressed vision, such that there is minimal friction, waste, toil, and trouble?
Q3 — How and what opportunities are there to engage and test your knowledge and backlog against the vision, where do you Ba?
If the answer to these questions isn't clear, the problem isn't the backlog, the problem isn't you, the problem is leadership. Leadership doesn't require vision like leadership requires collaboration, vision is a product of leadership and collaboration. It is through that vision and collaboration that a more balanced and holistically considered system can be created and once strategy is ironed out we can be sure that the tactical issues being experienced by our friend on Linkedin will never happen again.
References:
Strategize — Roman Pichler
Strategy — Lawrence Freedman
Managing Flow — Ikujiro Nonaka et al.
The Art of Business Value — Mark Shwartz
The V Discipline — Peter Senge
