Letting work happen vs making work happen

This is a follow up of my previous post Gamers, musicians & artists. The TL;DR of that post is; people tend to self organise, find what they have to do and also hold their peers accountable to an expected standard. All they need is to work in small teams, some clarity on what their objectives are and leave them to be in a state of flow where they are constantly learning & improving while going behind their objectives.

I used to go to my college by town bus service. Town bus services are mostly run by governments. There are no incentives for the government employees to run a great service; but the ones we took to our college were run by enthusiastic drivers and conductors who treated their buses as their second home. These guys kept the buses squeaky clean and in best shape though it was an old bus, they pooled in their own money and added a radio when new FM channels were introduced. They would enquire about our health if we did not turn up for a few days. They would also signal us through the horn when they approached the college gate so we could run outside the blind spot and catch it on time.

The students became fans of these services and started celebrating bus day every year. All the regular passengers got together on a day along with the staff and distributed sweets & gifts. I still feel these guys will be running their buses like how they did before even though they are nearing their retirement age.Nothing prevented them from checking in and out, run a poor service and still be paid for; but they wanted to enjoy something they do day in day out and went for an ever improving quality of service even when they were not expected. I have rarely seen these people fall sick even though the climatic conditions varied from cold to too hot within few months.

Software development teams also if left on their own, will always try to punch above their weight when they buy in to the purpose they have signed up for. The reason people will stay engaged and go for it is a light tension to constantly be challenged, learn to overcome failures and the support to bounce back stronger. People need to have business knowledge, be competent in their tech domain and also have room for failures which promotes creativity. Eric Schmidt in one of his talks mentioned that his teams always try to shoot for the stars, but many times they fail and land on the moon, but landing on the moon itself was impossible and at times it seemed to be more easy to reach what was impossible, when work was allowed to happen. He calls his people smart creatives and there are people to facilitate decision making to make them go fast.

I always quote this from Semco’s management style. They call their managers ‘Facilitators’ who help the team to set unimaginable goals and equip them to go behind. To go behind audacious goals, we need to communicate well to the teams and make sure they are equipped both technically & people wise; which will then let work happen itself with very less intervention. By trying to make work happen through a great plan, we will be predictable and deliver as per plan week on week and quarter on quarter but it won’t be anything disruptive or far fetched. Even if we achieve a great objective tracking to a plan, in an ever changing environment plan will soon become obsolete. There is this cliched story of cathedral builder vs person laying bricks. Everyone would want a cathedral builder, but many will choose the cathedral builder to just lay bricks as told by the planner.

Let work happen and see the magic

Originally published at vinodkumaar.wordpress.com on March 28, 2017.