Cautious Reflection About “How” We Change

As George Santayana is often quoted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Since I believe that is true, it is worth looking back at another, less often quoted individual — Melvin Conway. He was a programmer in the 1960s. He wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220, he wrote a paper on coroutines, but the reason we know him at all, is that he is credited with coining Conway’s Law. Unlike other, so-called “Laws,” Conway’s Law was not intended as a joke, but rather as a valid observation of how real organizations make things.

In 1968, Conway wrote a paper called “How Do Committees Invent?” In it, he wrote:

…organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

This is more commonly quoted as, “Any development project reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”

As we move forward in an environment of change, it is important that we keep this in mind.

To see how this manifests itself in the real world, please read this blog entry from one of the Vista programmers on how they developed a particular feature for which he was responsible. While you are reading, see if you find any of what he says familiar. If you do, consider that we may need to address those issues ourselves as we try to move forward.

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Retreat

I spent (most of) the morning at Mountain Acres Lodge. Actually, I spent the first hour and a half driving around George’s Valley, which is directly across the ridge from Decker Valley, which is where Mountain Acres Lodge is, but let’s ignore that. As a result, I managed to miss Kevin’s talk in which he apparently answered a question I asked him in the last IT Leader’s Brown Bag lunch. If nothing else, at least I can provide fodder for further conversation.

Anyway, this was session 19 in the Brown Bag series and it was graciously hosted by AIS. Thank you very much!

As always, the event was wonderful. The conversation insightful and stimulating, and I already have ideas about how I can use what we talked about. Many light bulb moments today.

I think there is a core of people who really get it, who have integrated these themes not just into their daily lives, but into the way they think. Like learning a foreign language, it is the difference between being able to translate into the language you know and being able to think in the foreign language so that no translation is necessary. We are beginning to speak the language. Half a dozen people sat in a circle with me in our discussion group and had a single conversation. Ideas starting in one voice and flowing to the next. Being picked up by another and carried on by the rest. Without hesitation. Not rote repetition, but new answers to new questions — pertinent questions.

On a side note, I saw something in some meetings yesterday, as well. For a long time, I’ve been wondering how to influence the glacial pace of change in our organization. It has been extremely frustrating for me. I guess I was in a bit of a mood and I had a moment like Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network, where he says, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” That wasn’t what I said, but it was how I felt. The funny thing is, like in Network, the reaction was to hear the same thing from just about everyone around the table. It wasn’t just me any more. The people that I thought were the glacier had changed my mind. I was looking at it wrong. Not a glacier, but an iceberg. And the iceberg was breaking up before my eyes.

Things are changing. Now in visible ways.

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Missing the Target

I spent the last week in Anaheim, California at the Networkers at Cisco Live conference. The closing keynote was presented by John Cleese. He explained that he believed that the reason “why they would hire an elderly English comedian to address a group of technical types of astonishingly high IQ” was because they wanted him to play the role of court jester. He would be able to say things that were true, but too offensive for polite conversation, that the audience would feel obliged to laugh at, lest they loose face. This would let him use humor to get across information that would help them to learn about themselves, but which could easily have offended them.

After a suitable amount of offensive satire, he told a story.

There, now I hope I’ve been sufficiently offensive, so now I can make my contribution to this “geek fest” by telling you why I’ve always been just crazy for guided missiles.

Even as a very small child, these lovely creatures enchanted me far more than stories of catatonic princesses and talking vermin. Probably, because the very first nursery story that my mother ever read me was called “Gordon the Guided Missile.” And this is why the guided missile found this very, very special, very warm place in my heart.

You see, Gordon sets off in pursuit of his target and immediately sends out a signal to discover if he is on course to hit that target. The signal comes back, “No, you’re not on course, Gordon. Change it up a bit and slightly to the left.” And Gordon changes course, as instructed, and then he sends out another signal, “Am I on course now?” And back comes the answer, “No. Adjust your course down a bit and slightly further to the left.” And so he adjusts his course again. And, conscientious little fellow that he is, he sends out another request, “How am I doing now?” And back comes the answer, “Gordon, you’ve still got it wrong. Down more and a foot to the right.”

And the guided missile, its rationality and persistence a lesson to us all, goes on and on, making mistakes, and on and on listening for feedback, and on and on correcting its behavior, until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. And then we applaud Gordon.

And some critic says, “Well, he made hundreds of mistakes, didn’t he?”

Yes, but that didn’t matter did it? Because all of his mistakes were corrected, and so Gordon succeeded in avoiding the one mistake that really matters: missing the target.

— John Cleese, Thursday, July 26, 2007, Anaheim, California

My takeaway from this is that communication — explaining what you have in mind, asking for feedback, and listening to what others have to say — even if it turns out that you are wrong — is much better than not achieving your objective because you didn’t find out you were wrong until it was too late to do anything about it.

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On the Impact of the Themes

Over on Liberty Road, Kevin has asked for some input while he prepares for the upcoming ITS All-staff meeting. He is looking for feedback on his four themes.

I’d like to ask that you tell me what you have done personally, seen personally; done in your group, unit, or organization or seen in your group, unit, or organization; that has been in support of one of the themes, some of the themes or all of the themes. How have you changed your approach to what you do in light of a theme or themes? How has your group changed its approach?

I gave one example from my experience in the comments. I had more to say, but wanted to give others an opportunity to talk. Instead, I thought I would continue the conversation here.

My comment was on the theme, “IT at Penn State is larger than ITS,” but I had another recent breakthrough on some of the other themes.

The other day, Phil Coolick and I were discussing a potential new service. We are in Telecommunications and Networking Services so naturally, it involved telecommunications and networks. This particular idea is very exciting, but also very complicated, and involves many components that are neither telecommunications nor networks.

I think we do telecommunications and networks well. Other areas, like middleware, content management, and so on… not so much. However, we felt we needed to deliver a fully formed service and this service involved those areas.

Traditionally we lived in a stovepipe, to use the local vernacular. In business, they call this vertical integration. Here is a snippet from what Wikipedia has to say about vertical integration:

In microeconomics and strategic management, the term vertical integration describes a style of ownership and control.

That is what it comes down to: ownership and control. Under the old guard, that was the motto. Now, however, Kevin asks us to “Put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery.” If we do that, we see that we are not individual corporations trying to create service monopolies selling to customers. We are part of a support group within an organization whose mission is teaching, research, and service. In that light the measure of our success is not, “How big is our kingdom?” but rather, “How well do we support the mission of the University?”

As we were going through the discussion of this potential new service, Phil was adamant that we not take on the responsibility for parts that were outside our area of expertise. (I’ll have to admit that I had simply assumed we would be doing them.) In that context, it was instantly clear that if we limited our fully formed service to be the telecommunications and networking aspect — the data link through application layers of the TCP/IP stack — that we could assure that we could do it well.

However, that would leave us with only part of a useable service. What to do? What to do? Wait a moment… What if we leverage the strength of being ITS? Perhaps, rather than inventing another wheel, we might find some group within ITS that already has wheels. We thought about the people we knew, made a few phone calls, and lo-and-behold, there were a variety of places that might provide the middleware part of our solution. In fact, with the answers to a few more questions, it was fairly simple to make sure that the right person was involved with the discussion.

That left us with the content management portion of the service. It did not seem to us that there was anyone within ITS that would be appropriate for this role. Wait again… What other tools have we been given? What if we remember that IT at Penn State is larger than ITS? Of course, if it had been a snake it would have bit us. Who better to manage the content then the IT folks in the customer’s shop? After all, they were the ones that instigated this in the first place.

• We had our complete service

• We were doing what we were good at and letting others do what they were good at

• We put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery

• We leveraged the strength of being ITS

• We remembered that IT at Penn State is larger than ITS

While it is too early to tell whether this nascent service will succeed — we are still in the talking phase, after all — I do recognize that the themes have already had a profound effect on the way we think and act. Thank you for that.

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