Tag Archives: New York

Constraints, metaphor and beauty

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Ray Hood’s RCA/GE Building is the the tallest tower in Rockefeller Center.

Constructed in the depths of the depression the building derives beauty from a simple metaphor for the worker — carrying people efficiently and safely to a well-lit space.

“As each elevator shaft ended,” Hood explained in Architectural Forum, we cut the building back to maintain the same 27 feet from the core of the building to the exterior walls. By doing so we have eliminated every dark corner. — Great Fortune by Daniel Okrent

Hood’s design emerged from a set of constraints: the number of elevators required, the achievable height of an elevator shaft, and the distance one can sit from a window in New York and still receive natural light. The resulting setbacks thin the tower as it rises achieving elegance without ornament and lightness despite a massive stone facade.

What an achievement for a man who died at 53 while Rockefeller Center was still under construction.

But even the most expressive, inevitable metaphor loses coherence across implementers and over time. His fellow project architects crafted some blocky companion towers. Inside “30 Rock”, I’d bet seventy years of renovation have thrust some employees into the shadows.

Since day one

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Walking the village past the bankrupting sublet of our first new york month

refurbished sweatshop infested with more dogs than roaches

where our 3 month old shimmied off the unfamiliar bed into the bedside stand

where I commuted to the mid-bust media job after the first of five layoff rounds

realizing it’s been one bitch of a firefight since day one

New York Health & Safety

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Another New York construction accident.

The city routinely asks it’s citizens to thread by, below and through construction. Cranes fall on houses, steel falls in ball fields.

saw by digiart2001 on flickrWith fallible commuter logic we do our part by filing under half-assembled scaffolding or pinning ourselves between heavy equipment and heavy traffic. Why don’t we cross the street? Go around the block?

I once shared the crosswalk at 9th Ave and 15th St with a 30″ pavement cutter. A utility crew worked it’s way across the intersection in bursts, cutting with the light in front of cars and along side pedestrians.

Life is cheap compared to the city’s evolution and our urgent routines.

Collaboration and Competition: Balkanization vs. Bounded Cohabitation

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Small collaborative groups often exist in isolation or in competition with other groups within an organization.

Unhealthy Competition: Balkanization1

This is the second pattern of collaboration that entrenches status quo (see Contrived Collegiality).

balkanize:

  1. : to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units
  2. : divide, compartmentalize <now pop culture has been balkanized; it is full of niches, with different groups watching and playing their own things — Richard Corliss>

Balkanization

In a Balkanized environment, one team’s win is another team’s loss or, at least, one team’s loss is not every team’s loss.

A company that organizes itself by specialty and doesn’t matrix well to projects lends itself to balkanization but leadership can encourage politics under any structure if they distribute rewards based on unclear, unfair or arbitrary criteria.

Valuable learning in one group is not communicated or is disputed and not widely adopted. Managers drive to surface shows of success. Individuals are not encouraged to true joint work across organizational boundaries.

Agile is often introduced bottom up without executive sponsors in less than optimal cultures. In this context, development teams have dependencies on teams that do not buy into agile values. Developers are separated from decisions about opportunities, product portfolios, potential revenues, and product features. This is both a fragile place for agile teams and also diminishes opportunity for the company.

Healthy Competition: Bounded Cohabitation

Internal competition can be used to spur original thinking and organizational change.

Nonaka and Takeuchi describe a concept of “bounded cohabitation” where teams are set in productive competition with each team pursuing a different set of premises and value propositions all geared toward the same outcome.2

The example they use is detective work. One approach is to form autonomous teams around different premises: premeditated murder, crime of passion, accident, natural causes, etc. Let the teams self-organize assembling the appropriate numbers with relevant skills and experience for their specific premise.

The teams investigate independent of each other. Under their premise, each team may look past evidence others find relevant but also follow leads other teams wouldn’t think to pursue. Eventually, one team establishes the most plausible course of events. The shared outcome is met and the teams re-organize around the next investigation.

Japanese manufactures often form multiple engineering teams around the same design challenge; e.g., an engine meeting novel requirements of size, efficiency and performance. They adopt the best solution incorporating other good ideas into the current or future products.

In one case, Sony merged two teams pursuing different product strategies: (1) an evolution in video tape players and (2) a revolutionary digital non-linear editor.

Synthesizing those world views resulted in the digital video editor with engineer-friendly analog controls that broadcast centers could rack into their existing facilities. This new technology with a familiar form factor created a new market that Sony decks dominated.

An executive sponsoring agile adoption must strive for healthy internal competition. Carve out self-organizing teams. Encourage them to follow their own paths to a clear, common goal. Mutually agree upon performance measures. Retrospect across teams to determine what’s working and why. Allow for wrong paths, allow for variation and embrace the unexpected.

The concepts and examples in this post are drawn from:

1 Hargreaves A. and Fullan M., What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School?, Teacher’s College Press, New York, 1991.

2 Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H., Hitotsubashi on Knowledge Management, John Wiley and Sons, Asia, 2004.

Contrived Collegiality

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This is one of three patterns of collaboration that entrench status quo.

“The unpredictable nature of collaborative cultures can lead administrators towards forms of collegiality which they can control, regulate, and tame.” 1

Contrived Collegiality

People in leadership roles often resist honest and open exchange. They don’t want change. They want it done their way. They fear loss of influence or status. They dislike confrontation. They feel external pressure. They are proud, defensive, in denial, or simply insecure.

With a courteous, professional veneer and a stated goal of collaboration, they suppress equal participation by:

  • controlling the schedule, conversation, or process,
  • withholding or misrepresenting critical information,
  • defining the collaborative task or roles too narrowly,
  • overly constraining allowed responses or behaviors.

Within an agile context, a product owner can prescribe a solution then use the agile planning to solicit a limited range of responses:

“Is it feasible?” “How long will it take?” “How much will it cost?”

All Scrum guarantees is that these questions will consider a manageable chunk of the application. But whether it’s a user story, minimum marketable feature or a full specification these questions fail to engage the life experience and passions of the team to addressing the core problem or opportunity.

Go on to create an environment where contrary thinking is a problem, define “buy in” as a lack of visible dissent and you’ve placed the development team in a black box they cannot see out of and you cannot see into.

Contrived collegiality leaves the product owner out on a limb. You’ve limited the chances of anticipating risks, redefining the opportunity in some dynamic way, and invention at any but the tactical level. Despite agile processes and a surface of collaboration, you are relying almost solely on your own abilities to avoid, as Mike Cohn says, “the wrong thing, on time and on budget.”

1 Hargreaves A. and Fullan M., What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School?, Teacher’s College Press, New York, 1991.