Friction, Confusion, and Underperformance
Embrace them. They are your friends.
(This article is part of an on-going series dedicated to developing Agile mastery. Each post offers value to students on this journey, however, there is an advantage to those who start at the beginning.)
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership. - Peter Drucker
If your goal is to eliminate Drucker's three naturally occurring consequences of organizing human beings as they work to accomplish complicated tasks, you're much more likely to do harm than good. Such a venture would squeeze out the human elements and create a lifeless machine incapable of creativity, imagination, or innovation. That wouldn't qualify as leadership.
Perhaps that sounds counterintuitive. Allow me to explain.
It would be easier to paint the inside of a balloon with a hammer than eliminate or even press to an absolute minimum workplace friction, confusion, and underperformance. Friction is one way the system tells you where it hurts. Many times confusion is the prelude to learning and deeper understanding. And often, like rests in music, underperformance can be a prelude to a burst of high productivity. Utilitarian and factory-model managers will busy themselves with balloons and hammers. Master coaches and mentors will focus on skillfully shaping each of these elements to good effect with their teams and organizations. That looks more like leadership.
A strong case can be made that we actually need these things if we want teams or organizations that thrive and contribute value. Think of them as oxygen: Not enough and the organism suffocates. Too much and the organism is killed by toxic levels of a good thing. The goal is to find the optimal range for each element that supports a healthy and productive environment. Most of the time, this means acting to reduce friction, decrease confusion, and remove obstacles to performance. What gets missed in a way that can cause as much harm as too much of these elements is the need it actually increase friction, spark confusion, and support underperformance.
Friction
Not all friction is bad. You know this to be true in the physical world if you've ever been in a moving automobile when the brakes have failed or in bad weather when the friction between the tires and the road - the resistance that allows you to remain in control of the automobile - gives way to slipperiness. Supreme badness. The same principles can apply in the social and cognitive world. The very reason we have three houses of government in the USA, for example, is so that a vital system of checks and balances are in place. A set of rights and laws that deliberately introduce a certain amount of friction into the governance system so as to prevent the types of impulsive tyranny the Founding Fathers sought to escape in the first place. More local to our own self-interests, keeping the box of chocolate chip fudge cookies out of the house introduces considerably more friction to the habit of binge consumption than if the box were within reach on the pantry shelf.
When working with a team or an organization, it can be helpful to temporarily introduce friction in the interests of enhancing the team's ability collaborate and solve problems. One of my favorite ways to do this is to strategically swap team members between two or more teams. And by "strategic" I mean don't do this just before a release and be intentional about the talent and level of experience you are swamping and why. Doing this can lead to many positive benefits.
The diversity of technical and social perspectives is incrementally expanded in each team. This leads to healthy and respectful debates, greater creativity, lasting collaboration, and transparency. When faced with emergent issues, the reflexive response to address obstacles with less inter-personal conflict. Subtracting one perspective and adding another on a team of five or more people adds just enough new juice without disrupting the overall integrity of the team.
The individuals being swapped gain insight into other parts of the organization and how the work they do impacts overall success. They begin to acquire a deeper wisdom about the organization, who has what skills, and what work has been done on other projects. I've found that this type of professional development helps build trust and a stronger loyalty to the organization as individuals build relationships with other parts of the business.
There is always something that can be improved. Finding those "somethings" is where the real work of a coach or scrum master is found. The Agile tenet of continuous improvement is only possible when the system informs leadership what needs to be improved. A team or organization may appear to be functioning smoothly when in fact it has stalled. Introducing a little friction at key places and observing how resilient the team or organization is will reveal the true health. Swapping a team member can expose unhelpful team dynamics or communication issues.
Confusion
I've written previously about a mental state the Greeks call "aporia" - A strong sense of doubt, uncertainty, or confusion. Aporia is disorienting. It's an indication that your brain is open to learning something new and that it's struggling to make sense of it. Virtually all of the research I've read either concludes or suggests a state like aporia is essential to learning new things. It's part of the cognitive process for assimilating new information into our lattice of mental models, beliefs, and values.
This is why it's so important to let people struggle with a problem, at least for a little while. Especially when they are in their formative years - whether as children or new hires to an organization. It's also important to make sure people aren't struggling with the same problem for too long or that the problem isn't, in fact, too large or outside their ability to resolve (either due to lack of knowledge, experience, or authority.)
Working through confusion is at the heart of building strong skills for curiosity, creativity, adaptability, flexibility, and resourcefulness. Having worked through a period of confusion, the learner is likely to be better at solving problems, asking questions, making decisions, and resilience. It is also likely they will have greater self-confidence and be more willing to work with others. Building future leaders who are competent and capable within any organization will depend on how well they work with things like confusion, uncertainty, and doubt.
Underperformance
High performance teams got that way by knowing when and how to rest.
I'm not a fan of "team building events" peddled as answers to team solidarity and promises of increased productivity. Scratch that. I despise them. I have zero examples of where they've worked (when considering the perspective of the entire team and long-term impact), many examples of null results, and a few examples of complete backfires. Some of what's being injected into the workplace is patronizing and infantilizing and look more like professionally organized play dates. I'll grant that there are places and industries where schemes like this are beneficial, but I suspect they are fewer than what the event consultants would like to reveal.
Nonetheless, Agile teams are composed of human beings and not machines. As human beings, we have a fundamental need to socialize, regardless of how introverted some of us may be. We also need to rest our brains - explicitly, in the case of sleep, and implicitly, in the case of the work we are being asked to focus on completing. "Peak performance" is just that, something that occurs in comparatively short bursts, peaks, and then moves back to a baseline intensity. Over the years, I've heard more than one manager express, with a straight face, a desire to implement the mythical Agile promise of "continuous peak performance." In the vernacular of the trenches, this is called "burnout."
When your teams are resting or engaged in a form of restorative play that they chose, there will be short-term underperformance on their main assignments. When deliberately planned and guided with a soft touch, this becomes a time for the team to re-energize, reflect, and integrate what they've learned while working on the previous release. This is different from the equally important Agile retrospectives. Agile retrospectives are still about the work the team has been focused on for the previous sprint or release. Imagine being on the production crew for a major movie effort. When the film is "in the can," as they say, you gather everyone together to review and critique the movie. This is still work. It isn't like going out to watch a completely different movie for entertainment or gathering for beers at the end of the day before enjoying a comp day off the next. (There are many, many ways to support individuals and teams as they rest and recharge. That's for a later post.)
Similar to strategically swapping team members, when a team is allowed to rest after a significant work effort, they return with fresher brains and eyes and are more likely to identify and work to remove unhelpful friction such as bottlenecks and inefficiencies related to the work they do. This leads to increased quality, reduced delays, and stronger trust between employees and management.
In the Stoic Agilist's draft folder are posts for conducting a friction audit, ways to introduce helpful confusion, and strategic approaches to team underperformance. Stay tuned...
If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please use the comments section or email me directly.
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