What you don’t evolve is being terminated

The quotation is better in Swedish, “Det som inte är under utveckling är under avveckling”, but still. Christer Olsson lectures in management and spread his idea that if you don’t evolve, you are becoming extinct. You cannot keep status quo without improvement. You can see the world as ever moving and if you stop still, you will not stay in your place but you will loose your position.

This is obvious to everyone who is struggling with agile or lean values, with the rule of constraint or Kotter’s sense of urgency. Evolve or die! But at the same time, it is easy to slip.

Some weeks have passed since my first 7 habits class, and during the first two weeks, I worked the habits, went through them in my head. But then they became mainstream in my head. I started taking them for granted. It is almost scary how little time it took. I came to a stand still. And I didn’t even notice it.

But one of the strengths of our 7 habits program is the learn through teaching part. As a part of our own training, we’re training others. I’ve picked two really talented developers with whom I’ve previously worked with and who are interested in management and leadership. And I know they are not just interested in a superfluous manor, they want to evolve in this area. This, alongside us sharing some experience around leadership in different flavors has made them interesting partners in this project.

I think I’ve tripled the gain of the class by having these discussions. Having worked with training for most of my professional career, this should have been obvious, but now it’s staring me in the face. I’ve covered all the habits with one of these guys but yesterday, I started with the first habits with the second guy. So, I had to turn back all those pages. Go back to the first habit. And I saw that I’d lost it. I’d let habit 1 go. By simply taking for granted that I’d already worked with that habit, I didn’t work as hard with it. I was not back on the level I was on when I started taking the class, but I was not as strong in this area as I was two weeks ago.

If I hadn’t looked back, reflected and understood that I was not evolving, I would soon have been back there again. This is a lesson I must not forget. And today I could again see the difference in my handling of a specific situation. My soon got too much vaccine when he got his flu shot today. I directly saw this as something I couldn’t do anything about. So, instead of badgering the staff, I instead kept calm, focused on Peter and awaited the information from the Swedish authorities. As I kept calm, I could see that the woman who gave the shot was not feeling well. She felt terrible about what happened and I could place myself in her situation. I tried to calm her by thanking her that she told me and I later called and confirmed that Peter didn’t seem affected. I did what I could about things I could affect and left the other things in the bin. Screaming about it would not have made the thing undone.

A sense of urgency

John Kotter stresses the importance of creating a sense of emergency. Working with the 7 habits program, this might seem like a really bad idea.

Urgency according to 7 habits

The 7 habits program divides tasks into four types:

I Urgent and Important – the crisis, stuff which is important and must be done “now”

II Not urgent but important – the strategic work, important tasks which must not be done at once, but if not taken care of is in the risk of becoming urgent.

III Urgent but not important – tasks which you don’t really see the point with but is urgent. This is mostly tasks which others want you to do.

IV Not important and Not urgent – these are the tasks which brings no value and which might bring a sense of wasting your time and guilt for not making use of your time.

The 7 habits program wants you to spend more time in sector II, since this avoids the I:s and creates a productive work profile. If you spend too much time in I, you will probably feel wasted and the rest of the time is spent in sector IV, since you don’t have the energy for anything else.

Urgency according to Kotter

When people think something is important, they can work harder and be more productive. By creating a sense of urgency, people uses crisis as potential opportunities. This can be a positive force in companies, clarifying what the objectives are and what they are not.

How to use a feeling of urgency

Most of us feel like we have too little time and too much to do. So, what should we prioritize?

it is very easy feel productive when you’re doing sector I tasks. You might feel like a hero, saving the day. You can avoid prioritizing since THIS is so important. But often, it’s not that productive. Too many sector I tasks are in sector II since you failed to complete them before they became urgent. This is also one of the points Kotter makes – you shouldn’t wait for the crisis to happen. You should sit, passively and just hope that things turn around. In other words, prioritize sector II tasks.

If you spend too much time in sector I, you can start thinking that sector III tasks are sector I tasks. You are so used to working with those hectic tasks that you fail to recognize what is important and what is not. You see something urgent and without really thinking, you take for granted that since it’s urgent, it is probably important too.

I’m currently working on an important project. It’s very important that we deliver on time and with the right content. And I want the people involved to feel a sense of urgency. This doesn’t mean that all the requirements are urgent or even important. These prioritized must be fully understood by the developers. By making them feel a sense of emergency, I also hope they can use this feeling to become more creative. This does not mean cutting corners and pushing defective code. It means that they can come up with new brilliant ideas and also discuss when they think that something is very time consuming so we can decide if it should be cut or not.

But the feeling must be shared with others. If other coworkers does not feel the urgency, they can easily distract my team with those sector III and sector IV tasks. It is so easy to see your own deadlines and tasks as important, but how important are they compared to other stuff? Context switching is one of the best ways to ruin a project. Once, I had a developer assigned 5 hours a week on a project. I declined. The context switching for this person would not make him productive and the others would spend too much time updating him every week. And how could he ever get that feeling of urgency if he had three projects at the same time?

My own conclusions are:

- Don’t mistake Kotter’s definition of urgency with the 7 habits definition

- Make Sector II tasks feel urgent! TDD, BDD, and what ever strategic software development techniques you wish to use must feel urgent, otherwise they will not be prioritized and then developers can start to think that the quality isn’t that urgent

- It’s hard to get a sense of urgency if you context switch too often

- You cannot get a sense of urgency if you’re alone with this feeling

- Developers will never feel that sense of urgency if they don’t feel and understand the objective. Excluding them from these discussions is contra productive.

Any other thoughts?

Teaching as a part of learning

One of the key parts of the Seven habits program I’m following is to include other people. The idea is that when you teach other, you gain a greater knowledge yourself. You need to reflect on the findings and referring them to another person. Also, this is an opportunity to test your hypothesizes on others.

So, I’ve booked a number of sessions with a former colleague, Morten. He’s a bright young developer from my former job, and we share a lot experiences, which we can base our discussions in. We’re also different; he’s a developer, he’s ten years younger and we will probably have to work the most on different habits.

Our first session was really interesting and even if we’ve discussed the concept of leadership so many times before, the discussion took a completely other route. Also, we discussed the personal choices in a broader perspective. To summarize; we both left the session with a bunch of new stuff to think about.

I’m also glad to see that Morten is sharing his ideas and experience with this collaboration on his blog. I’m really looking forward the next step!

Why me? or Why Me!

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of Sammy Davis Junior but he’s the man behind the statement above. When he was young, he felt Why Me? and thought about that he was short, kind of ugly, one eyed and a jew. He was concentrating on why he had all these negatives. In other words, why was he a victim?

Later on, he became really successful, and the statement stood but with a different focus – Why Me! How come that he could become so successful?

One of my first blog posts discussed Aron Ralston and Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Dedicated climber and adventure skier Aron Ralston fell during a climb and got stuck between a rock and the rock wall. He also asked “Why did this happen to me” but he soon realized that the question was why it hadn’t happened earlier. And then he realized that he could do nothing about what had happened. Now he was there and he wanted to survive.

Self portrait of Aron of his actual situation when he was stuck. (source healthline.com)

Both Sammy Davis and Aron Ralston was in situations less than ideal. But there they were. But they both decided to do what they could. In the case of Sammy Davis he used his looks to create a new and different type of performer. Aron Ralston cut of his hand to break free.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist who survived the holocaust. In his Man’s searching for Meaning, he states what made him survive was that he accepted what he couldn’t do anything about how he was treated but he could do something about what he did and what he thought about. While they without any pain killers operated on him as a part of a medical test, he thought about how he would talk in front of students about this experience.

We always find ourselves in these “why me???” situations. In some cases, we are born into them, they just happen, etc. In other cases, we ourselves place us there. And in some cases, someone else puts us there.

Habit 1 of The Seven Habits takes focus on these situations. And the key value is to try to do something about what you can do something about and accept what you cannot do anything about. It’s about being pro active and take responsibility.

What does it matter if you’re genetically predisposed to becoming obese? Even if so, you can do nothing about that but what you can do something about is what and how you eat and exercise. Whining about genes doesn’t help you, does it?

What can you do about your boss being a complete idiot? Will he become smarter of you complaining about it? You can choose to live with that, try to lessen the effects of it or find yourself another job.

In many cases we just stop here, whine about stuff we cannot do anything about. Ralston tried moving the huge block of rock. But he couldn’t so he affected what he could affect. How much time do you spend on trying to move those huge blocks of stone?

That does not mean that doing what you can is not painful? All these stories are filled with pain but the question you need to answer yourself is – what can you live with?

I took a CPR training this Thursday and people were worried about hurting the person in question. And the trainer, having seen some of the worst scenes imaginable responded: We pick life over injury.

We sometime don’t pick the situations we’re in but we’re better off trying to do what we can about the future and if we see ourselves in control of what we can control.