Chaos Multipliers (n*x | where 1<n<∞)
If the amount of chaos prevalent in & across teams in an organization would have to quantified / represented how would that be done? And could only hiring ever be a strategy to combat it?
Common Beliefs
It is very common for anyone working as a part of a team to believe that hiring more team members would ease it all up for himself and everyone else alongside, especially when he feels like he is overburdened in any way.
But, could hiring and onboarding maybe an exodus of people ever going to be a solution in any way? What would one attribute the chaos to? And, what if the actual reason for chaos is unknown as nobody has ever spent any meaningful time studying & discerning it and what if it is not a resource crunch as it was believed to be earlier?
Styles of Work & Culture
1. General Management Focused on Ops
Over some organizations that are into production / manufacturing one talks of general management which is a totally different approach to the ones used at IT organizations. Processes & Operations (Ops) is their lifeblood and they always thrive on improving it, constantly & consistently.
They believe in hiring a (sometimes also a team of) top-shot, high profile MBA grads from elite universities to dig deep into the operations side of things and do a lot of number crunching & analyzing in an aim to identify, list out what corners they should be cutting & also gauging / forecasting what impact that would bear and the amount of money they’d save across a cohort, projecting it over a year’s timeframe.
And once they find 3 – 4 such alternatives they would also run their analysis over each of those options and prioritize the one that makes the most sense given the situation / goal the top management wants to / is set out to achieve.
2. Start-up Culture Focused on Collaboration
Of what is known today as the modern way of working, largely attributed to start-ups and their culture employing Ops and number crunching in an aim to zero-in on the problem and arriving at a solution route is easier said than done.
The reason is simple. With every team and their members having their tasks cut out over their individual deliverables are required to collaborate efficiently as a team whilst actively contributing their share of work over the outcome that is the desired organizational change. Having a certain set of guidelines, rules and could provide them with the clarity over how to progress. But, in many cases that clarity in itself is more or less absent which is primary & major factor leading to chaos.
And in such a situation represented by the nadir of the workflow in the box marked in red (refer picture above) how right would it be to induct more resources / a team of people who are all ICs and expect them to magically turn the situation on its head?
So, typical representation of the scenario here is (stay with me through the math here): -
An important learning from this whole scenario is, by the influx of (n) resources who are slated to play IC roles into a team over a situation that’s already chaotic could only lead to multiplying the chaos by a minimum of (n).
What was known to be chaos over a small set of people who were struggling to keep pace with expectations as required by their management and their EXECs would have spilled over and replicated to the fresh additions to the team grossly leading to complete lack of direction and more mounting chaos.
Chaos Donors
When it is more or less established that adding resources to a team might not help a great deal in mitigating the chaos prevalent let alone eradicating it, we could think about exploring over why it occurs and the main contributors, factors that lead to these problems.
There are a few well known “Chaos Donors” as I like to term it. While these factors may all be linked to the leadership style at the top they can be controlled to a large extent by a sorting it out with a stepwise action plan that fosters proper alignment.
1. Lack of a clear vision by the organization's top brass / EXECs
Sometime two of the most crucial yet neglected exercises in an organization could be building clarity over their Mission - the sole purpose of their existence and the Vision – a very basic version of how they plan to help themselves achieve that purpose. I have seen how copywriters are hired to do this job. Well, no problem with that if you need someone to articulate it for you. But, the original ideas and root of all those thoughts have to be from the founders, sans which it would be like a ship caught in a storm with a broken navigation system. That “no strings attached” engagement isn’t going to turn out good for anyone in there and is sure to backfire very soon.
There is no alternative here. The underlying pillars of strength for any organization at a very nascent stage is the Mission & the Vision. And it is better to spend ample time over that and sort it out at first because that’d often define the direction to take at an elementary level and also help you lay out a path to accomplishing them stepwise.
2. Lack of proper leadership who usually controls, arbitrates, defines what alignment means
Many a times over the subject of alignment leaders tend to focus too much on getting the whole team adhered and onboarded onto a certain process / methodology that they feel could be the most effective based on their prior experiences when in actuality what it means and what’s required could be altogether different.
Alignment is about motivating, controlling, getting the team to gel and function as a unit over a few set outcomes. That could be done via definition of goals at a high-level / OKRs entrusting the team entirely while keeping a close tab & regularly tracking the team’s progress.
3. Lack of action plans like goals, strategy, roadmap et. al.
It might as well be possible in some cases that leaders due to their varied backgrounds from other industry verticals aren’t really updated of recent changes in that systematic methodical approach that’s been tailored to fit into the current scheme of things and in the way, they have to get teams to function & gel largely. And that could really hamper optimal resource utilization.
Action plans ought to play the part akin to a guiding light in a dark tunnel. As much as it is that, nothing ought to be written in stone either. When the plans are defined and have been put in place it is to say that some kind of an outline / a direction has been defined of course with the inherent understanding of the readiness to chop and change as required & necessary.
Chaos Aggravators / Multipliers
And then, there are few Chaos Aggravators / Multipliers that are the cause for situations going helter-skelter and completely out of hand. Often the cause for these could be much deeper and at the cultural level in the way an organization itself believes in functioning. Culture changes though are easy to spot for a few experienced product people who come from a process-oriented background from organizations practicing PLG (Product Led Growth), they may not be that easy to find solutions for and eradicate in a whim. The change ought to be a gradual one and propagating top-down.
4. No proper adherence to a Culture and Ops (HIPPO-ruled culture)
Dynamically chopping and changing requirements / To-dos over ad hoc requests has been a burning requirement since a long time now. And, that’s the reason we have something like the first mandate of Agile Development that was coined and adopted worldwide. But expecting all teams to change as in put down whatever they were doing and take up something else altogether totally different based on the fancies of one person with authority could be a step toward abolishing all of those set rules & discipline in a flash and compromising a lot on a well-defined culture.
No doubt, every team would have faced this situation at some stage, sometimes more often and over regular silos. When the source of the suggestion ought to be given their due at times, it becomes equally important to understand the motivations, background & the “Whys” behind the suggestions. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s the highest / lowest paid person’s opinion or an engineer, designer, manager or any other internal / external stakeholder. What should matter is how that’s adding value and there could be no other way than giving it the due consideration it deserves and brainstorming to arrive at the best route.
5. Lack of a proper protocol / definition over frameworks & best practices
A big red flag. Sometimes in a few organizations the top brass believes in recruiting to fill in a few of the ICs and hand them all the responsibility to drive everything forward inclusive of strategy & prioritization. It could be a matter of esteemed elevation for that someone in taking the job head-on and steering it through. But, beware! The initial direction set out might as well get embedded deep into defining the culture the teams adhere to and it may feel like it is quite a task to change that if it’s propagated across a team of 50-100 people.
Frameworks are aplenty and one would have to spend some time over picking the one that best suits a given situation and defining a protocol and a few of those principles / best practices in spelling out the Dos & Don’ts. When the adherence to a framework may be good the pitfalls have to be studied and teams involved have to be mentally prepared to chop and change accordingly. The onus should always be on the outcomes and the process to help get there.
6. Early stage teams with a lack of clarity over bifurcation of roles, responsibilities & accountability
Mostly in what is an early stage start-up there with the team being really small and the whole gig yet to take complete shape, there ought to be ample confusion wrt the deliverables themselves being split haphazardly and having tons of overlap with the others getting seamlessly involved weighing in with their opinions. That often also would lead to a lack of control over each individual’s accountability which intern would end up overburdening a single / section of the team terribly.
Yes, it could be complete chaos at a stage of an organization where everything is taking / still to take proper shape more so with people often donning multiple hats with a prime just focus over getting the job done and not paying too much of heed to the how & what behind it. Resultant may soon be a burn-out. Even at an early stage start-up it ought to be fairly possible for the founders / cofounders to build a bifurcation of the roles and responsibilities over each of the hires and actively contribute towards a culture underpinning work-life-balance and employee well-being.
7. Non-collaborative structure of teams & lack of shared understanding
Disjoint teams lacking effective collaboration might have been a commonplace a decade back with teams trying to onboard themselves onto a newfound methodology / framework or going the traditional old-fashioned way in believing that the resources know what best to do leaving the alignment bit to them as well. The resultant is loads of worries over personal egos, lack of adherence to timelines, deliverables and understanding of individual roles and responsibilities.
Collaborative culture requires one to think beyond their current and immediate deliverables over building an understanding over how their work is going to add up and connect well over how their contributions in the team are going to help shape the product / service offering. And for that to happen efficiently egos if any have to checked at the door and the whole focus should be on getting things done via the best route possible.
8. Leadership’s complete lack of trust in the team and its members
I have recently heard stories about how the top brass / CXOs tend to keep a tab / control over the minutest detail related to product development on the release of features as well. That kind of micro-management could have a typical explanation of its own based on the case. But, the underlying motivator for leadership to get into such level of detailing could be attributed chiefly to a complete lack of trust in the team.
It is always very important to empower & entrust the team’s ability and that ought to start off by setting a vision firstly and then building action plans over goals both long-term & short-term setting all expectations straight over the required outcomes.