Episode 19: Why Don’t Businesses Emphasize Error Correction?
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Transcript
[00:00:13] Blue: All right, welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. We are meeting again with Bart, and we’re talking about his management philosophy that’s been inspired by Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge. So Bart and Camio, how are you guys doing?
[00:00:29] Red: Great. Doing great. Glad to be back here.
[00:00:34] Blue: Yes. In real life, it’s actually been a while since the last recording. In fact, we did one recording in between. So it’s been a while since I had a chance to talk with Bart, although him and I are constantly emailing each other with various types of philosophical questions. So I’m telling you, he asked the best philosophical questions much better than anything I can come up with. So and Camio, how are you doing?
[00:01:02] Green: Doing great. I’m just happy to be back. I’m really looking forward to talking through the rest of Bart’s philosophy. And I’m excited to learn more.
[00:01:14] Blue: So before we get started, I actually wanted to share something. I was talking with Carrie, who used to be on the show. She still helps us behind the scenes. And where we work, and other places we work too, and not trying to call out any one place in particular. We were talking about how the common approach is top down. And some of the really big problems that come from that. And I know we’ve talked about this in the past, but we kind of had one of those come up recently. I mean, these things come up all the time, of course. This is the norm. If you’re doing top down, that solves certain problems, but it causes other problems. And a lot of things that take place of the problems that take place are actually management problems that management doesn’t even realize or management problems. And we’ve had some of those kind of recently, and there isn’t a lot of feedback that comes up from the people who know that this decision is going to cause problems. And sometimes it’s still the right decision, by the way. I’m not trying to call out management as making bad decisions even necessarily, but I don’t think they always understand the bumps and lumps that are gonna take place and how serious they might be with some of their decisions, even if it turns out long run to be the right decision in the short run. There’s often really big problems and there might have been some benefit of understanding that going in if there had been more of a cycle of information going from top to bottom and back, which made me think a lot about parts. Management philosophy. So I started telling Carrie about it.
[00:02:54] Blue: She started getting really excited. She’s like, oh my gosh, this sounds so interesting. So anyhow, that was just like yesterday, by the way, that I was talking with her about that. So that kind of came to mind. I thought, oh yeah, I’m gonna get a chance to talk a part about this further, a little more about it.
[00:03:09] Red: We have a philosophy about knowledge creation because we believe that that’s the essence of what organizations do. They create knowledge in order to solve problems, problems that relate to success, performance, engagement, all the beautiful kind of things that organizations need to develop in order to thrive, survive, flourish, and all those things. So knowledge creation is essential. And we start out with a philosophy and we build an approach upon the philosophy. So maybe it’s already weird to hear that there is a management methodology that has a philosophy. But I think because knowledge creation is so prevalent and Karl Popper’s epistemology, his theory about knowledge is so powerful that basically we started from the philosophy and then we built a methodology on top of that. The philosophy deals with knowledge creation in the Popperian sense. So you’ll see three key things in this philosophy that deal with knowledge creation and you’ll recognize them because they’re very Popperian. But the creation, the first point, the creation of knowledge starts from a problem that you want to solve, something you want to understand and improve. And so knowledge doesn’t need to be fetched from any authority. We also do not need to reapply existing knowledge whenever we face a new problem. Knowledge also doesn’t come from observations, from generalizing observations. So the first point in the philosophy is about where does knowledge come from? In our philosophy, the Popperian philosophy, it is that knowledge comes from the process of solving a problem and not from any kind of fixed source where we just have to fetch it, apply it to the problem and we’ll have the solution. So that’s the first key point and you’ll see it later in the approach.
[00:05:15] Red: So we hand out problems to solve throughout an organization in an organization as opposed to giving predefined answers that come from predefined authorities or historical knowledge that we just want to reapply. It starts from problems and problems are the source of new knowledge creation. Second point is that knowledge needs to grow and problem solving is essentially the process of growing knowledge. There is no such thing as a fixed piece of knowledge that you can throw at a problem and then consider it solved. Every new idea and every new piece of criticism is going to evolve the knowledge that is being created and is going to lead us into newer problems, but that are already better problems because they contain already parts of the solution. And so this is the notion of a very active and dynamic perspective upon knowledge. And that is what people do. That is what people do when they are cooperating. They’re basically shaping knowledge. They shape it through their own IDs and through their IDs of criticism on other IDs. And that is a process that makes knowledge a very dynamic interactive phenomenon. And that is what we should stimulate. Problem solving is dealing with the dynamics of knowledge and not about finding the exact piece of existing knowledge and, as I said, throwing it at the problem and assuming that it’s solved. The third point in the philosophy is also familiar. I’m sure, but that is the idea that the growth of knowledge is unpredictable. So we need to cooperate, we need to solve problems, but we’ll never be able in that dynamic to predict what the solution will look like, predict what the next ID will be, predict what the next criticism will be.
[00:07:25] Red: That’s impossible because if we could predict it, we’d already have it. And so there is something intrinsically, inherently unpredictable about saying we put a team together, we give them a problem, and we know what’s gonna come out of it. And that’s an annoying point in some respect to management because managers want certainty, want predictability, want need to forecast things and all those things, but if you genuinely problem solve, there is always a very large component that is inherently unpredictable. You can set requirements for solutions, you can set boundaries for where a solution can be found and where it shouldn’t be found, but there is still a very important component of pure predictability. And on the downside, that may sound a little bit annoying, as I said, because we want predictability, we want stability and forecastability, but there is a huge upside to this as well because human creativity and the fact that it’s unpredictable has something very positive as well. It could lead to much better solutions than the one we try to predict in advance and try to predict because we are searching for existing solutions or past knowledge and predict that that will be, again, the solution that will be found and the solution that will solve the problem. I look at it more from a positive perspective, from a perspective that creativity is inherently something that will create something new, improve something, lead you into performance levels that indeed you cannot predict in advance, but definitely not therefore less good or problematic or something like that. So those are the three points in the philosophy.
[00:09:22] Red: They all deal with knowledge creation and we use them going forward actually to build a concrete methodology, something that you could implement tomorrow in a team for a given situation, context and problem that the team is faced with.
[00:09:41] Blue: All right, excellent. You know what, can I make a couple of comments? Just stuff that comes to mind. So Nicholas Tolleb in his book, The Black Swan, which is his most famous book, he talks about something you said was similar to something he said, but it was like a totally different context. So he talks about management wanting predictability and their desire to like make plans. They forecast we’re gonna grow our business by this much, like everybody does that, right? He kind of attacked that practice and he suggested that business growth because it is connected to the growth of knowledge and is therefore unpredictable. Then a lot of times it’s really just about having the right circumstance happens along and that you’re in a good position to be able to take a hold of the opportunity. And he gave an example of how some company he worked with something came along and somebody said, I would really love to have this service and they quickly did an analysis, figured out they could provide it. And then that became like their top seller by far was that service that just by half instance happened along. And so that would be one thought is that maybe even the growth of knowledge being unpredictable and management’s desire for predictability, we could, and this one probably could be argued. In fact, I’m hoping Camille will argue it, but Nicholas Telev at least argues that you can’t even predict your sales and that it may even be a mistake to try to have goals that you, predictable goals that you follow with sales. I’m not sure if I agree with him on that or not, but that’s just the thought that might be right for this.
[00:11:31] Blue: And the other thing that comes to mind is there’s reading a book by George Glider and he suggested a lot of the same thing about the unpredictability and about novelty being what drives the market. So the unpredictability of knowledge growth being what drives the market. He suggested though that there is a place for predictability, but it wasn’t what people think it is. It wasn’t the Adam Smith view of capitalism where you’re trying to be more and more efficient and things like that, but it was actually, he criticized Adam Smith on the grounds that most economists, they’re trying to figure out predictability for financials when really financials is driven by knowledge creation, which is unpredictable. But he says there is predictability necessary for the channel. So what he means by that is the sales channel. And so he thinks that’s mostly government’s responsibility as a matter of fact, to create a predictable channel. If you don’t have a predictable channel, then knowledge creation in the market becomes impossible, he says. So, but you want really strong predictability on the channel, but you want unpredictability on the market itself. And so there’s a bit of both, but he’s kind of trying to identify where it makes sense to do each. And the thing that’s interesting about it is that he actually applies this over to how broadband works and I don’t know this well enough.
[00:12:58] Blue: So I swear I’m gonna just butcher this, but he points out that if you were to look at broadband, that the way they set it up, nothing obviously transmission of data is not random, right, it’s all non -random, but the way they split up the bands so that they can try to get the maximum bandwidth, the end result is a whole bunch of non -random communications that when taken in aggregate, look random because a channel that’s predictable that gets filled up will look random in the end, even though nothing in it individually is random, if that makes any sense. But I thought that was really interesting. So anyhow, just keep it in the mind.
[00:13:44] Red: If I may comment on the manager thing and then the predictability, because you mentioned your managers want to make plans, I guess what I’m thinking related to that is the following. If you make a plan, you’re setting somewhat kind of a broad direction in which a solution needs to be found. You’re already saying that it shouldn’t take longer than this, that the milestone should look something like this, for example, a kind of threshold sales. But you can never predict which ID will eventually make it so that the milestone is met in time or the milestone is met in terms of KPI or quality or outcome metric. And the danger is when you stick to that predictability and when you’re sure that it’s going to have to be that milestone on that date, then you’re putting a break or a limit on knowledge creation. Then that’s detrimental to the creation of knowledge. So yes, you need to guide and set out a couple of somewhat specific planned events or milestones, but the IDs with which those milestones will be achieved and whether they will be achieved in time, that is largely unpredictable and that you should remain as, or you should treat as unpredictable and give enough autonomy so that those IDs can be created in the teams that need to meet your milestones and achieve your specific requirements, but it’s in the end unpredictable.
[00:15:42] Blue: All right, that makes sense. One other thing that comes to mind with this was the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel where he talks about the value of monopolies, which I thought matched this idea of knowledge creation in the market where you have nothing, the best types of businesses aren’t the ones that are trying to efficiently do something that everyone has done before, but the ones where they create something completely new and then have a monopoly on it essentially for a period of time as competitors are trying to come up to speed on it. So he’s using Google and Facebook and various other companies as an example. But yeah, that makes perfect sense, Bart, what you’re talking about that there is a need for both of these. Some predictability and you can see why management would be interested in that. Cameron, do you have any comments on this?
[00:16:36] Green: Yeah, you know, honestly I’m so curious about now how to apply this philosophy into these problems. Yeah, I’m just, I’m following along and just really enjoying the conversation.
[00:16:57] Blue: All right, I moved on to the next slide. Do you want me to move on to the next slide, Bart?
[00:17:02] Red: Yeah, so here we’re coming to, what does this mean now concretely? I mean, how can you turn this philosophy, which may sound still a little bit general and broad? How can you apply this into an organization into a team facing a problem? So we left with the point that the growth of knowledge is unpredictable, but the growth of knowledge is ideally fostered through problem solving. And so as opposed to trying to figure out a methodology where we can control very clearly what steps people need to make, what kind of metrics people need to report on what kind of evolution that they have to go through, we come from the other side and we figured out how could we optimally grow knowledge and what kind of processes are the ones that allow for optimum knowledge creation, given that it’s still knowing that it’s unpredictable, but at least fostering an optimum growth of knowledge. What are the conditions? What are the approaches, the methodology to allow for that? And there are a couple of things that can be turned into practice, into reality, and that you can control. So you can’t control the outcome of a lot of problem solving, but you can control the fact that you install good processes of knowledge creation. And there are eight little things that lead to our approach that we do while implementing the approach. First of all, give good problems to teams. So instead of giving your answers, instead of saying, by the next semester, we need to increase sales by 5 % and we need to do it by focusing on those clients and this salesperson is going to help you to do that in this or that way.
[00:19:08] Red: That is giving your answers already and in a way that the room for knowledge creation is already a lot inhibited. What we do is we give problems to teams in the sense that come up with the plan approach IDs that allow for at least 5 % sales growth and we specify what kind of degree of freedom that there is in solving their problems. For example, you can specify the number of degrees of freedom that a team has in seeking a solution as opposed to giving already a very much predefined answer with a lot of requirements that are not negotiable and therefore are not degrees of freedom. So in giving problems to teams, you need to think hard about what degrees of freedom do you give, what kind of autonomy. It can be in terms of the time with which they deliver. It can be in terms of the freedom of approach that they’re allowed to seek and it can be even in terms of freedom of which road to choose which fundamental choice to take in order to solve the problem. So you can go wide with giving autonomy but it has to be at least a minimum of autonomy. Giving the entire answer to the problem already before the team has to go out and deliver something that is already hampering the growth of knowledge, hampering the problem solving process that that team has to get into. And then -
[00:20:52] Green: So by that you mean that if you’re constraining the solution options tightly, then it constrains their ability to generate the knowledge that they’re going to need.
[00:21:10] Red: Exactly, yeah. If they do not have a minimum of autonomy to come up with IDs that eventually will solve the problem. If they don’t have that minimum of autonomy, yeah, then it’s basically execution then there’s no creation, there’s no knowledge development, there’s no error correction allowed. It’s basically algorithmically executing a predefined answer Yeah, exactly. So, and then the, yes?
[00:21:49] Green: No, I was just gonna say, please continue.
[00:21:52] Red: Yeah, so then the second thing sounds simple but it’s essential. The one thing you can control as a manager is demanding participation in this problem solving process. So first of all, you give a team a question, a problem instead of your answer. And second of all, you demand participation because you have selected the problem solving team very carefully. You typically put together teams that require cooperation that are not used to cooperation but that true cooperation will get to better solutions, better IDs. And so sometimes you have to cut across organizational silos or organizational layers to compose that team. But then you demand participation. That’s often in the beginning a little bit hard because people say, I’m asked to be in this team but I don’t know these people, they’re from another department, they’re from another place in the company but it’s crucial that they at least minimally participate. Be present, be transparent and all those things in the problem solving process. So you’re not forcing your answer but you’re at least demanding regular participation in this problem solving process. That’s the second one. So I’m listing all the things you can control and this is within the philosophy that you can’t control the answers. You can’t control and predict the knowledge that will be created but you can at least control the things that will allow for optimum knowledge creation. And so giving a problem with some autonomy is one second participation. That is something you can control. And then thirdly is what I call rumination. So rumination time, that is typically the first stage of the problem solving process. Rumination is what the cows do. And this is actually the time where you get familiar with the problem.
[00:24:01] Red: You have been handed a problem but for many people, the problem may still not be clear or they may have very one -sided interpretations of the problem, maybe very one -sided first IDs. And so the rumination time is a fixed process activity which is facilitated by a facilitator but which is basically geared at aligning the understanding of everyone given their different angles of attack, their different backgrounds in the company, their different backgrounds in terms of knowledge that they already have about the problem and knowledge that they already may use to come up with first IDs. This is typically a crucial phase because too often people get rushed into new projects where we assume that everybody understands what the mandate of the project is, what the deliverables are, what the expectations are. And rumination is exactly the phase where you are exploring your interpretation of the problem with the rest of the people on the team. And you do that from all different angles. And that’s typically the phase where there aren’t any big engagements yet on, I will do that, I will do this or I will deliver that. It’s really ruminating. It’s passing on IDs, passing on interpretations from one person to another and checking whether we have an aligned understanding about one the problem and possibly two already some emerging first IDs. It’s important also to get to know each other, get to know each other through the problem and through the IDs. But without any, at that stage at least, without any forced duties, like make sure that you do that and make sure that you take care of that deliverable. It’s really understanding the problem to a level that you’re very much aligned in that understanding.
[00:26:17] Red: And it’s also discussing first IDs that come up and that may then possibly solve the problem. And that you can control as well. You can demand for rumination time, you can put a facilitator in that process to make sure that that phase in the problem solving process is rightfully addressed. And then the fourth point is also that’s something specific for every ID. That comes out of the rumination or that comes out of any other stage in the problem solving process. For any ID, we appoint an ID owner. And an ID owner is basically the one who is initially convinced that that first ID has a chance of success, has some way of solving the problem. And the ID owner at least has some preliminary first explanation for why he or she thinks that that ID is able to solve the problem. And what the ID owner does, sorry, what the ID owner does is he’s going to actively look for criticism, actively look for enhancements, corrections to his or her ID in the team. And the ID owner can be anybody. It is simply the one who comes up with the ID and with a minimum of conviction. And so we don’t distribute the tasks according to functional responsibility. So like all the sales IDs need to be carried out by the salesperson on the team and all the ID IDs need to be carried out by the ID personal on the team. It’s unpredictable given the fact that IDs are unpredictable. It’s unpredictable who will come up with the kind of first ID on how to advance in the problem and how to work out a certain ID.
[00:28:21] Red: But an ID owner also has to actively look for criticism in the group in order for his or her ID to evolve, to eventually come better, to become implementable, to become testable, to be able to discuss status and progress and advancements of the ID in execution. That is one other thing you can install and control. This is the specific role of an ID owner in the team. And typically for one problem in one team, you have four, five or more even IDs with all of them ID owners. And you’re growing a kind of portfolio, mini portfolio of IDs that are all taken together, solve the problem you’re asked to solve. The fifth point is basically that you can also increase the skill for criticizing IDs, which I like to call sometimes also enhancing IDs. So criticism, when it’s done well, enhances an ID because it detects errors in an ID and it proposes corrections to the errors. And so you enhance an ID. And so for me, criticism is something very positive, very, very dynamic and very enhancing. And so the ID owner actively looks out for enhancements of his or her ID, but the rest of the group, the rest of the team also needs to learn what it is to criticize well and to enhance and help the ID owner to strengthen his or her IDs. And so that is what we’ve talked about previously also on the podcast, but that is really the skill of enhancing an ID without tackling somebody personally and really getting into the ID and trying to make it better through criticism and helping the ID owner, therefore, to strengthen his or her ID.
[00:30:28] Blue: Question for you on that one. So you actually, it’s interesting how you put this criteria for criticizing slash enhancing an idea. Now, criticizing an idea should be a case of enhancing an idea. It should be that you’re pointing out a problem with an eye towards trying to improve the idea. But I would think a lot of people just with no clinical rationalists, Karl Popper’s philosophy background, criticism is something that has become weaponized in culture, probably throughout all history. Do you find that referring to it as error correction or enhancing an idea works better than calling it criticism? Or do you call it all those things and kind of use them interchangeably and try to get people to change their understanding of what criticism means?
[00:31:21] Red: Yeah, we tend to use them interchangeably, but we are really clear upfront on what the criteria are for good criticism and therefore for enhancement. And it’s on the list here, because we’re listing here things that can be controlled in the sense that you can explain to people what the difference is between bad and good criticism and how people can learn and practice it while being in a problem solving process, while working with concrete IDs and with ID owners that put forward these IDs. You can teach people how to improve their criticism and their criticizing ability, if you want. And it’s, I think, also something that needs to be controlled. It has to be part of a problem solving process that there is a good definition and a good picture about what is good criticism, what is bad criticism, and even along the way, the facilitator in a problem solving process can give advice and feedback to people in a team on whether they are enhancing IDs and how they’re doing it or whether they are doing the opposite. And so it’s even part of the improvement of the cooperation and the individual contribution to cooperation that those discussions take place that a facilitator can take somebody apart or can take somebody regularly apart and just present a mirror on how he or she has been doing in criticizing an ID and enhancing it, and that can be positive. And then it’s an occasion for giving some positive feedback, but it can also be negative and it can be a working point for the person that will be worked upon in subsequent sessions.
[00:33:17] Red: But I think it’s something that you have to organize for and you can even control the fact that people will learn to eventually criticize better by first knowing what good criticism is and then by trying to learn to apply good criticism in the action, in the action of the problem solving process and with the help of a facilitator, this can be organized for and these feedback sessions can take place and people can learn based upon those feedback sessions. And that is something that goes in parallel to the content work, to the content discussions about the problem, the IDs, the advancements, the status. It’s something on top, but it adds to the problem solving skill of the group if attention is paid to that.
[00:34:09] Green: I’m glad you asked that, Bruce, because I had the same thought both on the idea around criticizing and then even with the previous thing that we were controlling where an idea owner was looking for criticism, both of those things are kind of the all and almost consider, people protect their ideas. They don’t look for criticism of their ideas and criticism is considered as like you say, even in situations where it’s not weaponized, the word has a negative connotation and you’ll hear people say he was really critical of my idea as a negative thing rather than, oh, he was really critical of my idea and we were able to enhance it because it’s just a very different way of viewing things.
[00:35:03] Blue: Yes, I think it is important that we understand that the average person, probably everybody has had lots and lots of experiences with weaponized criticism, right? And there’s a reason why people react badly to the idea of criticism. They’re not just being silly or stupid. There’s a good reason for why people have a hard time with that because it does get weaponized so often. And so this is a bit of a mindset change to realize, well, actually criticism is a gift. It’s a chance for enhancement. It’s a chance to actually make things better.
[00:35:43] Red: Yeah, exactly. And it is indeed mindset and behavior change, but I think it’s fundamental as well if you want to drive the problem -solving ability of a team because they will always have their IQs, they will have their dominant behaviors, but it’s true problem -solving and true learning how to problem -solve in a cooperative setting and through good criticism, which enhance IDs, both when giving criticism, but also when accepting criticism that adds to the problem -solving capacity of the team. And that is something that I think needs to grow. That shouldn’t be the same for one problem that we’re solving together today and then another problem that we’re solving in six months. You should see a gradual evolutionary increase in the problem -solving capacity of the same team and the main driver or one of the main drivers for that enhancement is actually the quality of asking for and receiving criticism on IDs.
[00:36:59] Green: Well, excellent, please continue.
[00:37:03] Red: Yeah, so number six, another thing you can control is what we call everybody takes the pen. We actually have a software platform online for problem -solving, for generic problem -solving in teams. Any kind of problem, any kind of hierarchy of problems and as many teams as you want, online, transparent and all those things, but we have one rule is everybody takes the pen. So whether you are a high contributor to problem -solving or whether you’re just maybe listening in into teams or being rather passive in teams, you always have a contribution. You always have a part of an ID that results into an action or anything. And we say that everybody takes the pen in this online tool. So you’re being transparent on how you’re solving the problem, how you are putting together a plan, how you’re advancing through the plan, what your status of the execution is at any point in time, what kind of choices you’re making, what kind of errors that you have made and corrected and all those kinds of things, but everybody takes the pen to make that transparent in a kind of problem -specific environment in the platform. And this is very much different to the situation where you have, for example, a consultant or even a portfolio management person who takes the pen, him or her only. And so I’ve had a lot of situations before I started Pactify where there was one note -taker or one central administration and he or she was the only one who was writing the reports, but those were already an interpretation of what was really going on into the teams and what was really being done by the individuals.
[00:39:10] Red: So it was already a consolidated interpretation and then it was presented to senior management steering committee and there as well was an interpretation. It was not right from the hand of the people contributing to these problems and projects. It was in different layers being consolidated and each time with interpretation loss and information loss being consolidated. So when everybody takes the pen, there’s a much more direct link with your contribution and how you want to make your contribution explicit what you count or what you expect from other people, what you engage yourself to plan to do and to deliver. And so there is no note -taker, no central entity that administers everything. So we distribute the taking of the pen literally.
[00:40:17] Blue: You said you have software that you use for this?
[00:40:20] Red: Yes, so we built a problem -solving, generic problem -solving software where all participants in the problem -solving process directly enter their IDs, their advancements, their corrections, all those kinds of things and you can make a sort of hierarchy of problems into it. So you have a kind of portfolio look as well together with very specific looks into the individual problems and the contributions of anyone to that problem.
[00:41:00] Green: That’s really interesting to me because I find it’s generally hard to get almost anyone to take the pen. I’m such a believer in a decision made and not documented, might as well not be made at all. And so often, especially in big organizations, it’s called a communication problem. Decisions are made, moved forward on, no one understands the justification. There’s multiple points along the way where micro -decisions are made, never captured by anybody. And it makes understanding problems really, really difficult. It makes every effort ends up being an enormous kind of BA analysis type of a thing where you’re trying to recreate and understand all of the details because nobody wants to document what they’re doing. No one wants to document their code or, you know… So I’m fascinated how effective this is for you.
[00:42:07] Red: Well, it is hard in the beginning because obviously all those central entities, the PMOs or the program management officers or the consultants that are running around, they make life very easy for managers because they just have to ask them and they have one source of their information. When we start and say everybody takes the pen and it’s the consolidated writings that are the version of the truth, that’s hard to kick off in the beginning because a consultant is used or a program manager is used to, from the beginning, write very concise and, you know, information that is easily digestible by management. When you give the pen to everyone, it takes some time before those writings become sharp, before they learn to be concise and be relevant in what they are being transparent on. And that is again also a learning process that we think is important that everyone goes through as opposed to somebody who’s perfect in administration doing all the writing job and then everybody else on the team, first not saying a lot, but then when the reports are out, complaining that that is not what they meant to say or that is not what was happening in the team or what the team is doing. And then you get all those kinds of yes and no discussions between the central entity typically that writes down everything and consolidates everything and then what really lives in a team. But it’s only when you force everybody to take the pen and help them to become better in conveying what they have been doing, what they plan to do, how this all rolls up into the entire portfolio picture so that the manager can read and understand and have some relevant information.
[00:44:19] Red: It’s only when you ask that from everyone that the learning effect starts to kick in, in the whole group. And as long as you say, no, we’re not going to do that, we just have one responsible to give us the reports on how everything is going. Yeah, then you run into these problems of people not recognizing what is in the reports and then losing all kinds of time to clarify that. And so you get the problems afterwards. I get the problems immediately in the beginning when I say nobody, there’s nobody to report, you are the ones that are going to report by taking the pen yourselves. But then that brings the problem a little bit upfront because you have to learn people to take the pen.
[00:45:15] Green: Fascinating, okay, cool.
[00:45:17] Red: Yeah. Number seven could have been number six and six number seven, when you take the pen and when you’re solving problems, you better use a project language. And with a project language, I mean not the kind of fuzzy prosaic language, but language that deals with, this is my milestone, this is my due date, this is an action that is required in order to get to that milestone. Project language is the language of being specific on how things are going to evolve and how things have evolved up to now with specific language on timings, owners, milestones, actions, status, progress, what have you. And it’s again, also a kind of language that you need to learn into a group because people sometimes tend to prefer the language of saying, yes, I’ll take that, don’t worry, it will get done, but this is kind of the fuzzy, the fuzzy kind of language, which isn’t saying a lot, especially not in terms of engagements, especially not in terms of identification of where the focus is, where the problems are, where the evolution is going well versus not well. And so you better express yourself in a project language using terms like, this is where we stand, this is what we’re facing, this is where we’re having problems, this is what we’re gonna do about it, and by then we aim to get it resolved and all those kinds of project language type of expressions, that’s the ones that we want to learn people to use. As I said, as opposed to the more fuzzy, general, non -engaging expressions on where people find that the problem, the project or the problem is standing.
[00:47:26] Blue: I don’t think I quite understand what you mean by project language, to be honest. So could you explain that a bit further what project language is?
[00:47:36] Red: Yeah, it’s maybe on the very specific point that we, and it’s again related to our platform, but we ask some things that people fill out, like for example, every two weeks giving a status on what they have realized, where they have blocking issues, what their next steps are, and what they’re asking to senior management to decide related to the project. We are also asking when people make plans, like set milestones that they describe the milestone clearly that they attach a due date to it, whenever they describe an action or plan an action that the action is always related to a milestone so that they get into the logic of why do I need the action? Well, it is because I have planned a milestone and it’s all these kinds of, you could say systematic language with which that you express a clear status of your project and a clear path forward. That’s what I mean with project language. It’s also the language that you use when you’re using, for example, Microsoft Project. It’s also built around those kinds of statements that people need to make. And I refer it to the opposite in this sense that let me take a practical example. You can imagine project meetings where there’s a lot of talking, but the talking is always in a kind of language that is just generalized enough in order to not be specific and to not be very engaging for the person who put forward the statements. So we are a little bit stricter on that and pre -format also a little bit the kinds of things that we want people to express in this platform.
[00:49:44] Red: And this deals with expressing sharply and clearly where you stand and where you want to go and why.
[00:49:54] Green: Like I’m gonna finish this report by Thursday and have it into everybody’s hands on Friday versus I’m going to be working on this report over this next week.
[00:50:06] Red: Yes, or yeah, that’s a good example. Or for example, I’m busy with it.
[00:50:11] Green: Oh, right, even less like I’m working on that right now.
[00:50:15] Red: Yes, I’m working on it, yeah. It reminds me - I’m looking into it.
[00:50:20] Blue: It reminds me of Agile stand -ups where according to the Agile process, you’re supposed to say, how I’m doing on my commitment from yesterday, what I’m committing to get done today and what any roadblocks. And instead people end up just talking about I worked on this yesterday, I’m working on this today. And there’s no commitment in the language, there’s no anything in the language. Is that kind of the same idea here?
[00:50:53] Red: Yeah, exactly. And then the last thing is the fact that we use a platform is also with the requirement that everyone is on the same platform and the platform contains only one version of all the IDs and their evolution. This may again sound a little bit trivial maybe, but too often before doing Pactify, you always had multiple versions of where a project was heading towards or where it was standing. You had multiple versions in the organization. You had the steering committee who was working on one version. You had the teams individually that had another version of what they were exactly doing and how it was going and which directions they were heading. And the fact that you force everyone on the same platform, so both for reporting to a steering committee as well as for managing progress in the particular teams and do that on one transparent platform and not two. So no separate reporting to the hierarchy on the one hand and then another kind of reporting or tracking for everything that happens inside a team. You need to connect both and be on one platform. And that changes a lot because managers are then forced to read into the platform and project people are forced to communicate in a way that it becomes relevant to managers and so to avoid that they’re saying, yeah, I’m not going to read into that platform, just give me three bullets on where you stand. That is not what we do. We don’t do the three bullets separately. We work in one platform. And
[00:52:49] Red: so both people in a project team in a problem solving team, as well as the hierarchy who looks into the problem who decides, arbitrates, steers the whole portfolio of problems, they too are looking into the same platform. And that makes them basically get closer to each other around the content of what is there, around the status of everything, around the contributions of everyone towards progress in the different projects.
[00:53:23] Blue: The worst thing in the world is when everybody’s trying to keep track of something in a project and they’re all emailing each other and there’s no single source of truth. So I can’t really…
[00:53:36] Green: Well, email and Slack are awful, awful, awful ways to track project decisions. And then you have people say, well, that decision happened. Where did it happen? I think it was an email. I think it was in Slack.
[00:53:51] Red: Yeah. Exactly.
[00:53:55] Blue: We had one of those happen last week where we had discussed in Slack, okay, here’s why we don’t want to upgrade this environment yet. So this group, the JD group, told us, you shouldn’t upgrade your environment and here’s why. And then we started doing testing and they came back, somebody is like somebody else in the same group, but so came back and said, you can’t do this testing until you upgrade your environment. And there were the ones that had told us not to upgrade the environment, but just to do somebody else in the group. And so we’re like, so they’re like asking our permission. And we’re like, well, we’re actually just doing what you told us. And so everyone was like trying to track down where in Slack, the conversation had taken place. It was hilarious.
[00:54:43] Red: Yeah. But let me re -emphasize again here, the fact that this is difficult in the beginning because people want this freedom. People want their reporting channels to be customized, to be familiar. And some people therefore are sending out emails to everyone all the time. Other people, yeah, maybe use Slack or their, I don’t know, they use their handwritten booklet for the truth. And so people generally want this kind of flexibility, this kind of freedom about how to report and where. And sometimes it goes astray and it becomes all over email and nobody understands it anymore. By forcing everyone, well, to take the pen, to use a similar kind of project language and to do that all on one platform and not any other platform, we discard every other platform or any other channel of communication. So the 0.67 and eight, they are a pain in the ass in the beginning because nobody wants this, but it’s only by literally controlling even a little bit forcing this that understanding, mutual understanding is going to grow, that people are going to become sharper in how they are transparent about what they really are doing, how they really are advancing, what they really need in order to advance further. And yeah, the 0.67 and eight, if you let go of it, you get the traditional kind of, yeah, too flexible, too chaotic, kind of reporting some people in their usual language, other people in another language style. Nobody really being transparent to the point that they take the pen in the same platform where everybody can read.
[00:56:52] Red: So the point I’m trying to make is that 0.67 and eight are some things that to be fought for in the beginning with huge benefits eventually along the process, but not immediate and there are no immediate gains. But on the other hand, if you let go of them too easily, you run in all the kind of misinformation, misinterpretation, frustration, kind of problems that both of you are describing just now.
[00:57:23] Blue: All right, excellent.
[00:57:25] Red: I find it, I mean, Popper’s epistemology, I guess is the most powerful, the most relevant one and companies are about creating knowledge and solving problems. And so you pointed out very interestingly, why would that be the case that Popper hasn’t made it yet into management that it seems to be so weird to bring these ideas of Popper into management? You literally say that I’m the only one you know who’s using this in management. And so, yeah, this is basically maybe a question to you. What do you think is the reason?
[00:58:08] Blue: That’s a good question. Do you know, can I broaden the question maybe a little? Yes. You and I were having a discussion via email recently about like Popper’s falsification. I won’t go into our discussion, but it got me thinking about a number of things. Like, if you were to look, so science as an institution, science as a community, as a community of criticism existed prior to Popper, right? Popper was looking at what is it that the community of scientists is doing that makes it work? And he was trying to make it explicit, right? He was trying to understand what that process is because of course at the time and even today, they still think of it as an inductive process, things like that, right? And so he could see that there was a problem with that description of what science was doing. So, Popperian processes have existed far before Popper did, right? And so then you kind of get at that with the management side, radical candor comes very close to being Popperian but wasn’t inspired by Carl Popper’s philosophy. But for that matter, most of science isn’t inspired by Carl Popper’s philosophy as of today. The vast majority of people, so Carl Popper is definitely a famous philosopher, but he’s nowhere near as famous as a lot of his peers, you know, Kant, Winston Gain, I mean, like there’s all these philosophers out there that some are super famous, Aristotle is super famous, and there’s others that are kind of famous. Carl Popper kind of falls into the kind of famous category.
[01:00:02] Blue: And, you know, and of those who do know Carl Popper, like if I were to go around, I were to ask someone who works in the sciences, do you know who Carl Popper is? They would say yes, and then they would mention falsification, which honestly wasn’t the most important, it wasn’t even the best part of their theory, right? It’s actually a somewhat flawed part of his theory. There’s so many better things in his theory that are so much more important. And that’s usually the thing people know. And when they use that part of his philosophy, they almost invariably use it wrong in ways that are inconsistent and even at odds with his critical rationalism. So there’s maybe a fair question, not just for management, but why is it that despite him being a philosopher of some stature, why is it that a lot of his ideas haven’t really, I mean, people aren’t basing management on it. People aren’t basing science on it. People aren’t basing politics on it, right? And there are ways we could approve all of those because all of those, the market is based on his philosophy and they don’t know it, right? I mean, it underlies so many things. Maybe everything we care about, in fact. And yet people aren’t really looking at it from the viewpoint of our best explanation as to what’s going on. They kind of just do it based on heuristics, they do it based on institutions, tradition and those are all part of Karl Popper’s philosophy. So that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we could get a lot more explicit.
[01:01:45] Blue: We could make improvements faster if we, or so I believe, if we could figure out how to get people thinking in terms of, okay, everything is really kind of about knowledge creation. How do we set up a critical rationalist type process in this area that we care about? So then that’d be my first statement is that this could be brought into all sorts of things. And then my next statement would be that I think, maybe this is heresy, but I think part of it might be Popper’s fault himself. He is such a clear thinker that you don’t notice it when he is less clear, right? Certain things are a little bit hard to understand. And you don’t feel that way when you’re reading him. You feel like he’s being so clear, right? But there are certain things that it’s, you go back and you look at like how different people interpret him and there’s wide varied interpretations over certain things because he wasn’t always, he always talked about how hard it was to be clear. And that it is hard to be clear. So this isn’t a criticism of him as a person at all, but he was onto something big and he was struggling to put it into a best explanation of best words and best examples that he could. And I think a lot of times like you and I have discussed that I sort of blame Popper for a lot of the problems that people have with understanding his falsification, right? That he wasn’t as clear as he needed to be to really get people to understand it. And it was a brand new thing. So that’s somewhat understandable. And I think that’s one of the biggest barriers that exist.
[01:03:32] Blue: Strange as this may sound is it’s that you’ve got like a huge group, like if we were to look at science, we’ve got a huge group of scientists who still believe in adductivism because it has this really strong intuitive appeal. And it kind of seems to work for them. And so, they don’t feel any crisis to try to move to something better because, hey, and there’s something almost funny about it at times. I mean, somebody in the Forced Trans Group was talking about physicists. Oh, I think it was Dan Elton who’s a PhD, he’s a physicist. He was talking about how often there is pressure just to shut up and calculate in quantum mechanics because they don’t yet accept the only existing explanation for it, which is many worlds. And so there’s a lot of things where there’s no way they would make progress in science if they actually accepted a lot of their own philosophies that they’re give verbal, they’ll say, oh, I accept positivism. Stephen Hawking was very strong on positivism. And I’ve got posts that I’m doing right now where I’m going to address that. He abandoned his positivism the moment he needed to and started using critical rationalism, whether he realized that or not, right? And I think that happens a lot, that we kind of know how to do it. We’re not explicit with ourselves. We kind of have different ways we describe what we’re doing, but what we’re really doing is something else. And I know that this happens a lot in all areas of expertise where if you were to ask experts, what’s the best way to fly a plane or something like that?
[01:05:22] Blue: They’ll actually take you through and explain to you, this is how, as an expert, I’m telling you, this is how to fly a plane. And then you go watch what they do and they’re actually doing something totally different. And what they’re really doing is they’re trying to take a bunch of inexplicit ideas in their mind and they’re trying to boil down what they can as a good starting point for a beginner because that’s what you are because you’re asking. And it’s really something totally different than what they’re gonna actually end up doing themselves as a true expert. And that may be what I would offer as an answer to your question is we’ve got this gap where we’ve got these great ideas that have come from Karl Popper. Some of them are a little hard to understand. There’s some competing ideas that have strong intuitive appeal. As an example, I think it’s very hard to compete with the intuitive appeal of hierarchical management and top -down control. It has been so effective for so long, compared to, say, chaos, that it’s really hard to convince a manager, especially if their personal value is caught up in the idea that they are, as the CEO or whatever, that they are the ones that are making the big difference in their company. I think there’s a whole slew of boundaries, not boundaries, barriers to wanting to embrace the truth about what’s really going on, which is Karl Popper’s philosophy, conjecture and refutation, or the different ways you could say it. Even just trial and error gets pretty close to the truth. The fact that it’s really all about knowledge creation
[01:07:11] Blue: and trying to abandon authority and things like that, there’s good reasons why people want to protect their authority. Think of Sigmund Freud. His theory was 100 % slippery driven. It all came down to, you go ask him and he gets to tell you the interpretation. So he had really strong reasons wanting to protect his legacy to not want to give up that authority. So I think you have a lot of natural barriers that exist. I think that Popper was the first step towards really understanding his theory and that he only got a certain percent down the road himself before he died. And as you and I are fans of David Deutsch, in some ways I feel like David Deutsch’s version of Popper’s theories are almost neopoparian. There’s enough changes. He would never call it this. He’s a fairly humble guy. But I feel like some of his, what he sees is maybe just explaining things a little better are actually improvements. There are places where there was a problem with the original theory that Popper came up with and he fixed the problem. And it’s in some ways a different theory now. It’s hard to know when the theory becomes a new theory. I mean, Darwinism and Neo -Darwinism are they the same theory or are they different theories? Right? It’s the same sort of thing. It’s subjective in a lot of cases. So what do you think? I mean, this is just kind of really going off the top of my head.
[01:08:39] Green: So I want to look at it from a slightly different angle. I don’t think most business management or management in general, I don’t think it’s created almost ever with an idea of any kind of philosophical view. I think you see that more and more happening but most of what drives management processes traditionally is just mirroring what other people were doing that was successful at the time. And now in business management schools, people aren’t studying philosophy to try and learn how to be better managers of people as a matter of course, that’s not what they teach in MBA programs. That’s not the curriculum. And even in the philosophical, I took philosophy, I don’t remember a lot about it. And I don’t remember Popper standing out as like this thing that I was supposed to pay attention to necessarily. Popper’s not that famous if you’re not a philosophy nerd. So it wasn’t until I started talking to Bruce and he’s got so much passion around Popper and Deutsch and it’s borderline religious like to talk to Bruce if you happen to go anywhere near those subjects, I just don’t think it’s a consideration which is how you think you get things, they happen organically. This is the creation of radical candor. It happened organically for her that she discovered these truths that Popper describes.
[01:10:29] Red: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.
[01:10:32] Blue: Well, I’m just gonna say, I mean, I have an MBA. They don’t even really teach just agile, right? Right. They don’t even really teach radical candor. They even the pseudo -Popperian views that have a lot of the right ideas, those don’t even come up at least not when I was in school, right? I mean, I think you’re right that they’re really trying to teach, this is, in a lot of ways, they’re trying to teach the traditions, the traditions that work. Yeah,
[01:11:07] Green: and even the teaching of business finance and everything that’s around P &L, it’s fairly rigid in its interpretation of itself and what those numbers mean and how you move those numbers along. When earlier, when we were talking about some of these concepts, I think you started to dive down into this projecting things and trying to create sets of rules that will result in projections. That’s what they’re teaching in business schools and they’re, look, teaching it probably from the wrong perspective because they don’t care about this. They don’t see a value in this.
[01:11:48] Blue: Right. You know, and sorry, Bart, I have one more comment and I’ll let you get in here. So there’s actually a kind of analogy to something in the past and Bart may actually disagree with this one, but let me explain. So everyone’s kind of familiar with Demings and he was the one that came out with like total quality management or the use of statistics, statistically controlled processes. And, you know, Demings is obviously an American and the way the myth gets told, I don’t know how to what degree the myth is true, but there must be some truth to it. He tried to peddle his philosophy, his science of how do you improve your processes using total quality management, using statistical control. And Americans already knew how to do business. You know, they were the best in the world. Why did they need this new idea? And so the Japanese had just lost a war. They brought him over. They picked it up. You know, rumor has it that they were very good students of Demings. And then, you know, today, there are certain Japanese companies like Toyota or something like that. They’re very famously Demings based and they’re awesome at what they do. And there’s jokes about like, you order from the Japanese and some of these are supposed to be true story. I don’t know if they’re asking true stories or not, but you order from the Japanese, you know, these little bolts and you say, okay, you’re allowed to have, you know, there’s a tolerance that you could have 1 % of them be bad.
[01:13:23] Blue: And they receive their bolts and they have a little package with 1 % of them bad with a note saying, we don’t know why you wanted 1 % of them to be bad, but here they are. And because they were so good at what they were doing, it was gonna be 100%, right? There was no need for the American tolerance because they had gotten so good at their statistical processes. It’s interesting that statistical processes are actually a perian, right? That they’re based on variations and measuring variations and I’d have to get into it as to how it’s perian, but there’s a connection there. Let’s just say that. But the same sort of thing, I think a lot of these ideas do take a long time to catch on. Popper may be famous within philosophy nerd circles, but he really isn’t so famous outside. I mean, if I’d mentioned Carl Popper to people, most people would never heard of it. If they’re scientists, they have. If they’re scientists, they know exactly who I’m talking about, but if they’re not scientists, they know who I’m talking about.
[01:14:21] Red: I actually never mentioned him because indeed, as Camille says, it’s not on top of their mind. It’s not familiar. It’s not known. So you cannot start with a philosophy discussion with managers or name -dropping like Popper. That’s definitely true. So I’m getting at it from another angle, from a more concrete angle, explaining the methodology foremost without the philosophical part. But there’s something I’m trying to get my mind around when you look at what is being taught at MBAs and what is being written in management books, as also Camille referred to. What I feel a little bit is that all of those theories are from the other epistemological basis, namely the justificationist basis because all of them never question themselves as a theory. They justify themselves as theories. They don’t see their theory as evolutionary, as dynamic, as improvable. And with any type of, I did an MBA as well and all the theories you learn there or any management theory you read in management books, almost all of them, but I could be wrong, but almost all of them, they basically use the epistemology that is contrary to the Popper one, which is the justificationist epistemology, which is not starting from the basis that your theory, by definition, contains mistakes and that you have to be busy and occupied with improving your theory continuously as opposed to justifying it. And there, I think it’s really fundamentally powerful what Popper’s epistemology can bring to the table in management, but given indeed practical constraints like he’s not known that much, it’s kind of deep his thinking, it’s philosophy where you can’t start with philosophy in any kind of management discussion, but still there’s this fundamental lack in management theories that is linked to, in my opinion, the
[01:16:44] Red: fundamentally wrong epistemology and if that could only be changed, that could unlock huge potential.
[01:16:55] Green: Well, and I think there’s always a little bit of a fine line because I think Agile had, has and continues to have some promise around that area, but then you also see this kind of desire for people to brand the solution, which then has a tendency to lock it in space. Like, you know, you see this with Agile, like a scaled Agile framework, they wanna brand and lock it down so that it can be resold over and over and over again. And which automatically there puts it back into the justification side, because it has to justify it, you know, why it can’t change is because this is the only and best way to do these things.
[01:17:40] Blue: Just recently got certified in scale Agile, by the way, cameo, and I agree with you.
[01:17:47] Green: I’d love to have a separate conversation about that. I have a lot of thoughts.
[01:17:55] Red: But by the way, yeah, Agile is an interesting example, because if you see the evolution from waterfall to Agile, that basically, again, yeah, my personal impression, but that’s very popperian. It’s just making errors faster and learning faster from errors because you’re doing things, no?
[01:18:13] Blue: It is, that’s absolutely true. And I think that was the thing I really wanted to say in cameo when she was making her point, and it’s really agreeing with her though, is we don’t really have to bring up Karl Popper, right? I mean, that’s, if you really want to get into it and you’re really trying to understand it, he’s got a lot of clear thinking around it. Doge added to that clear thinking around it. But what we’re really talking about is the importance of evolutionary processes to knowledge creation and the value, the fact that knowledge creation is what you’re really after, right?
[01:18:43] Green: Those
[01:18:44] Blue: are simple ideas right there. If we could even just introduce, even if you never mentioned Karl Popper, if we could just introduce those two simple ideas and say, you know what, those two ideas are why Agile is the best methodology that we currently know about and waterfall was a failure by comparison, you know? And we could start to learn, they’re starting to have agile processes for business instead of just software. And that’s becoming increasingly popular because Agile embodied knowledge creation into it in a way that waterfall didn’t even come close, right? And there’s a lot of places where we could really start looking at that. Just some really simple versions of these ideas even would be really powerful. I’ve always wanted to apply it more to, you know, our political system and a lot of the problems that we currently have in politics and how to improve and take care and solve those problems. I think we could, if we could look hard at, maybe some of the places in our government where it’s very hard to create new knowledge.
[01:19:58] Green: Yeah, but you know, businesses have a tendency to be regularly and fairly broken, but politics is completely broken. Like that’s a windmill you just can’t even try and point at. It would do that.
[01:20:15] Red: I agree, Camille, that’s really also the basis for my choice to do this in companies, but because in companies, you can minimally organize at least for something different.
[01:20:27] Green: Yeah.
[01:20:28] Red: In politics, it’s chaos at that point. Right, right.
[01:20:31] Green: In business, you can actually make improvements and make change and bring insights and make environments where people can be and grow and be successful and be happy. And I just don’t believe that’s true in politics.
[01:20:44] Blue: So let me tell you why that is. So if you look at the market and some businesses, they have two choices, right? The capitalistic system will always be about knowledge creation and will always be evolutionary and there will always be improvements because of that. But there’s two ways that can happen. One would be that a company internally creates knowledge and improves. And the other is that the company goes out of business and the competitor takes over. That’s giving them a better job, right? And if you look at the capitalistic system as a whole, the reason why it’s better than the political system, this is a totally different discussion, is because a company that isn’t doing a good job can go out of business. All my libertarian friends that I’m always arguing with, that’s one of the points they always make to me and they’re completely right about that, right? They’re spot on right about this. They actually, libertarians get a lot, a lot of things, right? Whereas with a political system, that does happen in a political system. Political systems get overthrown and new ones replace them. But you don’t want that. That’s a much more, I mean, it’s a big problem if a company goes out of business and a bunch of jobs get lost. It’s a much, much bigger problem if a government goes out of business and.
[01:22:00] Green: Well, there tends to be more bloodletting when governments go out of business and then when.
[01:22:05] Blue: Yes, potentially. And that would be what they would argue against, but anyhow, I agree. And so I think that you end up with, that’s why really, if you really look at the political system, it really does work, right? I mean, it’s so hard to see sometimes just how well it actually does work over the long run. But by comparison to business, business seems a lot nimbler because they’re dying and being reborn on a far more, on a
[01:22:38] Green: much higher basis. Yeah, right.
[01:22:40] Blue: So of course they’re outpacing governments and political systems, right? And, but the fact that our political system does shift and change over time and that it’s built in to do that is why the American system is so much better than, you know, the old monarchies or something like that of Britain, or I don’t know, right? And Britain’s actually about example because they started merging with democracy in a long time ago, but France or whatever before the French Revolution. And so everything is always messed up and then improving, right? There’s always problems, problems are inevitable and then we solve them and then there’s a new set of problems to deal with. That’s a David Deutsch thing that I’m kind of paraphrasing. But yeah, so, but it would be nice if we could understand that is the process and how do we speed that process along? How do we do that in a way that causes less data? Well, that’s what agile is, right? And we often forget that waterfall was actually an improvement, right? Waterfall actually was a step in the right direction compared to what was being done before, right? They were at least attempting to, you know, have more conversations up front and you think about like a requirements document and we always talk about how rigid that is, but that’s a lot less rigid than every man for themselves just building stuff and there’s no real attempt to have a phase where we talk ideas through first when it’s not very expensive to change them, right? Right,
[01:24:13] Green: right.
[01:24:13] Blue: So waterfall, strangers that may seem is actually a paparian process also. It’s just not as good as agile. Agile is this giant improvement over waterfall because the paparian side suddenly got way more emphasized and the ability to fail quickly got emphasized. And then you’re a big fan of design sprints where you’re now applying a similar sort of idea but at a much cheaper phase where you can fail. This whole idea of failing quickly, right? It’s, paparian processes are the opposite of, I mean, sometimes you’ll sometimes hear about this idea of, you know, I don’t want to overreach. And there’s cases where that would make sense, right? But really what you really want is you want an environment where you can just be overreaching all over the place and you can make mistakes, you can learn from it. And so you’re trying to figure out how to make that as safe as possible. And Agile was our giant step in the right direction for doing that.
[01:25:11] Green: So that’s, you know, that’s interesting, Bruce. The other day on LinkedIn, I posted something about how, you know, under promise and over deliver is like the laziest kind of, it’s not the way fast moving teams work, right? An actual healthy fast moving team is over promising all the time, working like hell to pull it off and then being supported when they don’t so that they’re willing to try it again, right? That is, and I got so much, like you obviously don’t live in the real world, you don’t live in a world where, and you know what my response was? Like when JFK got up and said, we will put a man on the moon by 1969, like that was totally undoable by any measures of science at that point that it was not something we could do. He didn’t promise an achievable thing. It’s why we call doing the crazy thing, a moonshot, but that’s the most healthy business environment we could ever give to teams.
[01:26:09] Unknown: Is that right there?
[01:26:10] Green: I totally agree.
[01:26:11] Blue: The best business environment, the best college creation environment is where you’re over promising all the time and it’s not that big a deal if they don’t make it because they’re getting the most out.
[01:26:24] Green: Right. And you know, as a consultant, like it’s especially where people in the consulting circles that were like, well, that’s a great way to fail your company, but it also would mean you’d have to like Bart’s doing, educate people about what makes healthy and growth environments. And part of that is this culture of making failure safe.
[01:26:50] Blue: Yeah. To the point of the people who are arguing with you, because I totally agree with you. I know. You can obviously put yourself out of business if the environment just isn’t ready for that idea, right? And so you have to then solve the problem of great knowledge around how do I educate my clients? For that matter, and I think this is an underrated thing that’s really important, how do I get the right clients so that I’ve got the clients that are going to allow me to be successful? And I actually think we underestimate the degree to which that is important in business, is to get rid of the clients that aren’t going to make you successful and who, particularly in consulting, I’m thinking of. If you really look at like the software consulting business, everyone I’ve been in, there’s not a lot of repeat business with most customers, but you make a ton of money on the ones that you were highly successful with and you keep getting repeat business with. You don’t need every single one to be successful, you only need a handful to be successful, to build the alliances, gain knowledge about their systems, things like that. So to some degree, there’s a natural survival process. You have customers come in, they’re not going to be willing to allow for over -promising and under -delivering, even if that is what’s in their best interest. And in the end, that project with that customer may not be successful because of their attitude and there may be not much you can do about it. Maybe you could move to under -promising and over -delivering and see if you can make them happy, I don’t know.
[01:28:30] Blue: Maybe there’s a place for that, but it sure isn’t the best work environment and it’s not the way they’re going to be the most happy or successful in the long run.
[01:28:38] Green: Well, and bringing this back to this thing that triggered Bart about him being the only one who’s using Popper’s epistemology, the truth is, is there’s still not that many business people who necessarily feel comfortable with the concepts that are Popper’s epistemology, even if you take Popper out of it.
[01:29:02] Blue: Yeah.
[01:29:03] Green: And it’s coming back to that MBA thing. If you’ve got MBAs that say, here’s this very specific set of things that make success. And a lot of what’s in Popper’s epistemology and even what Bart’s doing here is revolutionary because it challenges that status quo of business. And I think if you’re trying to find customers, I wonder, Bart, do you struggle finding people who are open to these concepts from a business perspective?
[01:29:32] Red: Oh, it is, yeah, it’s a good question. It’s not easy. I mean, it shifts their mindset, the first discussions typically. We don’t, yeah, even from the first discussions, prospect discussions, for example, I mean, we don’t bring the usual methodologies, the usual approaches. So already in the beginning, but obviously also we don’t bring it black and white, we don’t put it extreme, so we don’t try to offend people. But it regularly, it takes, I mean, it takes five, six discussions before we start somewhere, let’s say, because we need five or six good discussions in order to advance into, for them, often a new territory.
[01:30:22] Green: Yeah, you’re educating, right?
[01:30:24] Red: Yeah, and I’m doing this already for, what is it now? Seven years, so I’ve learned to appreciate where a company stands at any moment in time and how the company can gradually and evolutionary adopt these things, as opposed to revolutionary or presenting it as really black and white kind of options. But it is different. It is, I mean, the very notion of being allowed to make mistakes and having the freedom to correct your mistakes. That is already very counterintuitive to some managers. And I must say over the years, I don’t know why, I may have some hypothesis, but I’m more successful with female managers than with male managers, I must say. Because I think that typically a male manager still has a little bit more this idea of, I need to have all the answers to all the problems for everyone at every moment in time. And with women, it’s different. They’re more open to, let’s send the question or a problem into the organization, as opposed to my answer. Interesting, so we are…
[01:31:50] Green: That doesn’t surprise me, by the way.
[01:31:54] Blue: We’re kind of out of time, but I would actually really like to hear your opinion more on that. I mean, there’s kind of an obvious thing that we tend to associate male personalities more with the top -down control type of authoritarian approach and women more with the collaborative. I don’t know if that’s even true. That may even just be a stereotype, but I would be really
[01:32:15] Red: interested
[01:32:18] Blue: in your opinion on why BART is seeing that. And that’s a really interesting thing I hadn’t thought of before that when female managers may be better positioned to accept a lot of these correct ideas about knowledge creation.
[01:32:35] Green: So… I don’t necessarily want to say that this is a… We’re out of time. We can’t start this conversation right now. That’s another 35 minutes of conversation right there.
[01:32:49] Blue: We’ll pick it up next time.
[01:32:51] Red: We’re gradually moving to more and more interesting problems. That’s popular.
[01:32:55] Blue: The other thing I want to pick up next time, Camille and I talk all the time about project manager because I’m a project manager and how I feel like a lot of the standard project management mindset is wrong. The standard PMP that everybody wants a project manager to have to be certified in that there are cases where that’s really great knowledge. So I’m not trying to completely downplay the knowledge, but there are probably more cases where it’s literally harmful. Building a bridge versus software, ideal in the software space. I just have a really hard time believing the PMP approach is the right approach and that it’s gonna be anything but harmful. And so that’s another thing I want to discuss related to this next time. Bart may not be familiar with PMP because that may be an American thing, but project… He’s probably familiar
[01:33:53] Green: with prints though, which is fairly, you know, maybe a more rigorous version of the same thing.
[01:34:00] Blue: Yeah, prints is bad in its own way. Yeah, prints is different enough though that it’s a different set of problems.
[01:34:11] Green: Well, and my only point on comparing PMP to prints is that they are both rigorous project management standards.
[01:34:22] Blue: Yeah. My prints instructor got certified. My favorite quote was, there’s nothing incompatible between prints and agile. That was what he said.
[01:34:33] Green: Oh, really?
[01:34:34] Blue: Yeah, and totally not true, but anyhow. All right, we better wrap this up. And I think… Bart, when
[01:34:42] Green: you agreed to come talk for one episode, did you think it would all of a sudden become like this regular thing you were doing? Yeah,
[01:34:52] Red: I think it’s interesting because, as I said, I mean, we gradually move on to better and more and more interesting discussions and problems. So this is a good signal. This is very Popperian.
[01:35:05] Blue: This is very Popperian. All right, so thank you, guys.
[01:35:10] Red: You would have liked it like this.
[01:35:14] Blue: Thank you, guys, for this show. This has been a great discussion. Thank you. And Bart, we’re gonna have to have you back. So we will schedule another episode with you. All right, thanks a lot, guys.
[01:35:29] Green: Great. Have a great week.
[01:35:30] Red: Bye -bye.
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