Sociology matters more than technology or even money. It’s supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn’t, then there’s nothing else worth concentrating on.

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. But there’s no need to act alone. When something is terribly out of kilter (like too much noise in the workplace), it takes very little to raise people’s consciousness of it. Then it’s no longer just you. It’s everyone.

The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose. Such a manager knows that he or she really can’t give direction to these natural free electrons. They have progressed to the point where their own direction is more unerringly in the best interest of the organization than any direction that might come down from above. It’s time to get out of their way.

But much of this fine individualism evaporates in the workplace. There, we accept the wisdom that virtually everyone needs a firm direction, handed down from above.

In extreme cases, the charter is a blank check; if your corporation is fortunate enough to have a self-motivated super-achiever on board, it’s enough to say, “Define your own job.” Our colleague Steve McMenamin characterizes these workers as “free electrons,” since they have a strong role in choosing their own orbits.

Not only are the entrepreneurs inclined to be uppity, they are a terrible example to your employees. They’ve got more freedom, more time off, more choice of work. They’re having more fun. They often make more money.

As facilitator, try these ploys to restart participants’ thinking when the idea flow slows down:

• Analogy thinking (How does nature solve this or some similar problem?)

• Inversion (How might we achieve the opposite of our goal?)

• Immersion (How might you project yourself into the problem?)

Discourage negative comments, like “That’s a dumb idea,” since dumb ideas often lead others to think of smart ideas.

As facilitator, you want to impress on everyone to strive for quantity of ideas, not quality, and to keep the proceedings loose, even silly.

Running the project through a whole night, for some reason, adds to the fun. People love an excuse to get tired together, to push back sleep and let their peers see them with their hair down, unshaved, rumpled, and grumpy, with no makeup or pretense. And it makes them feel more closely bound to each other:

What present-day standardization has achieved is a documentary consistency among products, but nothing approaching meaningful functional consistency.

In any event, progress toward more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The thoughtful manager doesn’t want to stop the trend, but may nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder.

What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity. We have to be careful to conserve it and keep the greedy few from hogging more than their share.

If you’re a manager, this vestigial memory requires you to make sure that your people never have any fun on the job. Any evidence of pleasure or joy in the workplace is a sure sign that some manager is not doing the job properly. Work is not being extracted with maximum efficiency from the workers; otherwise, they wouldn’t be having such a good time.

When the sense of community is strong enough, no one wants to leave. The investment made in human capital is thus retained, and upper management finds itself willing to invest more.

You may be quite sure that you want no part of office politics of the sleazy kind, but Aristotelian Politics is something else entirely. Aristotelian Politics is the key practice of good management. Refusing to be political in the Aristotelian sense is disastrous; it is an abnegation of the manager’s real responsibility.

Winchester was a place where everyone knew everyone, where people stayed put from generation to generation, where a lost dog or a troubled child was everybody’s concern, and where you looked out for your neighbors when calamity happened.

[...] the most natural learning center for most organizations is at the level of that much-maligned institution, middle management.

Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.

When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can’t take place at all.

[...] high-tech organizations may accumulate experience at an astonishing rate, but there is no guarantee that their learning will keep track.

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay.

The transforming idea is something that people in Chaos can grab onto as offering hope that the end of the suffering is near.

When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is Chaos.

According to Satir’s model, change happens upon the introduction of a foreign element: a catalyst for change. Without a catalyst, there is no recognition of the desirability of change.

You can never improve if you can’t change at all.

William Bridges, in Managing Transitions, suggests that we never demean our old ways. Instead, we need to celebrate the old as a way to help change happen.

Johnson asserts that the Believers But Questioners are the only meaningful potential allies of any change. The two extremes, Blindly Loyal and Militantly Opposed, are the real enemies.

MANTRA: The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.

Start by stating in explicit terms that corporate spam is unwelcome. One of our clients even built an e-mail filter that rejected—with a polite advisory—e-mail that had his address only in the CC line or that had too many total recipients.

An effective repeal—establishing that only explicit consent gives consent—could save your organization person-centuries of wasted time.

One of the reasons that organizations are bogged down with everybody plowing through endless numbers of endless e-mails is that there is an unwritten rule at work. The rule is,

Silence gives consent.

Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you’re not going to get much done.

It’s nice if people allow you to pull information from them about what they’re doing, but less nice if they push it on you. Less nice still if what they seem to want to push onto you is everything.

All of these are signs of organizational dysfunction. If people don’t dare send anything out without copying you, that may be a sign of personal dysfunction.

Imagine going through today’s e-mail onslaught, asking about each and every arriving message, “Do I need to know this?” How many messages would pass the test? The ones that don’t are a kind of internal taxation, using up your time and the time of others. No wonder so many of us are forever wondering why we go through whole days without actually getting any work done.

[...] they haven’t really solved the spam problem because most of the spam in your In-box comes from co-workers.

A decent coach understands that his or her job is not to coordinate interaction, but to help people learn to self-coordinate. We think that’s the job of a knowledge-work manager as well. If you buy that idea, most coordinating e-mail is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

[...] self-coordination and mutual coordination among peers is the hallmark of graceful teamwork.

We’ve become so used to tons of coordinating e-mail that we now take it for granted. Time to ask the key question: Can this be good?

The human capital invested in your workforce also represents a ton of money. If your company employs a few thousand knowledge workers, it could easily have enough invested in them to be the equivalent of a modern wide-body aircraft. Wasting the time of that huge investment is money poured down the drain.

If you were standing beside this person with a stopwatch, you would probably have noted no wasted time at all. The waste is concealed in the slow restart of his or her design work, the direct result of interrupted flow.

It is a sad comment on the prevailing culture in development organizations that, in spite of all the talk about “lean and mean,” it is politically unsafe for a manager to run a project leanly staffed through the key analysis and design activities.

The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair.

When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain conclusions. When, instead, the participants take turns interacting with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the whole group is missing; the boss might just as well have interacted separately with each of the subordinates without obliging the others to listen in.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time. It sounds like this should be an easy sin to avoid, but it isn’t.

Your goal should be to eliminate most ceremonial meetings and spend the time in one-on-one conversation, to limit attendance at working meetings and apply the “What ends this meeting?” test to each one.

It’s the regular ceremony that needs to be suspect. An example of a regular ceremony is the weekly (or daily!) status meeting, with ten or twenty people locked in a room taking turns talking to the boss.

There is occasionally a real need for ceremony in the workplace. A ceremony might be called to celebrate some accomplishment, to lay out a strategic change of direction, or to evaluate a project at its end. All of these justifiable ceremonies are a bit out of the ordinary. That’s what makes them justifiable.

The ceremony is a series of conversations, and conversations are a good thing. What’s not such a good thing is all the non-listeners locked in the room while the conversations take place.

If they have their laptops open, their focus is somewhere else.

A meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony. Its purpose is not to get any particular thing decided. It’s all FYI.

Working meetings have a charming characteristic. You know when they’re done. When the decision has been reached, there is no further need to meet. Before it’s been reached, the meeting is not yet complete.

Even short stand-ups can be a drag on an organization’s effectiveness if they lack purpose and focus.

Here’s the rub: The technology that is so evident at meetings today does not facilitate the meeting at all; it merely provides an escape for people from the pointlessness of what’s happening around them. What the technology enhances is the dreadfulness of meetings. Our meetings are worse today than they were a generation ago, because a generation ago people wouldn’t have been able to bear them—they would have revolted.

While everyone deplores the time used up by these meetings, lots of managers excuse them as an unfortunate necessity: necessary because of the monumental complexity of what the organization is trying to do. The notion of monumental complexity, of course, confers status on everyone, so once it has been advanced as justification for the meetings, nobody is very inclined to offer the alternate possibility: competitive windbagging.

As the number of vested parties to any action increases, meeting population goes up. Additionally, meetings give visibility, an essential factor to anyone who hopes to rise in big-company hierarchy. You don’t get noticed by listening thoughtfully, so anyone who’s there for visibility is likely to be a talker. The worst meetings feel like congregations of windbags with nobody listening and everybody speaking or waiting to speak. Because there are so many who need to speak, meeting duration increases seemingly without bound.

As organizations age, meeting time increases until—in the final stages—there is time for nothing else.

It’s no surprise that cheap delivery to hide lousy benefit is not a great motivator, so executives in this position might find themselves saying, “This work is so important that we must have it done by January first.” What they really mean is, “This work is so unimportant that we don’t want to fund it beyond January first.”

[...] in many cases what they’re trying to accomplish is not to goad the team into excellence, but to get team members to finish the project on the cheap.

If the manager and his or her team aren’t going to do risk management, someone else has to. The best project manager in this situation is the one who can say, “Look, we’re willing to take on this challenge, this scary delivery date, and we’ll do our best to meet it. We’ll have no time to manage the risk that we won’t make it in spite of our best efforts, but somebody better manage that risk. Unless we see that specific plans are being made for the eventuality of our late delivery, we’re not going to be able to think of this as a challenge; it’s more of a stupid, desperation crapshoot.”

Can-do thinking often replaces risk management when the outcome has been defined as a challenge.

It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just too awful to think about.”

[...] it’s worth saying that project risk is a good thing, a likely indicator of value.

Let a hundred flowers blossom and
let a hundred schools of thought contend.

What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new.

You can’t really declare something a standard until it has already become a de facto standard.

Better ways to achieve convergence of method are

Training: People do what they know how to do. If you give them all a common core of methods, they will tend to use those methods.

Tools: A few automated aids for modeling, design, implementation, and test will get you more convergence of method than all the statutes you can pass.

Peer Review: In organizations where there are active peer-review mechanisms (quality circles, walkthroughs, inspections, technology fairs), there is a natural tendency toward convergence.

In Australia, where striking uses up nearly as much labor time as working, there is a charming form of strike called work to rule. Rather than walk off the job, workers open up a fat book of procedures and announce, “Until you give us what we’re asking for, we’re going to work exactly to the rule.” When the air-traffic controllers do this, for instance, they can only land one plane every seven minutes. If doctors were to do it, an appendectomy would take a week. Introduction of a Methodology opens up the possibility of work-to-rule actions in still more parts of the economy. People might actually do exactly what the Methodology says, and the work would grind nearly to a halt.

Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s not at all unusual for a Methodology to use up a linear foot or more of shelf space. Worse, they encourage people to build documents rather than do work. The documentary obsession of such Methodologies seems to have resulted from paranoid defensive thinking along these lines: “The last project generated a ton of paper and it was still a disaster, so this project will have to generate two tons.”

Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking. All meaningful decisions are made by the Methodology builders, not by the staff assigned to do the work.

There is a big difference between Methodology and methodology. Small m methodology is a basic approach one takes to getting a job done. It doesn’t reside in a fat book, but rather inside the heads of the people carrying out the work. Such a methodology consists of two parts: a tailored plan (specific to the work at hand) and a body of skills necessary to effect the plan. One could hardly be opposed to methodology: The work couldn’t even begin without it.

Like any other system, a team of human workers will lose its self-healing properties to the extent it becomes deterministic. The result can be workers proceeding in directions that make no sense to them at all, a sure sign that they can’t be doing any good.

Whatever the heterogeneous element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team members. It is a clear signal that it’s okay not to be a clone, okay not to fit into the corporate mold of Uniform Plastic Person.

This may offend your sensibilities as a manager, but managers are usually not part of the teams that they manage.

Whatever the elite characteristic is, it forms the basis of the team’s identity, and identity is an essential ingredient of a jelled team.

It may be news to some, but the human creature needs reassurance from time to time that he or she is headed in the right direction.

When team members develop a cult of quality, they always turn out something that’s better than what their market is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from short-term economics. In the long run, this always pays off. People get high on quality and outdo themselves to protect it.

The judgment that a still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell for a jelling team.

Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization:

• Make a cult of quality.

• Provide lots of satisfying closure.

• Build a sense of eliteness.

• Allow and encourage heterogeneity.

• Preserve and protect successful teams.

• Provide strategic but not tactical direction.

In organizations with the best chemistry, managers devote their energy to building and maintaining healthy chemistry.

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.

The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed.”

The common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together.

[...] what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

Here are some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:

• Annual salary or merit reviews

• Management by objectives (MBO)

• Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment

• Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance

• Performance measurement in almost any form

We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others.

When you observe a well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time.

[...] we don’t work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn’t get done on time.

When you take into account the way that the team members’ differing abilities to work overtime tends to destroy teams, the case against it becomes persuasive.

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway.

It has been our experience that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exaggerated, and that its negative impact is almost never considered.

Most organizations don’t set out consciously to kill teams. They just act that way.

What’s never going to help, however, is a phony deadline. When the manager intones, “We absolutely must be done by _____,” group members can barely keep their eyes from rolling. They’ve been there before. They know the whole routine.

The typical steps we take to deliver a product in less time result in lower quality.

No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions of the jelled team are exclusive.

Neighboring workers are a source of noise and disruption. When they’re all on the same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time, so there is less interruption of flow. Putting them together also gives them opportunity for the casual interaction that is so necessary for team formation.

Just telling your people that the goal matters won’t be enough if you also have to tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper.

The right to be right (in your manager’s eyes or in your government’s eyes) is irrelevant; it’s only the right to be wrong that makes you free.

The only freedom that has any meaning is the freedom to proceed differently from the way your manager would have proceeded.

But once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them.

When you’re stuck trying to solve a problem, deBono suggests that rather than looking for ways to achieve your goal, look for ways to achieve the exact opposite of your goal. This can have the effect of clearing away the brain’s cobwebs that keep you from being creative.

Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity. The greater the insecurity, the more frightening the idea of a clique can be.

When the team is fulfilling its purpose, team members are more effective because they’re more directed.

Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people—corporations seem arbitrary to people—but the arbitrariness of goals doesn’t mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did, we wouldn’t have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary. The Universe doesn’t care whether the little white ball goes between the posts at Argentina’s end of the field or those at Italy’s. But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to.

Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each manager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. Only at the bottom, where the real work is performed, does this ingenuity fail. There we count on “professionalism” and nothing else to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction. Lots of luck.

Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naïve managerial optimism. The mechanism by which individuals involve themselves in the organization’s objectives is more complex than that.

Teams by their very nature are formed around goals.

Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matters most.

Companies go through periods in which middle and upper managers vie to outdo each other in thinking up ways to improve near-term performance (quarterly earnings) by sacrificing the longer term. This is usually called “bottom-line consciousness,” but we prefer to give it another name: “eating the seed corn.”

This human capital can be substantial; thinking about it erroneously as sunk expense may lead managers toward actions that fail to preserve the value of an organization’s investment.

An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the month, the money is gone and so is the heat (or whatever the expense was for). An investment, on the other hand, is use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are capitalizing the expenditure.

A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining.

[...] in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that’s a long-term concept.

The best organizations are not of a kind; they are more notable for their dissimilarities than for their likenesses. But one thing that they all share is a preoccupation with being the best. It is a constant topic in the corridors, in working meetings, and in bull sessions. The converse of this effect is equally true: In organizations that are not “the best,” the topic is rarely or never discussed.

We avoid measuring turnover for the same reason that heavy smokers avoid having long serious talks with their doctors about longevity: It’s a lot of bother that can only result in bad news.

Think of imperfect attention at meetings to be more about a dysfunctional meeting culture than about anyone’s work ethic.

In the most-simplistic terms, the new generational divide in your organization is about attention: Young people divide theirs while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at a time.

Disney Fellow Alan Kay defines technology as whatever is around you today but was not there when you were growing up. He further observes that what was already around you when you were growing up has a name: It’s called environment. One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction epic Childhood’s End, the tension derives from a new generation of humans that are not just quantitatively, but qualitatively different from their parents. The significance of the title is that the arrival of this generation marks childhood’s end for the human species. Evolution has played a nasty trick on the parents, making them suddenly the new Neanderthals, while their children become homo superbus.

Young people arriving in the workplace today are not quite that different, but there are some generational differences that need to be understood and accommodated.

Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can’t be changing.

Just as we relish the different foods diverse members may bring to the table, so too we need to relish the different ways they tend to work and think and communicate.

One of the teams I work with started a “Bring in an Ethnic Dish for Lunch” event once a month, and it was such a hit that it soon became twice a month. Each dish was something a bit exotic, prepared by team members with different backgrounds.

It soon became clear that the audition process served to accelerate the socialization process between a new hire and the existing staff members. A successful audition was a kind of certification as a peer. The reverse seemed to hold true as well. Failed auditions were a morale booster for the staff. They were continuing proof that being hired for the group was more than just the dumb luck of when résumés happened to hit my desk.

The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

Yet when you set out to hire an engineer or a designer or a programmer or a group manager, the rules of common sense are often suspended. You don’t ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the interview is just talk.

leadership as a service almost always operates without official permission.

• Nobody is given any time to innovate, since everyone is 100-percent busy.

• Most innovation that happens anyway is distinctly unwelcome because it requires accommodating change.

• Real innovation is likely to spread beyond the realm of the innovator, and so he or she may be suspected of managing the organization from below, a tendency that upper management tends to view with great suspicion.

• Step up to the task.

• Be evidently fit for the task.

• Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time.

• Maximize value to everyone.

• Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill.

While they sometimes set explicit directions, their main role is that of a catalyst, not a director.

In this example, leadership is not about extracting anything from us; it’s about service.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unprofessional.

Uniformity is so important to insecure authoritarian regimes (parochial schools and armies, for example) that they even impose dress codes.

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management.

Evolution has planted in each of us a certain uneasiness toward people who differ by very much from the norm.

Parents do have a shaping effect on their children over the years, and individuals can obviously bring about huge changes in themselves. But managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way.

In our egalitarian times, it’s almost unthinkable to write someone off as intrinsically incompetent. There is supposed to be inherent worth in every human being.

C. S. Forester’s series of novels on the Napoleonic Wars follows the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, an officer in England’s Royal Navy. On one level, these are pure adventure stories set in a well-researched historical framework. On another level, the Hornblower books can be read as an elaborate management analogy.

• Get the right people.

• Make them happy so they don’t want to leave.

• Turn them loose.

Work conducted in ad hoc space has got more energy and a higher success rate.

You don’t have to solve the space problem for the whole institution. If you can solve it just for your own people, you’re way ahead. And if your group is more productive and has lower turnover, that just proves you’re a better manager.

If you can pick up a lease on a run-down fraternity house or garden apartment that would make cheap, idiosyncratic, fascinating quarters for your people, well then, so what that they will be housed differently from everyone else in the company? If it’s okay with them, who cares?

A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours and Alexander’s) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas.

Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each [working group] a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every workplace so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines or bags) becomes an important, comfortable and daily event. . . . In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event: a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into.

—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

Whatever work could be done outdoors was done outdoors.

People who wouldn’t think of living in a home without windows end up spending most of their daylight time in windowless work space. Alexander has very little patience with windowless space: “Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.”

Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space. Each individual needs protected private space.

[...] extract from Pattern 183, Workspace Enclosure:

People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance. . . . You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you. . . . There should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front of you. (As you work, you want to occasionally look up and rest your eyes by focusing them on something farther away than the desk. If there is a blank wall closer than eight feet your eyes will not change focus and they get no relief. In this case you feel too enclosed.) . . . You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind you make, from your workplace. Your workplace should be sufficiently enclosed to cut out noises which are a different kind from the ones you make. There is some evidence that one can concentrate on a task better if people around him are doing the same thing, not something else. . . . Workspaces should allow you to face in different directions.

—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

This natural or organic order emerges when there is perfect balance between the needs of the individual parts of the environment, and the needs of the whole.

There is one timeless way of building.

It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been.

The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.

—Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space.

Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say “Ahah!” and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work.

Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.

You can save even more money by ignoring the problem altogether so that people have to resort to iPods and headphones to protect themselves from the noise.

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you.

As people begin to realize that they aren’t alone in their feelings, environmental awareness increases.

We need to learn from them, learn to fight fire with fire. So, the first step toward a sane environment is a program of repeated assertion. If you believe that the environment is working against you, you’ve got to start saying so.

When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs. The most obvious symbol of failure is the paging system.

The most obvious symbol of success is the door.

That’s the character of knowledge workers’ work: The quality of their time is important, not just its quantity.

Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration.

The big difference between a phone call and an electronic mail message is that the phone call interrupts and the e-mail does not; the receiver deals with it at his or her own convenience.

Do you often interrupt a discussion with co-workers or friends to answer a phone? Of course you do. You don’t even consider not answering the phone. Yet what you’re doing is a violation of the common rules of fairness, taking people out of order, just because they insist loudly (BBRRRRIINNNGGGG!) on your attention.

When the day is over and you’re wondering where the time went, you can seldom even remember who called you or why. Even if some of the calls were important, they may not have been worth interrupting your flow.

In most of the office space we encounter today, there is enough noise and interruption to make any serious thinking virtually impossible.

Peer pressure makes it hard for most of us to show that interruptions aren’t welcome, even for a part of the day.

E-Factor = Uninterrupted Hours/Body-Present Hours

If a product is projected to require three thousand flow hours to complete, then you’ve got a valid reason to believe you’re two-thirds done when two thousand flow hours have been logged against it. That kind of analysis would be foolish and dangerous with body-present hours.

If you’re a manager, you may be relatively unsympathetic to the frustrations of being in no-flow. After all, you do most of your own work in interrupt mode—that’s management—but the people who work for you need to get into flow.

The worker who tries and tries to get into flow and is interrupted each time is not a happy person. He gets tantalizingly close to involvement only to be bounced back into awareness of his surroundings. Instead of the deep mindfulness that he craves, he is continually channeled into the promiscuous changing of direction that the modern office tries to force upon him.

Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks. It’s only when you’re in flow that the work goes well.

During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement.

The rest of the time is dedicated to subsidiary activities, rest, and chatter.

Though they represent a minority at any given time, it’s a mistake to ignore them, for it is during their solitary work periods that people actually do the work.

Gilb’s Law:

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

Measurement of intellect-worker productivity suffers from a reputation of being a soft science.

An intermezzo is a fanciful digression inserted between the pages of an otherwise serious work (oh, well, fairly serious work).

People are hiding out to get some work done. If this rings true to your organization, it’s an indictment. Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune.

When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back.

Note that we made no objective measurements of noise levels. We simply asked people whether they found the noise level acceptable or not. As a result, we cannot distinguish between those who worked in a genuinely quiet workplace and those who were well adapted to (not bothered by) a noisy workplace.

Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more likely to deliver zero-defect work.

People in the roles studied needed the space and quiet in order to perform optimally. Cost reduction to provide work space below the minimum would result in a loss of effectiveness that would more than offset the cost savings.

If you participate in or manage a team of people who need to use their brains during the workday, then the workplace environment is your business.

The top performers’ space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it.

[...] the effect that software pioneer Harlan Mills predicted in 1981:

While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.

It mattered a lot who your pair mate was. If you were paired with someone who did well, you did well, too. If your pair mate took forever to finish, so did you. If your pair mate didn’t finish the exercise at all, you probably didn’t either.

There was a very weak relationship between salary and performance.

There was no correlation between experience and performance except that those with less than six months’ experience with the language used in the exercise did not do as well as the rest of the sample

I asked what the number one problem was. “The environment,” he replied. “People were upset about the noise.” I asked what steps the company had taken to remedy that problem. “Oh, we couldn’t do anything about that,” he said. “That’s outside our control.”

The amazing thing is not that it’s so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does anything about it.

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.

As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it’s not worth improving anything but the workplace.

Almost without exception, the work space given to intellect workers is noisy, interruptive, un-private, and sterile.

[...] people work better in natural light. They feel better in windowed space and that feeling translates directly into higher quality of work.

If you wonder why almost everything is behind schedule, consider this:

There are a million ways to lose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.

Some days you never spend a productive minute on anything having to do with getting actual work done.

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

I asked her how she found time for such things with all the management work she had to do. She gave me her patented grin and said, “Tom, this is management.”

The typical project that’s stuck in the mythical backlog is there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building it, even with the most optimistic cost assumptions.

We all know that projects cost a lot more at the end than what we expected them to cost at the beginning.

Unless you’ve been asleep at the switch for the past few decades, change of a language won’t do much for you.

While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static.

The Seven False Hopes of Software Management

People who are desperate enough don’t look very hard at the evidence.

A slight variation on Parkinson’s Law produces something that is frighteningly true in many organizations:

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others (see Table 5–3).

Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (“Just wake me up when you’re done.”) had the highest productivity of all.

People just don’t work very effectively when they’re locked into a no-win situation.

Bad estimates, hopelessly tight estimates, sap the builders’ energy.

Moreover, systems analysts typically have more estimating experience; they are able to project the effort more accurately because they’ve done more of it in the past and have thus learned their lessons.

[...] if you believe as we do that bad estimates are always a demotivating factor, then this data doesn’t need explaining away at all. The systems analyst tends to be a better estimator than either the programmer or the supervisor. He or she typically knows the work in as much detail, but is not hampered by the natural optimism of the person who’s actually going to do the job or the political and budgetary biases of the boss.

Treating your people as Parkinsonian workers doesn’t work. It can only demean and demotivate them.

Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people.

Their lives are just too short to allow too much loafing on the job. Since they enjoy their work, they are disinclined to let it drag on forever—that would just delay the satisfaction they all hanker for.

Parkinson’s Law is a long way from being axiomatic. It’s not a law in the same sense that Newton’s law is a law.

In some Japanese companies, notably Hitachi Software and parts of Fujitsu, the project team has an effective power of veto over delivery of what they believe to be a not-yet-ready product. No matter that the client would be willing to accept even a substandard product, the team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are achieved.

Philip Crosby presented this same concept in his book Quality Is Free, published in 1979. In this work, Crosby gave numerous examples and a sound rationale for the idea that letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality.

[...] read the words of Tajima and Matsubara, two of the most respected commentators on the Japanese phenomenon:

The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.

How is it possible that higher quality coexists with higher productivity? That flies in the face of the common wisdom that adding quality to a product means you pay more to build it.

Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

In the long run, market-based quality costs more.

Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence.

By regularly putting the development process under extreme time pressure and then accepting poor-quality products, the software user community has shown its true quality standard.

“But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality.” Read those words and weep, because they are almost always true.

The builders’ view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own.

Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality.

Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence.

Whenever strong emotions are aroused, it’s an indication that one of the brain’s instinctive values has been threatened.

In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and of their own work experience.

People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost.

The realization that one has sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) is devastating.

Workaholics will put in uncompensated overtime. They’ll work extravagant hours, though perhaps with declining effectiveness.

Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you’re just wasting time.

Throughout the effort, there will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. The trade-off might work to your advantage for the short term, but for the long term it will cancel out.

That you can get what you want or you can just get old.

That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud—but it’s the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn’t going to stop just because a project completes a month late).

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay.

Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World.

The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs.

For all the talk about “working smarter,” there is a widespread sense that what real-world management is all about is getting people to work harder and longer, largely at the expense of their personal lives.

The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one. That fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in the field; for folks like us who write books, it is positively tragic.

We are so single-mindedly oriented toward Doing Something, Anything that we spend a scant 5 percent of our time on the combined activities of planning, investigating new methods, training, reading books, estimating, budgeting, scheduling, and allocating personnel.

We spent far too much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough time asking the key question, “Ought this thing to be done at all?”

The uniqueness of every worker is a continued annoyance to the manager who has blindly adopted a management style from the production world. The natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.

Many development managers adopt the same attitude. They go to great lengths to convince themselves that no one is irreplaceable. Because they fear that a key person will leave, they force themselves to believe that there is no such thing as a key person.

You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.

The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and by making sure they understand that “none” is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated—that’s part of what they’re being paid for.

The “make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger” mentality can be fatal in your development area. It can only serve to damp your people’s spirits and focus their attention away from the real problems at hand.

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, “The light is better there.”

Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.

Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions.

We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. Because we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business.

The most strongly people-oriented aspects of their responsibility are often given the lowest priority.

The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.

[...] there is an inviolable industry standard that prohibits examining our failures.