Control Freak

This is a trap I often fall into and I’m always embarrassed when I do.

Sometimes someone presents a point of view to me and I listen but disagree.  Then later someone else says the same thing and I listen a bit more.  Finally a third person says it and I change my mind.  Terrible to admit it but what I’ve done in this situation is decide that I carry two votes and so it takes three people to out-vote me.  When really my decision making should have nothing to do with the number of people who tell me.

One important attribute that sets apart real leaders is their willingness to switch track when presented with the ‘right’ idea, no matter how much they have invested in the current track.  This is what makes an agile leader and in turn an agile organisation.

But for some managers, quite unknowingly, their ego is simply too big to change after a suggestion from just one person.  Or maybe they are just worried that they will be seen as flighty if they change quickly.  Whatever the reason, these are the people who need to validate the change by ensuring there is sufficient weight behind it.  There are even some managers who assign varying levels of votes to different people.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest that we should drop everything we are doing the moment someone shows us a better way.  Some things are like oil tankers and take a long time to turn around.  But what we should do is clearly acknowledge that our view has changed and, most critically, start to plan from the new viewpoint.

Hopefully I’ll learn to get better at spotting when I’m counting votes instead of listening to the arguments.

A brief observation, but one that took me a long time to spot.

There is an effect that I call “management amplification” that takes place when a manager talks to a member of staff about their work. This is irrespective of whether the manager is just explaining their concerns with their work or just asking questions. That effect is to amplify the words of the manager to make them sound much stronger than they intend.

There is nothing I can do to stop this amplification, but if I’m not aware of it then this can cause all sorts of problems. To give you some examples, if I say:

I’m a little disappointed by that

then management amplification makes it sound like:

That’s very poor and really could have been done so much better

and if I say:

That’s very poor and really could have been done so much better

then management amplification makes it sound like:

That’s absolutely terrible, I can’t believe you’ve messed it up so badly

and so on.

So what can I do about this – obvious really, I just always have to say things at one stop lower than I would have done otherwise. The one oddity is what to do when I want to say “I’m a little bit disappointed” but I don’t want the amplification. In that case I discuss it without showing my concerns and ask questions like “If you had to do it again would you do it the same way?”.

Now to be fair management amplification doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes people get to know their managers well enough that they either take them at face value or know how to translate what they say.  In some cases, especially where a manager is over the top in shouting criticism then some people just learn to switch off an ignore them.  However, even when ignored or understood this management amplification is still there, but not that many managers explicitly recognise it.

Some years ago now, I got an inkling that there might be a better way to deal with people wanting different jobs in the same team, avoiding job drift and which has everyone winning, not just staff or management. This way ends up with everyone doing the job they want to do and those people being the right people for those jobs.

How does this miracle happen?

The first thing is when I talk to people about they’re looking for, I have to get into the details of what they actually want to do, not what job they want. I’ve lost count of the number of times I ask someone why they want to be a manager and they reply that they want to do project management, but when pushed don’t actually want the rest of the work that comes with management. I’m then able to suggest they focus on a different role, one that actually gives them what they want.

Remember, no job drift under any circumstances. There must be a clear and transparent process as to how people get jobs:

• New or vacant jobs must be clearly defined and people can only do them once they are appointed
• Vacancies are advertised, people are interviewed and appointed. There are exceptions but I’ll cover those another time.
• The post that is vacated must then be filled and filled as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, here’s my best effort at describing a win-win plan:

• Keep in mind the goal of a win-win solution. That way more options come to mind than otherwise.
• Don’t have a preconception of what the end result will be like. Quite often it takes a lot of flexibility all round to get to the win-win and preconceptions prevent this.
• Think in terms of whole sets of jobs moves not just individual ones. If this person gets this job then this creates a vacancy here and so on. I keep these steps to myself, it is definitely not for sharing because if I do then it just comes across as either making a commitment or playing impersonal games with people’s lives.
• Avoid making any sort of promise and above all don’t let the job drift, for all the reasons detailed previously.
• Be open, honest and explain the various options and possibiliies. The more people understand about a situation the more they will accept it.
• Help people prepare for the interview for the new role. I explain to them what I am looking for, what skills I need them to have, and what qualities I want to see. This may sound like coaching someone for the role, but actually it is educating them to be in the right mindset. It gives them clues on what to learn and how to prepare themselves for the role, as much as it does for the interview.
• Finally, always remember to think about how a job that is currently being done is going to continue to be done. The last thing I want to do is create myself another problem without good reason.

Of course, there are any number of potential pitfalls with this that require special treatment:

Two or more people want the same job

This can’t always be dealt with, but it is possible. The most important tip is to discuss the job in real depth with those interested. The more people know the more likely they will self-select. At the very least, they turn around after failing to be appointed and comment on how they understand why they didn’t get it.

The second thing to consider is whether one job can be made into two – in some cases there is the scope and the budget can be made to fit.

The job someone wants doesn’t exist

I generally give this proper consideration. Often, It doesn’t really matter what the different roles are so long as all the work is covered by the right number of people. Yes there needs to be some internal consistency, so it is unlikely someone will be able to create exactly the role they want, but I might well be able to do part of it.

The person has an unrealistic view of what they are capable of

The number of times I’ve thought this and been completely wrong are too numerous to count. If they pass the interview test then they get the job. Anyway, that’s what the probationary period is for.

The gap between what someone knows and what the job requires is too wide

Simple, I just help them to learn what they are missing (or get someone else to do it). This might mean them reading books in the evening or even going on courses at their own expense, but then if they want the job they have to put some effort into it.

There are no vacancies

The main way to deal with this is patience. I have never worked in an organisation that has stayed still for more than a couple of years and so change will always come. When I get an inkling that this change is coming the first thing I think of is how to fit it into this plan.

In the end, I have to admit, this isn’t going to work for everyone, Some people are just in the wrong job, the right job is not going to come up for them here and they need to move on. But that should only happen when this process has been exhausted.

Whenever I take over a new team I try to find out exactly what the people in it want, how they want their job to work, what issues they have and then the fundamental issue of whether they really want to be doing something else. I nearly always find a few people who want to be doing a different job, though in the same team and are just waiting for the opportunity.

Of these, very few are people who want to be managers, which is what managers tend to assume that everyone else wants. Mostly it is someone who has tried a particular role, decided it is not for them and can see others doing a different role that they think they would be suited to.

Now, when I first came across this desire to do a different job, I have to admit it annoyed me. There were several reasons for this:

• I interpreted it as meaning that I had someone who was not going to be fully productive because their mind was elsewhere
• I didn’t want to be pressured to move someone into a role that they might not be the best person for, or even very good at
• Even if I could overcome that worry, I could rarely see the opportunity they wanted arising and so the situation seemed intractable

I’ve worked with plenty of managers who, when in the same situation, make unrealistic commitments to their staff about how their role can drift towards the one they want. Unfortunately, whilst well intentioned, this is generally a complete disaster. The manager will normally have tried to introduce it in a gentle way, limiting the introduction to prevent the current work being undermined. But all too often the person affected thinks they’ve been given license to just stop doing what they currently do and start doing something else.

This is one of the endemic snafus in the public sector, people doing a job they don’t want to do ending up doing something else and the work they should be doing not getting done.

Not only can job drift end up being a problem, but making a vague promise about things changing in the future can cause just as much chaos:

• For a start, as far as jobs are concerned, they are just too important for vague promises. People either hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they very rarely hear ‘maybe’.
• Making people promises about jobs may well not be in a manager’s power to do. They may need finance approval or their boss to sign it off.
• The manager may not get a chance to fulfil the promise in any reasonable timetable, or even at all, in which case the person concerned ends up feeling frustrated and possibly betrayed.
• Finally, and most importantly, the process of advertising a job and interviewing candidates is normaly too important to skip.

So, in contrast to either letting a job drift or making vague promises I used to try to sell those people the role they were already doing in the hope of persuading them to sit it out, whilst doing what I could to prevent job drift. Not a very popular decision.

I’ve since discovered a much better way to resolve this, where everyone wins, but more on that later.

Whilst there are plenty of people who mistakenly follow a technical religion, there are actually some very good technical reasons for minimising your use of Microsoft Windows. The main one of these is the horror of the Windows Registry.

At the heart of Windows lies a group of binary files that store almost all the configuration information for both the operation sytem itself and the installed applications, collectively called the Windows registry. Other operating systems have individual configuration files, sometimes binary and sometimes text.

The registry has lots of problems:

• It can’t be edited by hand with a text editor, a specialist tool is needed. I realise this applies to other configuration systems (like OSX plist) and I would make the same comment about them.
• Spurious entries and corruption in the registry can cause slowness and operational problems. It’s for this reason that a great market has grown up in registry cleaning software.
• Corruption is non-obvious to spot. This is caused partly by the binary format and partly by the cross-linking between various parts of the registry. This is another reason why registry cleaning software is needed.
• The configuration information for a particular application appears all over the place, not just one place in the registry, so you can’t easily see all the information you need at once.
• It is not easy to just swap between two configuration sets for an application without considerable hassle. With config files it is of course easy enough to just keep various copies and move them around as needed.
• De-installation of applications is a nightmare so normally only the installing application can do it since the bits can be all over the place. Of course if you don’t have the installing application, or it does not have a good de-installer then we need a registry cleaner, again.
• The registry is a single point of failure. If you lose one of these files (say the software one) then you lose all the configuration information for all applications.

Therefore, the impact of the registry compared to separate config files is:

• It takes a lot more time to get anything done.
• It takes much more effort to learn.
• The routes open to a sysadmin to test and debug are much more limited compared to other OSs.
• When it goes wrong, it take much longer to fix.
• It ends up costing a lot more money to support.
• Systems are less stable.

All very good reasons for just sticking with separate configuration files, as other operatings systems do, preferrably in text format.

This is one of the most difficult problems to deal with – when people get religion – in other words when people get extremely strong views on technology because that’s what the entrails of the chicken told them.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not equating strong views with a belief in voodoo, it is actually much more complicated than that.  There are plenty of people with strong views who have detailed reasoning for those views.  The issue is those views that are more religion than science.

For example, there are plenty of Windows avoiders out there.  But there is a real difference between those that avoid Windows because they see them as the evil empire and those that avoid them because they understand just what a disaster the Windows registry is.

So whenever I encounter any strong views I have to dig down to see if there is reasoning behind it to separate it from religion.  On the surface the distinction is not obvious.  Occasionally I find that the strong views are based on an intuitive understanding of the issues that can’t easily be put into words.  In these cases the process of digging down can sometimes lead to a switch from religion to science (a deconversion?).

The reason this bothers me so much is because I generally find that those for whom this is religion, can unpredictably change their views and worst of all, I don’t think they really understand technology.

At the same time I’m slightly concerned when I meet people who have been working in IT for several years and yet don’t have strong views.  We all come across so much rubbish that anyone who fails to be polarised by it is probably not paying attention.

For some years now I’ve viewed the practice of users storing data files in directories on local hard disks or even servers as completely anachronistic. In fact I think of it much the same way as I think of data held on a floppy disk – I know it’s there but getting at it is so hard it might as well not be.

To me, all this data is isolated in islands of information and needs to be rescued by being stored in a different way.

What I want is for all information to be:

• Searchable
• Categorised, with multiple categorisations
• Catalogued. In other words described in a table of contents
• Versioned
• Accessible by anywhere on the net in a controlled way

and that is not done by current operating systems. So, for that reason I think we need to see a shift towards all data being stored in specialist applications that provide these functions. Yes, I realise that desktop search has dealt with the searching issues, but it still doesn’t tackle my other points.

The product I prefer for this at the moment is Lotus Notes, but the moment something better comes along, I’ll switch. For example if there was an Internet based app that combined webdav, caldav, email, opendoc format files and so on then that might do it.

The final thing to note is that in any organistion the highly structured information is already stored in a specialist application, called a database. All I’m talking about is taking the same approach to loosely structured information, which is actually a first step in a knowledge managememt strategy.

I talked in an earlier post about people’s misconception of the management big stick, i.e. the ability to just instruct someone to do something rather than come to an agreement with them that they will do it. The misconception that I was highlighting was the belief of some people that wielding this big stick is what management is all about.

The truth is that the more I do this the more resented and thereby ineffectual I become. Only a little bit of respect is lost each time, but it soon adds up.

There are times when it can have the oppposite effect, but those are largely when I’m using the management override (to give it a more polite name) to impose a view that is almost a consensus, just one or two intransigent people are holding out.

So here are my tips on how to wield the management override:

Only ever do it when the situation absolutely requires it.

I have come across far too many managers who invoke the override at every point where they believe that people need directing to do something better than they currently are. In other words they think they know best and so they make people do it their way.

In many cases the manager will actually be right, their greater experience and awareness of the situation giving them the edge. But in these situations I ask myself the question – do I actually need to use the override or is there a better way to get what I want? In almost every case the answer is that I don’t need the override. Instead I can explain to the person concerned why I think there is a better solution and let them make their own mind up. Doing it this way means I have treated them with respect, like a fellow human being, not like a machine.

Another question I ask myself is – is this sufficiently important for me to want it changed? Surprisingly the answer I keep coming across is no, it isn’t. Again, there are some managers who have to fix everything they think is broken, no matter how important, who is doing it, or what the possible outcome, and they fix it by using the management override. I think that what they forget is that we are all learning and we all learn by making mistakes and getting it right the next time. If I stop someone from ever making a mistake then they might end up learning what I teach them, but they will never learn to learn for themselves.

This is one of the biggest generators of resentment for management – if we don’t let people get on and do their jobs because we interfere too much.

If it has to be done then it should be done as respectfully as possible

There are times when we have to do it. For example I do it about the use of indirection in our infrastructure because I think that is so overwhelmingly important. But when I do it there is a certain process that I follow to minimise the impact.

• At the forefront of my mind is the knowledge that I am overriding the will of others, and their views are based on just as much thought as mine and just as deeply held.
• I explain my reason for doing it, which is normally because there is no consensus and yet a decision must be made, or because I’m convinced this is the right way to go.
• I explain the decision in as much detail as possible to those affected.
• I generally need to publicly state that my solution is not perfect and there are unresolved issues. Then I need to make it clear that I know those issues and will keep a watch on them.
• I have to make it clear that if a better solution comes along, in particular one that has consensus, then I will change my views. The door is not closed.
• But sometimes I have to make it clear that the fact I am using the override does not mean they can disengage and leave things to flounder. Of course good staff would never do that.

Other tips

When I’m involved in a discussion about what is the best way forward, or how something should be done, I have to make it clear that I am participating on an equal basis as others and not using the override. I have to repeat this often. If I don’t then people forget and assume I am using it just because of my position and not anything I say.

Occasionally, despite my being convinced I am right, I find that I have got it completely wrong and so if I had used the override then I would have caused a real problem. I wonder how many managers do that and then don’t have the integrity to admit it and try to undo the mess they’ve created?

When I used to be a programmer I was very hot on my own internal naming conventions and I was using my own variant of Hungarian notation long before I discovered there was such a thing. Writing systems by myself meant that I could enforce this internal consistency and make my life simpler. But I always longed for my conventions to be understood by the compiler. So, just by giving something a specific name the compiler would understand how to connect it to other code, without me needing to explicitly configure it.

I’ve now seen that in action in Ruby on Rails and I am well impressed. It even has a name – ‘convention over configuration’.

An example of how it works in Rails is simple enough. If you have a URL http://domain/x/y then Rails expects to invoke a method called y in a controller called x. So easy. But Rails does this in a few more places and is always looking to increase use further.

I find that this approach makes so many things easier that it should be considered as a general principle for software design, not just a quirk of Rails. The benefits that it brings are:

• You have to write much less code.
• Spotting a naming mistake is simpler because it stands out more.
• If you don’t know the name of a particular function then you have a lot more chance of making a successful guess.
• You have more chance of guessing how and where a function is used just from the name and context.

Brains are naturally pattern matching machines and I think convention over configuration appeals to them much more than a long XML file. I’m surprised I don’t see it being used much more often but I bet we will in the future.

A small bugbear of mine. Why do auditors ask me every year “Do you force your users to change their passwords regularly?”. Since when did this become such an unchallenged tenet of security?

Well I don’t agree that this is a good idea at all, and I patiently explain that to the auditors each year. In fact I take the view that forcing people to change their password regularly can actually reduce the security of most systems. My reasons for this are fairly clear:

• Most people find passwords difficult to remember and the more complex the password, the more likely they are to forget it. This is probably because there is no obvious handle for the memory to be hooked onto, i.e. no mnemonic, no event, no place etc.
• If you force people to change regularly then you also force them to develop mechanisms for storing their passwords other than just remembering them, because the burden on their memories is just too much.
• These mechanisms are nearly always insecure. In some cases it is a post-it note stuck to the screen, sometimes a note in a drawer or on the desk or even a text file on their computer.
• Choosing a password is actually quite hard for many people. They can’t think of anything and so they tend to go for simple, memorable names. Just the kind of thing that is vulnerable to a dictionary attack
• Once someone has finally remembered a password, generally only through repeated use, do they then destroy the physical record of it.

So what really matters, is to teach users

1. How to choose a strong password. I’ve seen some nice online tools that evaluate the password strength as you type it. I’m sure they’re a bit corny and generally don’t include dictionary searching, but the do help the user.
2. How to choose a memorable password, so they don’t have to record it anywhere.

Now if auditors asked me whether we do that or not, then that would be a sensible question to ask.