Radical collaboration with Matt K. Parker

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

Last week I had a conversation with Matt K. Parker on radically collaborative organizations that are taking the world by storm. What is different about these organizations is that they are using ways of working based on partnership, equality, autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and the general belief that “management is too important to be left to managers”.

One pattern that Matt mentioned was the Advice Process. I remember first learning about the Advice Process when reading Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux.

Anyone can make make any decision if that person seeks advice from
1) people who have expertise about the topic
2) those that will be meaningfully affected

–Reinventing Organizations @fred_laloux

Common sense that sounds so simple but you never get to articulate it on your own

— Ivan Krnic イヴァン (@ikrnic) April 4, 2021

Making sound decisions in a distributed way always felt like the biggest obstacle to empowering teams. I’m not talking about teams making wrong decisions. I’m talking about teams not even daring to make decisions because they a) don’t feel they are allowed to and b) don’t know how to make one.

The advice process provides a super simple and down-to-the-point framework for making decisions. Listen to my conversation with Matt for more good ideas from radically collaborative organizations.

Would you like your new hires to deploy to production on Day 1?

Would you like to be like Etsy?

Kustodian tackles the eternal problem of developer onboarding and environment configuration by provisioning and managing roles and permissions to digital assets in all systems that support software development lifecycle.

Kustodian enables you to hit the ground running on Day 1.

Click here for more benefits.

Systems Thinking | Notes & Resources – In modern organizations based on knowledge work, flow-orientation beats cost-orientation anytime. Robert Stuttaford put together a nice index of resources covering Systems Thinking and Theory of Constraints. “A flow-efficient system can be more profitable than a cost-efficient system, due to producing more value more often and sooner, to higher quality and with lower failure demand, despite costing more along the way, and despite folks being idle throughout the process.”

The Age of Software Needs Value Stream Architects – Building complex software requires equally complex socio-technical effort. Mik Kersten finds that while we traditionally pay close attention to the architecture of the systems that we’re building, we neglect the architecture of the organization that is building it. Smart organizations don’t let their architectures emerge accidentally. They control internal structure and interactions. This is so important that they recognize a special role in the organization – a Value Stream Architect.

DevSecOps: Not the Tools, the Other Bits – When it comes to DevOps, people instantly think about tools and other technical stuff. Security aspect is no different – we go straight to the technical part: “Are you doing vulnerability scanning? How about pen testing?” Mario Platt takes us a step back to consider how technical practices are just tangible manifestations of our culture. Culture drives behavior, but culture can also be changed by behavior – for better or for worse.

O’Reilly Technology Trends for 2022 – Many organizations try to predict trends, but O’Reilly makes very educated guesses based on the data from their learning platform. The premise is that people are learning what people are using (or at least considering using). Tap into learning statistics – recognize trends!

The Big List of Engineering Management Resources – March 2022 – Shawn Axsom is Director of Engineering at Docker, and he shared his list of favorite engineering management resources to help you on your journey.

With the world getting smaller every day and collaboration happening between teams around the globe, we need to be aware of how different cultures perceive the world and how that impacts daily interaction and business.

“The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer helps us find a better way to collaborate in cross-cultural environments by better understanding cultural differences.

In 2020, we skipped a beat…
In 2021, we rebounded with online QEDx conference.
In 2022, we’re back in Zadar for another live QED conference!

Follow us for more info at qed.croz.net. At this time, I’d just like to give you a sneak peek that our keynote speaker will be Heidi Helfand and we’ll talk about Dynamic Reteaming as a way to future-proof your organization!

Photo by Robin Canfield on Unsplash