Month: October 2018

The Strategy Fountain

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Goals and strategies are like a champagne fountain cascading from one tier to the next. The bottle being the top most goal. Your strategies (the champagne) pours from one goal to the next (the bottle and glasses). You take and replace glasses across the tiers of the fountain. You empty one bottle before opening another. There is a finite capacity of how many bottles you can pour from and be effective. Similarly you let a glass fill before taking it and you empty it before filling it again. In some cases when a glass is empty you may set it aside, and replace the spot with a new glass.

While not the perfect metaphor, it invokes a sense of something grandiose, connected, and beautiful when done right. There’s an interconnectedness between all the “goal > strategy > objective > outcome” chains when looked at through an enterprise lens. The goal of one chain may be the objective of a higher chain. The strategies being the connective material.

Should I Stay or Should I Go

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A few days ago I wrote about finding inspiration. It got me thinking about goals and when it’s time to change the destination.

If you read the original post, you’ll notice that I didn’t talk about changing the destination or goal. The purpose of applying disruptive thinking to our strategies is not to come up with a new destination. It’s to find a better way to get there. Often times when you hear about companies pivoting in their strategies, you find that they have still remained true to a higher goal. A disruptive idea may lead to new stops and opportunity along the way. These may become smaller micro-goals, but we’re still driving towards the original destination. It’s tempting to chase shinny objects and there is a seductive force to emerging technologies. You need to be realistic about the reasons your chasing it. Is it something your interested in on your own, or does it contribute to the betterment of your goal. If you have passion for an idea follow it, but don’t fall into the trap of forcing something that doesn’t fit. Worse yet is abandoning a solid strategy for personal reasons.

There will be cases when an idea is divergent from the original goal, but valid for the company. Don’t abandon the idea. Flesh it out so you can come back to it later. It may even be worth a minor expedition to learn more. Remember that those larger goals will change in time. The learnings from that divergent thought may become the seed for the next major destination. Never abandon a good idea. Give it care and let it incubate. Learn to know when it’s the right time, place and problem to hatch it.

There can be a fine line between knowing when to pivot in a new direction and when to keep your eye on the prize. A good strategy with measurable outcomes, will provide clarity and insight for making those decisions.

Expand Your Inspiration

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“Think outside the box.” You hear it all the time, but what does it mean and how do you go about doing it? The first part of the question is the easy bit. We all know fundamentally that it’s encouraging us to apply new methods to an old problem. However; I want to put a finer point on this for my purposes. Thinking outside the box is about disruptive thinking. To change the status quo and move forward in new ways. Sometimes bold and sometimes subtle, we are changing the course to our destination.

So how do we do that? Where do those disruptive ideas come from? You steal them. No, I don’t mean take someone else’s idea and make it your own. I’m talking about what inspires you. The different paths to inspiration are as diverse as there are people. I’m going to discuss two; 1) following an emerging trend, and 2) adapting another discipline.

The first is the one I see the most. It involves looking at your industry, those related and investigating the emerging trends. Looking at how others solve problems can inspire you to do the same. For example, machine learning (ML) can identify sentiment from facial expressions. Then letting that inspire you to use ML to identify stress factors that broke a part from a photo. I refer to this one as standing on the shoulders of giants (to see further than you can on your own.)

The second is one I don’t see as often and wish I did. I’ve always felt the best inspiration comes from disciplines outside of your own. Using machine learning for facial recognition extended from artificial intelligence. But artificial intelligence was inspired by studying the brain. While the AI case is a direct parallel, your inspirations don’t need to be. You can be inspired from anywhere. Examine the process Monet used to paint his water-lilies. Study the migratory patterns of birds and butterflies. Anything. I encourage this method for many reasons. It can lead to truly new ideas and thinking. It gives you a non-technical metaphor to make communication easier. It can inspire others in new ways that make the idea better. It can reignite your passion for your job. And, by studying other disciplines not your own, you improve yourself.

These are only two paths to inspiration, but they paint a wide canvas and tend to be the two I lean on the most. I often find myself mixing the two. Using external disciplines to find new ways to utilize emerging trends.

Regardless of how or where you find your inspiration, find it. Trust it. Evolve it.

Three Laws

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I read an article not too long ago that discussed how everyone is looking for the next Silver Bullet to fix all their problems. “If we just migrate all of our apps to the cloud, we’ll be able to scale as much as we want. Move to the cloud. Deploy to containers. Serverless for the win!” What we don’t talk about is craft. The craft that makes an application scale in the cloud. The craft that ensures your container environment can support your workload. The craft of being cost efficient. And the craft to know the limits of serverless technologies and when not to use them.

Some time ago I developed my own take on the “three laws of robotics” as related to software development. I know it’s been done before, but I like where mine ended up. I’ve had the chance to test these with both developers and product owners and they’ve held up. I’ve even had a product owner surprise me by quoting one of them. Pay close attention to how number three addressing the opening rant.

Three Laws of Development

  1. A developer may not actively jeopardize the long term health of a project, or through inaction, allow the enterprise to come to harm.
  2. A developer must adhere to the user stories created by the product owner, except where such stories would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A developer must further advance the craft of software development as long as such advancement does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Personal Brand – Back to Basics

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When I went to work for my current employer I knew they had extreme views on brand protection. There was a line, fuzzy as it was. I thought I could still post about technology without crossing that line. As my job changed this became increasingly more difficult, and about four years ago my already anemic posts dropped to next to nothing.

Earlier this year I began writing and posting again. Even the long gap through Spring into Fall was because I was working on some longer projects. The issue is that none of it has anything to do with my professional life. That has always been the purpose of this site. While I’ve mixed creative and professional, the main thread was always related to my career in technology.

This has all lead me to re-evaluate my personal/professional brand, or lack there of. While I’m still struggling with whether to mix my creative efforts with professional, it’s time to get back to basics. I’m still at the same company, but my work has evolved over time, and I feel I can once again negotiate that fuzzy line.

The Beginning

When I started this site it incubated from some writing I had been doing condemning the superhero culture I saw circa 2005. We celebrated the heroic win when all was lost, when we should have praised those who delivered without issue time and again. It was about the rise of “the villain” as an agent of change. You can see that sentiment reflected in this site, “Malignant Genius: When you think like a genius, think malignant thoughts.”

Fast forward, and some of those old concerns still exist. My company refers to it as the diving catch. Pitching a no hitter is lauded, but forgotten. The diving catch makes the highlight reel. However; we’ve also seen movements such as DevOps, and agile methodologies adapted from manufacturing that focus on fewer defects and better quality. Times have changed and so have I. So where’s a villain to turn?

Moving Forward

There’s a lot of talk about the disruption of technology to move industries forward. This is where I’ll be spending most of my time professionally in the future. While I can’t discuss the tangible work I’ll be doing, I’ll also be helping to define what this means for my team and how we approach the work. It’s this, “disrupt to advance” space that I’m planning on addressing here. Not what the disruptions are, but how do you approach disruption.

I hope folks will find the ideas and topics in this space interesting. Who knows, maybe it’ll lead to a new tag line, “Be the change, think malignant thoughts.”