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| Mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb test |
Business today is about change and adapting to it. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the software industry. Free flowing and ubiquitous communication are the corner stones to innovation, good customer service, high retention and change. You would think that with the Internet, email and mobile phones communications would have improved by leaps and bounds. But it turns out this is not really true. If you ask most people what they would like their supervisors or managers to do to make the work environment better, you will hear "communicate better" most of the times. In my opinion this is the case because, email and mobile phones have substantially increased the quantity of communication but they have had a damning effect on the quality. The tools are improving but the content is deteriorating creating a rude deception!
Keeping a tight rein on information has never proved to be a good management strategy. The most famous example of this was the Teamster's strike at UPS in 1997. It is estimated that UPS lost nearly $700 million in revenue apart from the loss of credibility with its customers and employees. Many commentators argue that as part of its negotiations the management held a lot of information close to it's chest. It turned out that this flawed strategy caused many loyal employees to feel betrayed because they simply did not know what was going on. As a consequence they simply decided to leave. The lack of information caused a backlash with anger, resentment and loss of revenue.
Functional groups in organizations need to be "high-access" with communication at the center. Good communication will invariably lead to high retention. On the other hand "low-access" groups are characterized by constricted communication flows where people find themselves kept in the dark like mushrooms, stuffed in silos of job descriptions, rankings and the organizational chart. It is but natural that these groups have trouble responding to change and wavering customer needs which is a reality of the modern software producing work environment. The mantra has to be "when in doubt, over communicate!".
All in all mushroom management in the software product development world is an anti-pattern that will only end up producing mushroom clouds.
2 comments:
1. While I agree with misinformation or erroneus information flow through hierarchy is not helpful, information or data hiding helps with abstractions in most cases. I think think how much data/information is function of consumer's capability it consume it and having lesser number of variables makes it simpler np complete problem.
2. Whats do you mean by inaccurate information? Did you mean to say "data" here? I feel Information by virtue of its definition as "Processed Data" can never be accurate or inaccurate. Its perception of that data and degree of its acceptance by the consumer of the information.
The problem really is who is to judge the consumer's capacity and the level of abstraction that you bring in. If you don't get it right then you end up having very confused and lost people who will probably walk away. I agree that this is not an easy problem to solve.
Processed data can also be muddled with how it is presented. It is a two-way street where both the processor and the consumer are involved. Abstraction done badly can produce very screwed up views, can it not?
But that was beside the point, one of the things I was trying to say was that if you don't appraise people of why they are doing something adequately i.e. you don't explain the big picture adequately to them in a way that they understand then they are not going to hand around for very long.
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