Mushrooming Clouds!

Mushroom cloud from a hydrogen bomb test

All hierarchical and process-bound organisations are guilty of "mushroom management" at some point or another. Mushroom management is a satirical metaphor for a situation when access to information and decisions are restricted to employees and furthermore when the information is conveyed, it is inaccurate, incomplete and full of hyperbole. It is like being kept in the dark and having the dirty stuff thrown at you. Even if you are mildly ambitious this style of leadership will curtail your creativity and hold you back.

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.