November 1st, 2020
- meta-team notes
- Failed #SquadGoals: Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.
- what happens when "Everything is deeply intertwingled" meets much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly?
- > Every responsibility a team cedes to increase its focus becomes a new cross-team dependency.
- > Most businesses can only sustain a few areas of innovation. Internal process rarely is a primary area of innovation that differentiates a company in the marketplace. Studying the past allows businesses to pick better areas for innovation.
- this is very relevant to the meta-team, which is actually intended to have internal process as its primary area of innovation
- and everything else downstream of that
- and the innovation involves stuff like
- and then finding a way to organize people around doing such things
- this may require also finding some people who have "can't not do" energy about helping others or filling in the cracks
- which I strongly suspect exists, as I've felt it myself at times, as an expert generalist
- > A few of my recommendations related to the topics covered by the Spotify way of working:
- > More than 200 people in your product—engineering—design organization? The Scaled Agile Framework worked well for Fitbit when I worked there.
- > Less than 200 people? Shape Up by Basecamp is how I intend to structure my next startup.
- It seems to me there are deeply deeply 2 core questions here:
- 1. what general factors make for a collaborative cultural platform, and how does one bootstrap that and train it within the context?
- a few fairly mainstream books on this would be
- The Fifth Discipline - about creating a "learning organization"
- An Everyone Culture - about creating a Deliberately Developmental Organization
- this is one of the highest leverage points - which is not to say it's easy - because the capacity for effective collaboration & generalized trust allows conversations to redesign anything on any other level.
- Specifically, this involves these 2 leverage points from Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows
- this is the same, in some sense, regardless of scale/context...
- ...although in practice a different emotional/relational toolkit is needed here depending on whether the team/group involved is
- a company, a family, a community, etc
- very diverse in object-level culture or not
- doing intense urgent firefighting vs research vs art
- small and all knows each other, dunbar-sized, or huge
- and I think that noting those differences is also really important, even if there are commonalities & generalizeables across them
- 2. what specific organizational structure is appropriate to a given team of a given size and purpose?
- here, tons of different specifics could make sense.
- an independent research group might just have a bunch of loosely affiliated folks doing a kind of scenius thing
- a family would be very different from any company