I've been thinking a lot about focus recently. Knowing how our human brains work, that's because a lot of what I have been doing lately boils down to helping teams do fewer things in parallel, hopefully being strategic about what we say "NO" to, now…
The dirty little secret that not many know is that I have struggled with that for quite some time. A defining moment in my career was a radical candor kind of feedback from a former boss that went more or less along these lines:
Rodrigo, you take a lot of initiative, and that is something I appreciate about you. But you know what? It is not about what you start, but what you drive to the end.
I guess one of the reasons that things like the Kanban method ultimately resonate so much with me is because it provides a sort of system to change that. Another little secret that most people don't know is that I'm not organized in the sense of doing things in a very orderly manner. I am systematic, though, in the sense that I build "systems" that work for myself so that I can have the discipline needed to drive the things I want to drive.
In the language of personality assessment, which the psychology research seems to have more or less settled on, in the "conscientiousness" big aspect, I am "industrious" (mission-oriented) but not "ordered" (plan and check boxes). But enough about my dirty little secrets; this is becoming too personal.
Back to focus. The first thing is to understand what we mean by focus. In our context here, we are biased towards a couple of things:
How we deliver (product) value consistently;
And we do that by being conscious that the best way to deal with intrinsic uncertainties is by increasing cycles of learning, reducing time to market, and solving for needs (not "wants"). A technical enabler of that is to excel at change.
All together, this basically means applying a kind of enabling rule:
"What you build will OWN you".
Mind the nuance that you might have in mind a slightly different version of it, which is a kind of maxim for DevOps: "You build, you own". But this is more fundamental than that and, in fact, recognizes a trap that can be just to keep executing and doing stuff that you have been asked to do (i.e., what your customers/stakeholders want).
Anyway, I think you get it – in how this can serve us a good purpose of type of mental model. But that is too conceptual and not so actionable, so the fundamental question still remains…
How can we create more focus?
First, we also need to acknowledge the fractal behavior that focus brings about. It can and should be about focusing at all levels. But it's good to realize that there is a possible trick we can recur to, which is by recognizing that the higher the level we define focus on, the bigger the chance that we are tapping into a bigger leverage (exponential effect).
All good and well, but I am guessing (at least some of) you might be thinking that is not practical guidance just yet. Bear with me; we are going to get there in a moment.
By further thinking about how to create focus, I could eventually conceptualize a little model that might be useful. By attempting to properly categorize a few different ways you can accomplish that, creating focus. That becomes further potentially powerful as it is translated into policies that prescribe what the rules of the game are for that specific level and "system" we are looking at and want to create focus on…
(Note: I'm pretty sure I didn't invent any of those “enabling heuristics” maxims, but I do want to acknowledge the 1st one is a known inspiration from Cliff Hazell, since the others are more or less common sense.)
Each of those categories I came up with has its advantages, but also some specific challenges. Here's my first take on that:
Establishing limits is very practical but often suboptimal and difficult to scale (it might require a lot of "boots on the ground", so to speak);
Formalizing heuristics as policies can be very powerful because they are highly adaptive, but they can be challenging to enforce because they are rather conceptual;
Using signals distributes authority and nurtures reflective behavior, but might require some maturity and deliberately setting the time to reflect and act accordingly;
The beauty is that we don’t need to choose just one way, but can combine and experiment to uncover what works best in our context…
Just as a simple example, and this is very practical advice I've been coaching on recently…
Let's imagine you do some sort of quarterly planning. That in itself already means you are making some selection of what to start next, and you have to frame that under the constraint of a timebox. But you don’t have to start all work selected in parallel, and therefore you can apply, in some way, shape, or form, a WIP limit. And therefore, still use schedule and sequence for more incremental delivery!
An important caveat is that focus also means to take a systemic view of things. Just like I wrote a couple of weeks ago (or else you might be largely fooling yourself while thinking you are getting focus, so that's the risk and the trade-off, effectively).
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact