This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

When Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tim Ferriss all recommended a new book, I’ll probably grab a copy. Soon after it was released last March, I read Safi Bahcall’s Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. Having really enjoyed the book, I was excited to talk to him on the phone a few weeks ago.

We spoke about Loonshots and the book’s ideas on business and innovation. Our conversation touched on many provocative ideas, such as how team structure and incentives can influence the way people operate and perform.

“If The Da Vinci Code and Freakonomics had a child together, it would be called Loonshots.” — Senator Bob Kerrey

Before we dig into highlights from our conversation, let me tell you a bit more about the impressive Safi. In 2001, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company that developed new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors (PCAST) on the future of national research. Safi received his BA in physics from Harvard summa cum laude and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford. Safi regularly speaks with leadership teams about innovation, transformation, and reinvention.

Structure, Not Culture

The red thread through our conversation (and one of the main topics in Loonshots) was the idea of how structure defines organizations. “I use storytelling to illustrate that — for example, structure, rather than culture, helped the allies in World War II. There are takeaways, lessons, and rules that companies can apply to innovate faster and better.”

As well as structure, another significant theme was the two forces at play inside any organization: “Whenever you organize people into a group with a reward tied to their mission, you automatically create two competing forces, a tug of war.”

“Whenever you organize people into a group with a reward tied to their mission, you automatically create two competing forces, a tug of war.”

Broadly, I’d describe these two forces as 1) the more “wild,” entrepreneurial, or artistic force and 2) the more conservative, safe, and hierarchical force.

Safi talked about how these competing forces have specific patterns of behavior; he uses his physics background to compare these business patterns to the behavior of water molecules — there is both the flow of liquid and the rigidity of ice. This metaphor helps Safi underscore the difficulty of changing behavior patterns or culture.

“Changing culture is incredibly hard. No amount of singing ‘Kumbaya,’ holding hands, or forcing people to watch a video will change culture. Just like when a glass of water changes from liquid to solid, there’s no CEO molecule with a bullhorn saying, ‘I think it’s 33 Fahrenheit, everybody slosh around. Oh wait, it’s 31, everybody line up.’ That’s called an emergent behavior in physics. They just do it.”

“Changing culture is incredibly hard. No amount of singing ‘Kumbaya,’ holding hands, or forcing people to watch a video will change culture.”

Stake vs. Rank

Safi argues that one of the reasons that it’s hard to enact change in companies is because their existing reward systems lead to specific behaviors. “When you create a team or a company, you create these two forces — one is ‘stake and outcome,’ and the other is ‘perks of rank.’”

“Stake and outcome” is when a business’ outcome or monetary gains directly— and significantly—benefit the people working there. Safi explained: “Let’s say you have ten people at a small biotech company. You’re developing a cancer drug. If it works, everyone is a hero millionaire. It fails; everyone is unemployed. Stake and outcome are huge.”

On the other end of corporate rewards and incentives is what he calls “perks of rank.” He told another story to illustrate: “Now, imagine you’re inside Pfizer. Same drug, same people. Simply the forces are different. Your stake and outcome is tiny. But, if you can make funny remarks in meetings and say something that your boss agrees with and so on, then you might get promoted. So at Pfizer, perks of rank are huge, and stake and outcomes are tiny.”

That’s why Safi believes some organizations are apt to reject wild ideas — they are set up for “perks of rank” versus “stakes and outcome.”

However, the importance of the concept is that by understanding and identifying these forces, you can begin to manage them. “Once you understand a phase transition, you can begin to understand those aspects of a structure and manage it to do what you need. The key is understanding that there are two different phases. Just like there’s a solid and a liquid phase.”

Safi believes that some large companies think they are giving employees “stake and outcome,” but in actuality, they’re not. “Large companies, say ‘Let’s give everybody stock options. Now they’re owners.’ No, they’re not, they’re not owners. Owners are someone who’s outcome of their work is directly tied to their incentives and rewards. For example, if you work harder on your coffee machine, it’s going to move the equity needle by zero. If you work poorly on your coffee machine, it’s going to move the equity needle of your company by zero.” In other words, there’s not enough incentive for the employee to innovate inside this reward structure because the payback for that behavior is minimal.

“If you reward rank, you will create a political culture. If you celebrate and reward results and ideas, you will create an innovative culture.”

Instead, inside large corporations, employees are typically rewarded for playing politics versus being creative. Safi says: “If you play smart politics and suck up to your boss and do a decent job, you might get promoted, and that’s going to matter. So that’s how you encourage politics. Structure drives culture. If you reward rank, you will create a political culture. If you celebrate and reward results and ideas, you will create an innovative culture. It’s less about what you say or what movies you insist people watch.”

The Two Phases

Safi doesn’t see the two types of behaviors or structures as bad or good. Both have their place and benefits. Businesses must have both to succeed and need to learn how to balance the “core” and the “new.”

It’s not about turning everyone into wild-and-crazy innovators with no organizational hierarchy. He stresses that specific patterns are essential for certain aspects of a business: “To make something, you have to create a bridge to the soldiers and the manufacturers who will scale it up and deliver it to customers on time, on budget, and on spec.”

“The takeaway is that there are two phases — solid and liquid. Embrace wild, new innovative ideas, focus on franchise and execution…I’m not a believer that it’s different types of people. Just like if you take a molecule of water, you drop it into a glass of liquid, it’ll slosh around with the other ones. If you drop that same molecule into a block of ice, it’ll freeze. It’s not a property of the molecule; it’s a property of the environment.”

In other words, we might think that people are naturally entrepreneurial or naturally conservative, but Safi sees it more as people molding to their environment. He told this story about when he ran a bio-tech start-up: “We used to tell each other, ‘We’re innovative because we’re risk-taking entrepreneurs and those big corporate guys are risk-averse…’ As we grew up, matured, and started to work with them, we saw that they’re just like us. Exactly like us, and when we would hire them, they were us. And then they would go back to the large company, and they would be that risk-averse. It’s because it’s the environment, the emerging behavior, and the structure.”

Again, this risk-averse nature can be a positive and is even essential: “If you’re trying to manufacture guns, planes, and ships, you need very high-quality control and low failure rates. Risk is a bad thing. If you’ve taken the risk out of a battle — thumbs up, but, if you go to an artist and say, ‘You’ve taken all the risk out of your art,’ that’s a horrific insult.”

So, risk-averse structures and rewards work in specific environments, but failure should be pushed and utterly encouraged with the groups that need to be new, visionary, and innovative.

“You need that artist-creator group to be failing — to be trying ten things, nine of which fail.”

“You want to be trying ten things, and nine of them should fail. And if they don’t, then you’re not pushing the envelope. You’re doing a bad job because your competitor will find something better. You need that artist-creator group to be failing — to be trying ten things, nine of which fail. One should be trying wacky new things; one should be delivered on time, on budget, on spec to customers.”

Org Design

When you know what “type” your team is, that should inform your incentives and rewards. Instead, Safi talked about how companies usually end up somewhere in the muddy middle. He calls this the “What temperature do you like your tea?” question: “If you poll a big audience at South by Southwest and ask them, “What temperature do you like your tea?” the average that you will get is lukewarm room temperature. No one likes room temperature tea. The reason you’re getting that answer is that half like it hot and half like it iced, and the average is lukewarm.”

He continued: “The reason [companies] are getting incentives and management wrong is because it’s asking about the average across the company. Once you realize that there are two phases, there are two completely different objectives. One, you want to maximize risk; one you want to minimize risk. One you want very high, on time, on budget, quality control and then have incentives aligned with that goal. And the other, you want them trying all sorts of new stuff.”

Manage the transfer

The hope is that leaders, teams, and companies can tend to both sides — core and innovation. Additionally, companies need to find successful ways to bridge these two worlds. How does the innovative, artistic, or creative work transfer to the business-minded operations? It’s easy to generate good ideas; it’s not as easy to bring those ideas to life. Safi says: “The failure point is never or rarely in the idea generation. The failure is almost always in the transfer to the field, both directions.”

Some of the issues stem from opposing cultures or patterns: “It starts because they don’t like each other, and for a good reason. [One group] is busy, they’re paid on commission, they’re not paid to try crazy new stuff. With the artists, it’s what I call the ‘beautiful baby program.’ This is a beautiful baby. It’s so beautiful. [But the other guys] see vomit and poop. And that’s exactly right; they’re both right. Babies are beautiful, and they’re covered in vomit and poop. They have nice promising things, but they’re also full of flaws and warts and crap and shit and stuff that blows up, and that never works right.”

Additionally, the tension between the two groups goes back to different incentives. If a product goes poorly, the “soldiers” are not rewarded for failure like the creatives: “It’s not how they’re rewarded. It’s not how they’re measured. It’s not how they’re incentivized.”

In other words, each group needs a matching incentive system and organizational structure: “One you have to incentivize failure, the other you have to decentivize failure. One you want a flat organization, one you want structure.”

“One you have to incentivize failure, the other you have to decentivize failure. One you want a flat organization, one you want structure.”

To define the right management style, organizational structure, and incentives, you need to know what you want to achieve. “When you want accuracy, you want a narrow structure because you want redundancy, and redundancy is perfect. When you’re manufacturing planes, you don’t want a lot of variability or innovation in the freaking screw. But, over here [in innovation], you want as flat as possible because you don’t want it to be about politics and shooting your neighbor’s ideas down and getting promoted. You want it to be a bunch of people, more like a club.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Structure Creates Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

I am working with a team of executives who have gotten themselves into a bad spot. Each has become entrenched in the notion that their teammates aren’t trustworthy.

Their feelings about each other have already spread to the layers below and the CEO has now heard multiple examples of uncooperative behavior across teams.

I’ve been brought in to help them get to the other side of the conflict before it does any more damage.

My first meeting was only a couple of hours — not much time to get to the heart of dysfunction they said had existed for at least three or four years. But I had exactly the right exercise. It worked so well that I wanted to share it with you.

Here’s how to use this exercise to maximum effect:

Team Members: If you are a member of a dysfunctional team, read ONLY to the end of step 2 and then complete the exercise to that point before reading any further.

Team Leaders: As with team members, read ONLY to the end of step 2. Complete the exercise yourself and then continue reading. Only after you’ve done the exercise yourself should you try it with your team.

Coaches and OD Consultants: There will be so many opportunities for you to use this exercise with your clients…have at it!

The Exercise

This is a great exercise because it requires no special equipment, just a pen and paper. (Although, as I learned at a session in Silicon Valley recently, that a pen and paper might be special equipment in your organization. If so, bring supplies!). It’s also great because it takes only about ten minutes. Here are the instructions.

1. “On your sheet of paper, please describe the events that have led to the current problem. What has gone wrong to get you into the predicament you’re in today?”

Give them five minutes to capture their ideas. Flex on the time if at five minutes, everyone is still feverishly writing.

2. “Write down what it would take to fix the problem. What would have to change for things to get noticeably better?”

Again, don’t be too rigid in the timing. If they’re still pouring their hearts out, let them go. When they’re finished writing, you can reveal the next step.

[Spoiler Alert: don’t read on until you’ve completed steps 1 and 2!]

3. “Now, review what you wrote. Look for one thing in particular: In your first paragraph, circle anytime you used the word ‘you,’ or ‘they,’ or specifically called out someone’s name other than your own. Does your name show up? If so, in what way? Are you explaining to yourself how your actions got you into the present situation or are you describing what other people did to you? On balance would you say this is a story about how they created the problem or about how you did?”

I don’t have people read their statements out loud, mostly because they are so rife with blame that they could send the whole delicate situation off a cliff for good. The message hits home without them having to share.

4. “What about your second paragraphs; who did you talk about there? Are you focused on what you have to do differently to get a different outcome or does the second paragraph focus on how other people’s behavior needs to change to rectify the situation?”

By this point, folks are usually feeling a little warm under the collar. The majority will have filled both paragraphs with all the things their colleagues did to create the problem and all the ways everyone else needs to change before anything will improve.

From those two pieces of information, you, and more importantly, they, can identify what role they are playing in the story they are telling themselves about the dysfunction. That matters — a lot! Humans are storytellers and if the team members in front of you each have themselves as the victim of the story, the plot line will be a tragedy.

It seems incumbent on me to now cram the complexity of these perspectives into the mandatory 2×2 grid. Oh well, why not!?!

(It’s up to you whether or not you share this assessment with the team. I don’t. I simply use it to describe the different options we have for how we approach team dysfunction.)

The Victims

By far, the most common result of this exercise will be that you find yourself in front of a room full of people who are the victims in their own stories. I write frequently about victims because I find them the most tragic people on dysfunctional teams. Once someone has convinced themselves that the whole ugly mess is being done to them, rather than by them, it can be incredibly difficult to get them back contributing. If you stay in a victim role for too long, you become more of a burden to the team than any other character. It is the people who play victim who often need to leave a team to restore it to health.

The Villains

There’s not much chance that you’re going to find someone who is willing to admit that they created the problem, but that they are helpless to fix it. If you do, they are likely struggling with self-esteem issues and will need you to follow-up on the team session with a one-on-one conversation in a safer, more private space. Don’t worry, in all the times I’ve done this exercise, I’ve never seen anyone willing to admit that they contributed to the problem but have no way of contributing to a solution. (Remember, we’re talking about behavioral issues here. There are plenty of times people really have created technical messes that they can’t solve.)

The Scapegoats

You might get a few self-proclaimed heroes in the room who see no way in which they contributed to the problem but are more than happy to swoop in to try to fix it. Although that seems ok at first, it’s a recipe for growing resentment, so even the scapegoats will need to see some way in which they contributed to the situation.

The Leads

I hope for you that you find someone in the room that took the leading role in their own story of the dysfunction. These are rare and valuable people who, when prompted, can see and admit that they played a role in getting into the unhealthy situation and that they need to play a role in getting out of it. In my session last week, I had one, and his willingness to start most of his sentences with “I” really changed the tenor of the room for the better.

Ok, so by now you see that we’re trying to get people up to that top right box (aah, the blessed promised land of the top right box). That’s where the exercise goes next.

You have choices here. If you have another 10 minutes, you can have them write their new paragraphs right then and there. If not, you can assign them as homework or convene another meeting where you’ll move to part 2. Here are the instructions for the second section.

5. “Let’s start again. This time rewrite the story of what got you here with the majority of the sentences containing “I” or at the very least, “we.” Reflect on how your behavior contributed to the current situation, even if it was only by witnessing dysfunction and not intervening.”

Some might still struggle with this. If they do, take a look at their first version and see where they might have played a part that they aren’t aware of. Ask questions to draw out the storyline. “What did you do when she said this,” is a favorite of mine because so often, the person contributed to the problem by building up hostility and resentment without saying anything. The most common answer I get to, “What did you do when she said this,” is “nothing.” If they say “nothing,” prompt with, “How did saying nothing contribute to the situation you’re in now?”

Finally, you can move toward action.

6. “The last and most important part of the exercise. Rewrite your second paragraph focused on what you can do to improve the dynamics of the team and to resolve the present issues.”

To their credit, most people get this one. Many of the actions are related to their mindset, such as, “I can give Lou the benefit of the doubt.” Interestingly, sometimes that’s all it takes. So much of the conflict has been manufactured within people’s heads that simply shifting the narrative ends the conflict.

In other cases, you’ll need to prompt them to take action. With the team last week, there were examples of how the animosity among the leaders was affecting how their teams interacted, so they each committed to speaking with their teams to reset on the expectations about collaboration.

Ok, that was a bit of a long one, but this is such as simple exercise with such profound results. I am keen to hear what insights you get from using it. Share your responses in the comments.

My new book, The Good Fight is full of management exercises like this one that will help you get out of an unhealthy conflict cycle and start using productive conflict to make your team better. You can download a couple of sample chapters here. If you have read it, the most helpful thing you can do is to post a review. Would you do a girl a favor and write one? Thanks so much.

Further Reading

How to recover when you feel wronged

Everybody Hurts

From HBR: On a terrible team? Maybe you’re making it worse

The post An Exercise to Expose Team Dysfunction appeared first on Voltage Control.

First I’d like to thank our speakers. Without them and the brilliant content they prepared and shared on Tuesday, we would not have had a successful event. Our volunteers were incredible and certainly kept my stress levels low! Thank you, Scott, Enrique, Kim, Chloe, Chandler, Alan, and Josh. I would also like to thank the Voltage Control facilitators. The facilitated networking sessions were a big hit, and I’m grateful that Anna, Jane, Daniel, and Reagan were able to help make that a reality.

A big thanks to all of our sponsors. They were all a pleasure to work with, and I hope you have an opportunity to work with them. I’ve included them at the bottom of this post.

It was an absolute pleasure working with Peter from CTO Connection. If you have an opportunity to check out one of his other summits, I highly encourage it. He’s an outstanding guy and puts on a super event.

“To get over 100 senior engineering leaders in a room for the inaugural conference was an incredible feat.” — Peter Bell, CTO Connection

For those of you that weren’t able to make it to the Summit, I’ve collected a few quotes from attendees and wrote a quick overview of each of the presentations. I hope you enjoy

“I’ve been waiting several years for an event like this in Austin. The conversations and presentations were great, and I’m already looking forward to next year!” — RC Johnson

RC Johnson is the manager of Indeed Labs and member of Austin Technology Executives. Tracing things back, one could argue that he’s the reason I know Peter. He introduced me to the New York CTO School and then years later I followed a CTO School posting about the NASDAQ CTO Summit which is how I met Peter. RC was the first person to register for the 2018 Summit and promised me that he’d be the first to register for the 2019 Austin CTO Summit.

“Great combination of networking, content, and presenters. The format was engaging with nice, short talks, and packed a ton of intel.” — Allen Darnell

The structure of the 2018 Austin CTO Summit consisted of blocks of 3 20-minute talks followed by a break. There were a total of 5 blocks, 2 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.

Jim Colson — Designing, Engineering, and Delivering Products for a Full Lifecycle of Engagement

Jim Colson, who recently retired as CTO of IBM Watson Customer Engagement, is currently advising startups on technology and business strategy. Jim talked us through a model of how to think about users and where a specific set of users are in their overall journey through your engagement lifecycle. I enjoyed his concise and accurate definition of the difference between product and offering. He encouraged us to consider how we might improve our customer experience by thinking about offerings rather than fixating at the product level.

“The Austin CTO Summit was an incredible event of information exchange, networking, and insights across both large and small companies. It is extremely valuable for any CTO and I am already looking forward to the next one.” — Jim Colson

Lynn Pausic & Chris LaCava — Vital Role of Humans in Machine Learning

Lynn and Chris of Expero warned us of the dangers of using bias data to train your ML models. They presented a case study in which their client was interested in a decision support system for determining creditworthiness. When training their model, they used income levels and inadvertently discovered that there was a major bias against loans for women. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a bit, and Chris mentioned something that I hadn’t considered yet. As AI becomes more ubiquitous and models are white labeled, developers without the statistical skills to identify or address issues are using these models will start to use them without understanding their origins and it will be critical that bias is easily exposed and mitigated.

“The intermingled networking exercises were a great way to connect with the many tech leaders who attended. I’m looking forward to 2019 Austin CTO Summit”- Enrique Ortiz

Cynthia Maxwell — Keeping Your Team in the Flow

I first discovered Cynthia Maxwell when I read “Track and Facilitate Your Engineers’ Flow States In This Simple Way”, an article she published on First Round. I enjoyed the article, and the concept stuck with me. As Peter and I began recruiting speakers, I reached out to Cynthia to invite her to speak. I was delighted when she accepted. Her presentation further elaborated on the concepts in her article. My favorite part was when she pointed out that many engineers are not accustomed to or trained on giving negative feedback. This simple visual feedback mechanism can be used to as a starting point to tease out more critical detail.

“The first Austin CTO Summit felt like an event that had already hit its stride — I look forward to seeing how much better the next one will be! “— Bryon Jacob

After Cynthia’s talk, Anna Jackson lead the room through our first of 5 facilitated networking exercises. The audience totally embraced this and the room erupted with conversation. As the exercise wrapped up, the energy spilled into the hallway and we took our first break of the day.

Bryon Jacob — Seeds of Scale — Lessons For Startups Learned Through Growth

Bryon Jacob, CTO of data.world, spent many years at HomeAway where he saw the company scale from 30 people to 2000 people and acquire 30 other companies. Upon reflecting on those years at HomeAway, there were decisions he appreciated and decisions he wished he could go back and change. When founding data.world Bryon sought to repeat the good ones and avoid the bad ones. His talk shared some of this wisdom. One of my favorites was the idea that technical debt is a measure of uncertainty.

“Bryon’s talk featuring his “definition of done” criteria was clear and concise, perfect for sharing with my team. It will provide a great reference for assessing and formalizing our “done” criteria here at Capson Technology.” — Scott Artman

Vikas Parikh — M&A and Technology

Vikas works with business leaders to help who are buying, selling or reshaping a company. He offered the audience a bit of perspective into the M&A market and the things you should consider. His advice is to think far in advance and be prepared for the inevitable day.

“The short, fast-paced presentations revealed connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, opening up tons of new possibilities for me!” — Marcus Blankenship

Will Ballard — Scaling Self-Directed Development

I would hazard to say that Will’s talk was the most provocative. My pal and resident complexity junky, Daniel summed it up the best when he summarized Will’s talk as a case for disintermediation. Will presented and practices a system where all projects are approved based on the business merits and income potential. There are no estimates or deadlines enforced, and his team selects the projects they want to work on. Perhaps the most intriguing to me was Will’s comment that his system resulted in nearly 0 employee churn which was a problem due to lack of new ideas that typically come from new hires.

“It’s not often that CTOs get to take a step back from their day to day to learn from each other and be inspired. Austin CTO Summit did just that. Bravo” ~ Etienne de Bruin, Founder 7CTOs

After Will, Jane Westfall led us through another set of networking and lunch was served. During lunch, we provided supplies and topics for lean coffee. Attendees ate lunch while discussing a familiar topic with a dash of structure to keep things moving.

Heather Rivers — Lessons from the Black Box

I saw Heather Rivers give this talk at the NASDAQ CTO Summit last December. I enjoyed it so much that I asked her to come talk in Austin. She presented about the flight record which, once introduced, allowed officials to understand the root cause of airline crashes. These issues and the system implemented to solve them can be directly applied to software teams.

“Today, the day after the event, I was able to apply what I learned from Heather Rivers’ talk on Crew Resource Management and the communication model she proposed. Effective and timely information — I am looking forward to next year.” — Boyd Hemphill

Vivek Sagi — How to Dive Deep & Mechanisms to Help you Scale your Tech Org

Vivek began by pointing out that diving deep is easy when managing one team. We have tools like standups, 1:1s, design reviews, retrospectives, and demos. Then he posed the question: how do we replicate this for larger organizations? He presented a perspective that most leaders operate within the organization and product scope and never diving deeper down into the component level. He provided six mechanisms for diving deeper. My favorite was his warning to pay close attention to anecdotes. He recommends to assume anecdotes are correct and look for data to prove/disprove them.

I saw that there is increasing awareness of the importance of measuring the progress of software development teams and the obstacles they face more carefully and more rigorously. “— Eddie Reyes

Marcus Carey — If I Only Had A CEO

Marcus definitely racked up the most laughs. Marcus is the CEO of ThreatCare and told us the story of his struggles as a technical founder and not always getting the support and encouragement he deserved in the role of CEO. Through the lens of the Wizard of Oz, Marcus walked us through his advice on running companies. He also left us with a few book recommendations including the fifth agreement.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.”-Boris Portman

Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez — Toughest Words a CTO Says : Hold on the Code

Cherise provided a perspective on user testing and customer validation. As a Design Sprint facilitator and believer in user testing and solution validation, Cherise was preaching to the choir. I did find it new and interesting that she presented this work from the perspective of a CTO who was itching to write code and build things yet knew it was in the best interest of the company to pump the brakes and wait for more certainly on WHAT to build.

“ The support from the audience was overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.” — Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez

Meetesh Karia — Diversity in Team and Thought At The Zebra

Meetesh is an active member of the Austin Technology Executives group and often volunteers to run things when I’m out of town. I had encouraged him to start speaking publicly more often, and I was excited to host him at the CTO Summit this year. He absolutely killed it. I heard from numerous people that this was their favorite talk. He gave many actionable tactics utilized at the Zebra to improve their diversity numbers including working with Andela and adopting a policy that any candidate with an underrepresented background got an automatic pass on the first round.

“It is clear to me that the technical leaders of our generation deeply care about people. THAT really made my day.” — Qingqing Ouyang

Marcus Blankenship — Why Your Programmer Just Wants To Code

When Marcus published “Why your programmer just wants to code”, his bait worked, and I clicked. I was prepared to hate everything about this article and to my surprise, I was delighted. He was speaking my language. Marcus adapted the article into an interactive workshop where Summit attendees filled out notecards with ideas of how to improve the Summit next year. He then explained the overbearing process by which our ideas would be judged, including boosting ideas from more experienced individuals and pushing down scores for less qualified individuals. In the end, Marcus was painting a ridiculous picture to help shed light on how some of our own companies behaviors are indeed stifling sharing of ideas and ultimately our ability to innovate.

Eddy Reyes — Lessons From A Failed Startup — A Cynefin Retrospective

Eddy Reyes spoke to us about Cynefin. Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains”: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. These domains help you to identify how you perceive situations and make sense of your own and other people’s behavior. Each domain has a clear set of rules to identify which domain you are currently operating in and how best to function in that domain.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.” — Boris

Qingqing Ouyang — Unknown to Know: Building a Recognized Tech Brand for Recruiting

Qingqing’s presentation was also a house favorite. She recounted her experiences shortly after joining Main Street Hub and charged with the goal of building out the development team. After her first initial attempts at hiring, she realized she had a real problem as none of the engineers had heard of Main Street Hub and they were less than excited about working on a legacy PHP monolith. It was clear to her that she needed to focus on the reason she took the job and the Main St. mission. Diving deep into the why allow her to create a vision for the Main St. Hub engineering brand and to sell from the heart. At this point, she started to grow the team.

“The CTO Summit was a nice reminder that we’re all after the same thing in the end — meaningful work, progress, belonging. I look forward to the next summit!” —Reagan Pugh

Jack Humphrey — Improving the Development Process with Metrics-Driven Insights

I’ve known Jack Humphrey since the early 2000s when we worked together at Coremetrics. He is one of the smartest people I know and cares deeply about his people. Jack shared a process that he’s been rolling out at Indeed. At Indeed they have a data collection and reporting system which they’ve open sourced called Imhotep. Using this tool they can ask lots of questions about whether any given change to the system should be made and when made if the desired outcome was realized. This same tool can be used to look at the number of defects generated by a specific developer and the nature of those defects.

I appreciated the diversity of viewpoint and opinion among presenters and attendees. It was great to share ideas with peers who are grappling with a lot of the same challenges. And as a presenter, I couldn’t have asked for a more engaged and appreciative audience! — Jack Humphrey

After Jack closed out the speakers section, Daniel Walsh stepped in as the final networking facilitator just after I gave a few closing remarks and thanks to our sponsors one last time. Then we all headed across the lobby of the hotel for a few cocktails to end the night.

“It’s impressive that this was the first year of this Summit. It ran like a conference that has been going for 5 years”. — Scott Brittain

Next Year

After such a successful first year, I’m more than confident in our ability to grow and deliver an even better summit in 2019. We’ve extended a 50% discount to 2018 attendees. Tickets are available for sale now!

Get your tickets for 2019.

“Truly inclusive communities are built with intention. It’s so good to see individuals and groups taking active care of the community they’re part of. The CTO Summit represented lots of intention for me.” — Angelek Marler

+ Platinum Sponsors

AnitaB.org

AnitaB.org is committed to increasing the influence of women on all aspects of technology. Our local community expands our efforts globally to help individuals all over the world — especially those who are considering or currently pursuing technical careers — to access the resources they need to reach their highest potential.

Members of the global AnitaB.org Local community network organize events and provide one another with resources to navigate careers in tech. They organize valuable meet-ups, code-a-thons, and one-day HopperX1 events modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration.

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Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups is committed to connecting with people and building relationships that lead to growing local entrepreneur communities. We believe that people, not companies, matter most. People come up with ideas, build MVPs, raise capital, and ultimately launch Startups (companies). Our local team in Austin is focused on supporting startups interested in partnering with us to grow on Azure.

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Reduxio

Reduxio is redefining data management and protection with the world’s first unified primary and secondary storage platform. Based on the patented TimeOS storage operating system, Reduxio provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, and the unique ability to recover data to any second, far exceeding anything available on the market today. Reduxio’s unified storage platform is designed to deliver near-zero RPO and RTO as a feature of its storage system, while significantly simplifying the data protection process and providing built-in data replication for disaster recovery.

Reduxio innovates with:

• Accelerated workloads with High Performing Flash Storage
• Self-Protecting primary storage
• Optimized storage utilization
• Built-in integration with public and private cloud services and object stores
• Protect and move data between on-premise storage and the cloud

Learn more at www.Reduxio.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

+ Gold Sponsors

Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations use our project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, Stride, Bitbucket and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

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Creative Alignments

Creative Alignments is disrupting recruiting using a pay-for-effort model that creates a talent partnership with our clients. Aligned with growing tech companies, we place top talent at less than half the cost of traditional recruiters. Our senior team recruits across all functions in the tech space. Reinvent recruiting with us!

+ Registration Sponsor

Beacon Hill Technologies

+ Morning Break Sponsor

7 CTOs

+ Evening Reception Sponsor

Stride

Atlassian’s Stride is a complete team communication solution built from the ground up to help teams more effectively work together. Stride was built to solve the biggest problems of team communication by bringing together context, conversations, and collaboration into one powerful product, allowing teams to move work forward. Our brand new communication solution has best-in-class team messaging, audio and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

+ Community Sponsors

Ruta Maya Coffee

Allstacks

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Austin Fraser Ltd

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Beacon Hill Technologies

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RetailMeNot

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KungFu

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IBM

The post Austin CTO Summit 2018 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m passionate about alignment. Yup, alignment. It might not be the sexiest topic in the startup world, but it’s essential to success. (It’s the reason I fell in love with Design Sprints, as they are a fantastic way to build alignment with disparate stakeholders.) Lack of focus may be the #1 killer of startups, but I believe that lack of alignment is why many organizations fail to ever realize their mission.

So, if you’re ready to align your team, I’ve assembled ten of my favorite methods. Start applying some of these and please share back what you discover!

1. Define a Shared Vocabulary

Here’s where I suggest you start: make sure everyone in your company is speaking the same “language.” When individuals or teams use different terms or define things in contradictory ways, some (if not all) of your efforts will be thwarted. That’s why I recommend establishing a shared dictionary or lexicon.

The level of effort to create your dictionary will vary depending on the size and age of the company. Begin by meeting with each team and reviewing their standard reports, metrics, and assets. Identify terms that mean different things for different groups and look for groups that use a variety of words for the same concept. Document and socialize these differences. Work toward creating documentation of your organization’s official terms and definitions, whether through a PDF or internal website.

2. Use the “Note & Vote” Technique

The Note & Vote activity is my favorite take-away from the Google Design Sprint. It’s a great tool to drop into any workshop agenda, or even a staff meeting. What I love about this tool is that it combines focused individual work, as well as the power of collective wisdom.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: start by having the team individually generate ideas, challenges, or solutions. Then, everyone shares their favorite ideas with the group. Once everyone has shared, each person votes for their top concepts or ideas. (Depending on the size of the team and your time constraints, adjust the amount of individual work time, the number of favorites shared, and the number of votes per person.) This method is a great way to avoid groupthink, give everyone a voice, and come up with new, “out of the box” ideas.

3. Leverage Tools for Visibility

Without visibility, teams with the best of intentions may think they’re aligned, only to realize that they have drifted apart. There are many tools for creating visibility. Kanban and metrics dashboards are my two go-to strategies for creating visibility. For Kanban, I typically recommend Trello or Jira. While Trello is simple and easy to get started, Jira has much better support for software projects. For metrics, there a gazillion options these days, but I’ve been enjoying Klipfolio, and Looker is also quite nice.

Regardless of which tool you have, create a culture of actually using the tool. For example, make sure your standups and status meetings revolve around the Kanban board. Whenever a status changes, update your Kanban immediately. Review and analyze your metrics dashboards daily, if not more frequently.

4. Schedule One-On-Ones

If you aren’t doing one-on-ones, I’ve got to break it to you: you must start. There is no excuse—not even a small team! Managers, and especially executives, have the luxury of seeing the forest for the trees. One-on-ones are one of the most important tools you have to identify problems, opportunities, and see across your team to create alignment. They allow you to understand what motivates your team, their fears and concerns, and their challenges. So, if someone reports to you, I suggest weekly one-on-ones. I know everyone is busy, but I don’t recommend doing them bi-weekly. Schedule them for every week and commit!

5. Spend Two Hours Defining Your Purpose

I’m a big fan of Liberating Structures, which is a set of 33 tools and techniques that can be used to align groups. I highly recommend checking out all of their activities, but I will outline two of my favorite LS techniques here and in the next recommendation.

Purpose-to-Practice (P2P) is designed to help your group “design the five essential elements for a resilient and enduring initiative” in just two hours. By following the ingredients and agenda for this structured working session, your group will ultimately answer five important questions: “What rules must we absolutely obey to succeed in achieving our purpose?”, “Who can contribute to achieving our purpose and must be included?”, “How must we organize (both macro- and microstructures) and distribute control to achieve our purpose?”, and “What are we going to do? What will we offer to our users/clients and how will we do it?”

This is a helpful activity at the start of a startup journey or when you need to get your team back on the same page about your mission, customers, and strategies.

6. Encouraging People to Ask for Help

Another Liberating Structures activity that I find very effective for alignment is called “What I Need From You” (WINFY). This method only takes about an hour and spurs people to ask their colleagues for the things they need to be successful. In this activity, individuals make a list of what they want from others, share it, and then receive an unambiguous response of: yes, no, I will try, or whatever. This activity creates a safe space where teams can find clarity about roles, needs, and expectations.

What I like about WINFY is that it breaks down our assumptions about each other. We find out what people on the team are wanting, but not getting, or, conversely, when someone is making incorrect assumptions about what others want from them. This framework encourages collaboration among peers and is especially effective for executives who are often downward-focused, when they need to be horizontally-focused.

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7. Ensure Your Meetings are Inclusive
If you want to have an aligned team, you can’t have meetings where only a few people speak and share. Follow some simple rules to make sure that your meetings are inclusive spaces where everyone feels empowered to contribute. First, prepare by having a clear goal and agenda; this will keep everyone on track. If you have people that tend to monopolize discussions, you might want to initiate the “Note & Vote” activity mentioned above; it’s a good way to get more people involved in conversation and decision-making.

Another thing to be aware of, especially as a leader, is the tone of your meetings. Ask yourself: How is criticism and disagreement handled? Do individuals say “Yes, and…” or just shut each other down? Are ideas attributed and recognized or ignored? Take note of the tenor of your meetings and work to correct any bad habits before they become too ingrained in the culture.

8. Repetition. Repetition.

In almost everything in life, consistency is key. I think management needs to be particularly aware of this in terms of communicating with your team. You can’t assume that stating your strategy in one standup will be enough to institute new thinking and drive lasting change.

I once heard a CEO explain the same thing five times in one day to different groups. It didn’t matter if he was addressing the execs, the entire company, an intern, or the board. He patiently and consistently explained the same thing, with the same language. The message stayed the same. This kind of redundancy is monotonous and annoying, but it is crucial if you want to keep your team aligned. As an organization grows, the challenge is insuring consistency as you scale beyond your ability to do it in person.

9. Schedule a “Roles & Coffee” Meeting

Roles & Coffee is a more surgical tool that is useful when you have two employees who are having trouble working together. Often, when two team members are struggling to get along, it is due to weak assumptions about roles, responsibilities, and capabilities.

Ask them to find time to have a coffee together. When they sit down, they should take turns describing the role and responsibilities of the other person. By simply asking each other, “What do you think I do?”, they’ll be able to clarify the misconceptions that are standing in their way. While there are times when behavioral issues are at play, I’ve found this activity can clear the air for most situations.

10. Don’t Forget Postmortems

When major projects or initiatives end, teams are often ready to move on and forget all about what they just launched. They are onto the next thing or just plain exhausted. But, it’s crucial to schedule postmortems after important projects to reflect and talk through lessons learned.

During your retrospective, let team members share what worked well so it can be celebrated and repeated next time. Also, find out what didn’t go well and try to get to the root cause. I find that the classic trick of asking WHY? five times helps you dig into what went wrong. Work to foster a culture where it is ok to mess up, fail, and ultimately grow from hiccups and mistakes.

I hope you are able achieve more alignment by applying a few of these methods. With more alignment, your team will be happier, you’ll get more done, and you will increase the odds that you are doing the right things. All of this naturally adds up to a healthier, more resilient organization.

The post 10 Practical Ways to Align Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.