One of the hardest and most valuable things you can do as a company is the following:
1. Have a fully up to date org chart
2. Have a diagram that is not the org chart that accurately reflects how work flows through the company
3. Have an up to date and accurate diagram and explanation of what the company does and how it does it (architecture, revenue funnels, business value streams, code-bases)
Scaling decision making is *impossible* without a shared context to build alignment off of.
I would've never guessed this was the case when I first started my career, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Alignment and direction is so hard to get; clarity of what you're doing and how you fit into and contribute to a system is so hard to maintain. But it's so important that it should never be neglected.
I see executives working on decision matrices, and engineers working on refactoring, and infra building platforms, but I don't see people *actually communicating together*
@hazelweakly oh my god...yeah people ask who my manager is and it's like...do you mena the guy HR says is my manager who I literally only communicate with two or three times a year? Or the guy that runs my team but also technically isn't part of my team...I think...not entirely sure on that. Or maybe it's the people who actually assign me my work, of which there are literally dozens, many of whom don't even work at this company.
At this point I'm about ready to just say my manager is The Essence of Pure Chaos
@admin @hazelweakly
Harbinger of Chaos,
Your paid time off request has been: Approved.
@hazelweakly I've had similar experiences until I got to Unity. There is an entire framework of common phrasing, meaning, and how to communicate in a company wide understood way.
Things like "Driving for Alignment", Clarifying understanding, trial close, etc. It helps keep things focused and neutral.
Even have a framework called Fierce Feedback on how to provide constructive feedback that keeps it neutral. It's like DEAR MAN from DBT but for business context instead of personal relationships.
@hazelweakly Yep! I work with small to medium companies and teams, helping to navigate strategy, fwiw. We've developed a few visualization methods and facilitation elements for laying a foundation of alignment and "shared meaning".
One of the most useful metaphors has been getting folks into a bucket brigade and then create an artifact that visualizes handoffs and contingencies for their value chain. You can put all sorts of meta-data onto that map.
Not too many orgs value this, though.
@recursive that definitely feels like it can be the case 🫠
Although I'd bet a lot of it can come down to people just thinking they understand things and not realizing that they don't. I definitely do that! Everyone does. It's not even necessarily a bad thing either. At some point, alignment becomes far more valuable than consensus; necessarily so, even.
@gvwilson ooh those are neat! I like how they lay things out :)
It's also a great example of when computer diagrams really start to break down so I like that they're hand drawn!
@gvwilson *gasp* how could youuuuu
(It's fine. No judgement lol)
@gvwilson very cool!
Might you be interested and willing to contribute this workshop under a Creative Commons license to the open practice library?
OpenPracticeLibrary.com
Same exercise is useful for Product Vision
@hazelweakly Agreed!
> 2. Have a diagram that is not the org chart that accurately reflects how work flows through the company
I did this once for a ~30-person team I had recently joined. I took everything in Jira, put it on a post-it, and ask people who had touched them about who they took it from, what they did, and what happened next. It took me maybe a week and I ended up with a surprisingly complicated workflow diagram.
A number of people said, "Oh, that's how we work?" So I wasn't the only one in the dark.
@williampietri @hazelweakly hah, I tried that once one when I got promoted into a technical leadership role.
"Okay, I think I figured it all out -- is this how the work?"
*sends document to product owners*
"No."
"Oh. Can you help me fix it? What did I get wrong?"
"No."
@hazelweakly I've seen a huge amount of stuff recently that reinforces the GitLab handbook way of working.
Now that they've given up on transparency to seek higher valuations, it's not so easy to glean useful bits, but the handbook contents was nice and the issues and merge requests showed all the activities happening that bend and reorient the workers and the work.
Participating in it was fun because I could correct things and set boundaries and point out where processes didn't match expectations without it being a huge insult. Every modest and pendantic improvement was accepted. It was fascinating.
Anyway, any time an org that doesn't work that way tries to draw these things, it's just guesses and lies. That's why they pay consulting firms the big bucks.
This sounds right, but I don't know if I agree with it because I don't think I've ever experienced it.
@hazelweakly I'd say you need at least 2 org charts: the formal and the informal one.
The informal one is in between the formal one and the flow of work.
@hazelweakly Asking individuals to sketch out an org chat is one of my _favourite_ “getting to know a company" questions.
It's fascinating what the differences, gaps, etc. between different folk's drawings can tell you :-)
@hachyderm Yes this.
Another perspective: treat your company like a system and apply the discipline of System Engineering. A system is People + Processes + Technology. As companies grow they acquire tacit knowledge about how things are done. Then a couple of people leave and you discover nobody knows how it's done.
UML activity and sequence diagrams are a ready-made notation for describing business processes (flowcharts + swimlanes + parallel activities).
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