Welcome back!
One day late on sharing the post, again. I should probably stop to turn myself in every time I miss my own self-imposed deadline, but I want to be accountable to the regularity of my content so much that I fool myself as if you really care about this one day of delay, or do you even notice actually. But I have to accept it and forgive me for this flexibility, considered the reflection of this post.
It’s sparse and rare, but I start to get feedback once in a while and is very useful. So first of all thank you! I might as well stick to the practice of begging you for public or private comments: if you are a new, regular or occasional reader, let me know what you think, what you liked, what you would like to find in this newsletter, and what I could do to improve your experience. Or just to say “hello!”.
Let’s dive in! *splash*
Takeaways (TL:DR)
Being “exact”, reduce ambiguity, replicability of results, “fairness”, reduced cognitive load. These are all valid reasons, but I think there’s a measure to the contexts where following strict rules and processes becomes necessary: it’s trust. The two things often are inversely proportional and the symptom of this is the quality of communication. While trustful relationships allows the communication to flow and discussion to happen constructively, rules are a tool to delegate to an external force the breakpoint of that same discussion.
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Weekly retrospective
I usually resent when strict rules are blindly used by default or when hierarchy, influence and power are enforced to dismiss discussion. I probably nourish anarchist ideals but I’m way too disinterested in politics to really know what I’m talking about. I hate rules, and love debate, and rational discourse, which in a lot of cases is dispersive and inefficient. In the past I often fell in the trap of having to find my (or our) own conclusion at all cost only to find out it’s the same conclusion I could have ready made by copying or referring to what someone else already found out.
There is probably a good opportunity here to choose a lawful neutral alignment for my next D&D character and train myself to the feeling of blindly following a rule set. Maybe is enough to compensate. Also, games and rules and serious games are a complex topic and possibly a focus for another post. (There’s a meme at the end of the post if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
To get back on track, in the last week I lived the frustration of dealing with the rigidity of two different processes: privately, with the Italian justice system and professionally with the way of working of a team where conflict, anxiety, and hurry are growing into the most insane processes to cover a lack of communication.
When the tool becomes the end
I’ve been in a legal process for over a year and a half (and will probably be for up to one more year) that I started to get some economic compensation for…I don’t need to get into details. Let’s just say that the money involved are not so much in the greater scheme of things, but they are some. At this point in the process, legal expenses are very close to exceed the entire value of the compensation itself. And this by considering only my expenses, if we consider both factions involved it has been already exceeded probably by the moment the process started. This is when my brain started to think about all the things I’m sharing in this post.
So, laws and justice are a very complex matter of which, as well as for politics I shouldn’t be talking about, but I’m open to discussion if anything I will say would be debatable.
It is an oversimplification, but I think that for what concern this kind of disputes, law is just a tool to come to a decision from an external, uninvolved party, where two actors can’t agree for the sake of their respective benefit. In my particular case, the value of the lawsuit was easily measurable and clear from the very beginning. The efficacy of the “tool” known as “law” in this case, is directly proportional to its ability to dispense that fixed value to the actors involved. But. If the process to get to that conclusion is so expensive that no value is actually going to be available to dispense, something is broken. There’s no pragmatism, only ideals. And the tool is not solving any problem, not for sure the one it was asked to fulfil. Something created to serve people, defend their interests, and help society to facilitate its relationships became an intricate machine that serves itself instead, and values its own integrity over what it was created for in the first place.
I had a similar experience last year with the local police, that in order to follow processes and rules ended up telling me that the only way I could get their help to regain my stolen stuff was to go by myself in the middle of a slum in the middle of a giant abandoned park and call them directly from there — hoping I haven’t been assaulted or killed before their arrival.
I get it actually. Laws are what allow nations, some of the biggest organisations of people in the world, to coexist and thrive. Unfortunately, if these rules were too flexible they would be exploited by anyone for their own interest and caos and violence will rise. I understand the power of rigid and comprehensive rules from my experience in designing games, which I recently read is a practice now even used as an exercise for policy makers, with some sort of workshops.
Lawsuits must follow rigid processes and preserve their own integrity even when it seems nonsense in order to be safe and fair in more complex cases. It is not pragmatic in specific cases, but it is pragmatic at a systemic level, considered the current constraints. It’s frustrating sometimes, for sure is an improvable system and aspect of governments, especially in Italy, and if individuals would have more trust and integrity themselves there would be less need for such rigid structures, but this is yet another anarchic dream which won’t see the light early, if ever.
This is the paradox of rigid processes. I’ve briefly talked about flexibility instead in another post I link it here.
The big value and the big lies of prepackaged solutions.
Rules and processes and replicable patterns are great, and actually a practice that is hardwired in our brains. Cognitive biases are nothing but rigid rulebooks that our brain developed during evolution to evaluate and react to situations in fractions of a second and survive in the wilderness, where a fraction of a second was very important to make a difference between eat or get eaten. Cognitive biases are widely discussed in the UX design field and their study is a precious tool to define details of our experiences in order to make them positive and memorable, or simply to provide the correct guidance and set the correct expectations.
But what we learn by studying cognitive biases, is that most of them, when analysed with rationality and/or statistic, are just self imposed lies. Instinctive evaluations that our brain produces but are not our best alternative, because they were developed in a completely different context to the social one we are immersed today. But often times they are the faster and less expensive in term of effort (cognitive load in this case), and this makes them desirable and sometimes even a net positive trade off.
To balance the trade off, our brain developed the system 2 — as Daniel Kahneman calls it in Thinking fast and slow — to slow down when is possible and make the same evaluation with rationality and analysis. Both systems are useful in different situations, and unfortunately we are often not aware of which one is in control.
But, because this is part of our very own nature, we often build our tools and processes — and knowledge itself — in order to delegate our cognitive load and be able to find solutions faster and/or with less effort. Not so often we remember that we should at least spend a moment to ask ourselves if that processes is valid for the current problem or should be questioned.
Groups, communication and trust.
Another situation where rigid processes are needed, is when there’s a lack of trust and a weak communication in a group. I tell you my story. In the last couple of weeks, I rushed a delivery — of which I also talked here — and now, because of that speed, some details are off and the people responsible for writing requirements for developers and quality assurance folks are giving me some feedback and follow back on that work. Here’s the deal: they are asking me for missing screens which are the tenth copy of the same empty state component with only a slightly different copywriting that I’m not more competent than them to write; or they are commenting 18 different times to change “email” into “e-mail — which by the way is one of the biggest debates in the internet ever — instead of leaving me a single comment to tell me to change all occurrences. Or other similar repetitive and redundant necessities.
When I let them notice that they were asking for something that they already knew how it was made, they argued that if they don’t have the exact design for every screen, quality assurance teams would have open bugs for every little inconsistency even in the copy writing. As if they are too stupid to read the specifications that come with the image itself, the same developers have used to build the feature. It’s probably only process, and nothing more than process, but I see a lack of trust in their team, or a very good way of keeping the power in the ends of few roles by gatekeeping all the others from contributing.
Apart from malicious and paranoid hypothesis which I’ll leave out of the door for today, if we rely only on the facts, this is what I think is happening.
They were used to have a very big group, so they developed a rigid scrum organisation without caring about agile principles, they ended up work in silos — the product managers define product for designers which gives blueprints to analysts which write requirements to programmers which develop what QA will test — communication is very low, alignment is as rigid as the rest of the processes and demanding “exactness” gives them the illusion that nothing will go wrong and you can delegate steps of the process only through documents and artefacts.
What they create instead is a complete lack of critical thinking, developers execute blindly and don’t propose and discuss with designers solutions to optimise code and performance, QA switch off their brain and miss the chance to learn the product and give valuable feedback, nobody notices and reports if something seems off unless it block their part of the task and problems arise only when the product finally arrives in the hands of the users.
What’s more, by asking redundant task to the two designers instead of trusting the critical thinking and proactivity of the forty developers you are forcing design to become a bottleneck in the process more than it is already. And here is where the malicious thoughts break in and I stop.
The agile manifesto requires you to prioritise people and communication over processes and tools, and yet is one of the most overlooked aspect in todays teams and collaboration.
Conclusion
In the end, what I get from reflecting over these experiences is that once I filtered my own personal reluctance to follow rules and pre-packaged processes, this approach is neutral in itself (while its contents are really not neutral in any way). Applying rules can have positive or negative impact and the need for the process to be legitimately rigid is mostly dependent on the contexts, complexity and scale to which it is applied. Altough I still wish critical thinking and the ability to question the status quo and the rules we ourselves created in the first place could be a standard.
I think the fact that this practice requires more effort makes a point for being also a matter of respect, of being careful and empathetic enough to be willing to spend a bit more energy on using our brains to engage in debate, discussions and find suitable solutions, agreements and compromises for the particular situation and not relying too much over simple, ready-made, one-for-all solutions.
What do you think? Have you ever had a similar experience. What would be your alignment if you were a D&D character?
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia