I love blameless postmortems. And, it isn't really whether the team or the team lead decides to do a blameless postmortem. It's whether the company values looking at things this way. And, those values change over time, and shift when the times are good or bad (financially).
I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that would be a good story!
In fairness, this story does convey that. The "second story" part is great.
I do wish there was a little more about how management came around to seeing it, how they rectified bonuses and pay and PIPs. There is an untold journey here.
> I would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that would be a good story!
It doesn't have to be a dying company. Many companies that try to transition from startup -> small company -> medium company -> megacorp tend to run into periods of change and insanity in every one of those transitions. I suspect its one of the reasons why most companies die out at some point: the failure to focus on product and focusing instead on politics. Teams turtle down, avoid responsibility (i.e. blame) at every opportunity, the product turns to shit as nobody wants to move a muscle in case anything breaks.
I have been recommended the book "Turning the Ship Around" for an account of how to grow a new good culture in a decisively bad one. It's probably not an exact recipe for being able to hold blameless postmortems, but I suspect it could contain some valuable information.
If anyone knows how well it applies to this situation, please do tell me!
The consensus so far is to test waters and do some "in parallel", if necessary rogue-ish. The output is so superior in term of learning that you may then use this result as a trojan horse.
I think you can go too far in that direction. I worked for a big European software company, there was a deep culture of never blaming people, so any postmortem inevitably ended with a new process or training or transversal synergy coordinators, when sometimes the root cause was just bad developers
Assuming that "bad developers" is indeed the root cause, that still sounds like a systemic issue to me:
a) are the developers bad because they were hired that way? maybe the hiring process is broken
b) are the developers bad because they are not managed/trained properly? maybe managers aren't doing their job, and maybe it's not even their fault because they did not get training in how to manage people in the first place
c) if you implement extra layers (or "synergy coordinators") it probably means that the company hasn't figured out how to communicate properly
Management is ultimately responsible for everything. Even if you have the worst developer in the world on your team, management decided to hire them, retain them, assign them responsibility, and failed to improve their performance. That said, plenty of people are just self-serving dickheads. Could they be reformed? Probably. Is that the company’s responsibility? Only up to a point.
I’ve worked with people that I was responsible for training in DevOps, from a starting point of having only ever done GUI-based Ops. Basically starting from complete technical incompetence, and plenty of them succeeded, because they were good people with good attitudes. I’d wager a small team of people like that would always be more productive than a team of any sized comprised of arrogant, combative, CYA assholes.
Only tangentially related but I have to get it out of my system anyway:
I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on.
All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a team", mistakes are an opportunity to learn, and so on. One team showed pretty clearly how they had a good culture surrounding failures.
I'm not at all surprised that this one team is the team that has consistently won the last 6 years in a row.
Why aren't more teams copying this? Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success?
As the other reply kind of hints at, it's a lot easier to do this if you have the absolutely dominant driver on your team. If I was the technical director and we were losing, I'd certainly be like "Lewis, pal, we lose as a team, right?"
And then Lewis would be gone and we would just be losers.
There’s so many reasons for Mercedes success, that the parent comment comes of as being a bit silly. As you mentioned, they have Lewis Hamilton, who a lot of people would argue is the greatest driver of all time. They also have a very clear pecking order, team orders for Bottas to lose to Hamilton are a meme in F1 (“Valtteri, it’s James”). After the season was underway, they really only let them race after Hamilton had secured the drivers championship. Toto’s leadership is certainly very good (which the parent poster is referencing one particular part of), but you also have to remember, that Mercedes have only been dominant for one particular generation of F1 cars (the turbo-hybrid era). The sample size is absurdly small, and if you ask most commentators who’s going to dominate next, most of the would guess Verstappen (or LeClerc), not another Mercedes driver.
> team orders for Bottas to lose to Hamilton are a meme in F1 (“Valtteri, it’s James”). After the season was underway, they really only let them race after Hamilton had secured the drivers championship.
Is this not an extension of "we win as a team, we lose as a team"? Would this be possible with the same consistency in teams where both drivers are in clear competition with each other for the seat next season?
Well I think this is a bad example in general, because unlike most businesses, success is actually a zero sum game in top flight sports. If somebody does good enough to earn a seat, it will always mean that somebody else did bad enough to lose theirs. It’s also not a very faithful characterization of Mercedes. They were seriously considering letting Bottas go last year, it was honestly a surprise that they kept him (and let Ocon go instead).
If you want to see what the same management style looks like with competitive drivers, you can just look at the last time Mercedes had two competitive drivers. That would be in 2016, when Nico Rosberg won the drivers championship with Mercedes. The relationship between Hamilton and Rosberg had become so toxic, that Toto Wolf himself admitted he had no idea how he was going to solve it. It culminated with Hamilton trying his best to hold up Rosberg in traffic in the last race of 2016, because Hamilton needed to keep Rosberg of the Podium if he was going to get the title. You can watch the highlights on YouTube with the team telling him to speed up, while he more or less just refused. The only reason any of that was resolved, was because Rosberg retired after that season.
This story is pretty much repeated in F1 history any time you have two people on the same team competing for the title. Last year LeClerc and Vettel fought so much, and so dangerously on track, that it actually led to both Ferrari drivers crashing into each other and retiring in one race (something which mirrors one of the most controversial crashes in F1 history, when one McLaren teammate crashed into the other at Suzuka in 1989). The entire season was also full of their drivers arguing on the radio about team orders. Then you have the other most dominant driver, Verstappen, who Redbull have been unable to find a suitable teammate for.
To specifically answer your questions, at Mercedes “win as a team” clearly always means “help Hamilton win”. It’s not possible to operate a team where drivers are not fighting for their seat, and history has shown it’s not possible to have a good team culture when both drivers are actually competing with each other for the title.
Adding to this, Rosberg took advantage of the "win as a team" culture to win his championship. He fought a psychological war with Hamilton where the team refused to take sides. It was the only way to beat Hamilton.
Mercedes had to protect themselves from this and made the smart choice in choosing Bottas as he was well known for a calm and team focused demeanor. With Bottas, Mercedes could further build the team around Hamilton without causing issues between the drivers.
It would've been really interesting to see the team structure if Rosberg returned in 2017. Mercedes dodged a bullet by getting Bottas at the right time.
It reminds me a little of the time when Berger and Senna were teammates. Two very good drivers but there was no dispute who was the number one and two driver. It’s much easier to keep peace in a team where the hierarchy is clear. It would be interesting if Mercedes hired Verstappen next to Hamilton. I doubt they could keep the peace then.
No way. They already learned that having 2 number 1 drivers doesn't work (Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg on 2016 season). They won that season, but if it weren't for the totally superior car, they were on a tight margin. Distributing the winning points to two drivers doesn't work to secure both the Driver's championship and the Manufacturer's championship. There's a reason why Red Bull picked Max Verstappen over Carlos Sainz instead of having both, or why Ferrari had troubles last season with LeClerc suddenly performed better than Vettel.
Is it fair? No. Drivers like Barrichello and Massa never got a title, while arguably they are champion-level drivers. I think Bottas is someone in that position right now.
The other question is would you rather be in Bottas' shoes of being on the top team but the number 2 driver, or like Ricciardo or Hulkenberg which are also top tier drivers but haven't had a clear shot to compete or even the chance to get a podium for the latter. Motorsports (and Formula 1) is a cruel world.
I think Bottas is in a comfortable spot but has to give up his dreams of a title as long as Hamilton is around. Some drivers are ok with that, some aren’t. Ricciardo probably could also have stayed with Red Bull as a very good number two driver but he didn’t want to give up the title dream. Unfortunately he seems to have bet on the wrong team...
Yeah, and I'm sure he'd like the chance but either he puts everything in for a chance (as Rosberg did and decided he burned out after winning), or take the hit and do a good job for the best team.
Ricciardo made the same move Lewis did, and the delay in the new regulation opens up opportunity for him. How good or what could it be is very uncertain, though. I think he's very unfortunate in timing; I think he would take the chance of the Mercedes seat if he weren't in contract at that time. And if he knows McLaren were moving to Mercedes engine, he might consider that too. Nobody knows what Renault showed him that made him sign though. Or maybe $80M can wipe that pain away..
> There's a reason why Red Bull picked Max Verstappen over Carlos Sainz instead of having both
Redbull haven’t really resolved this problem though. Max obviously has championship potential, and is their number one driver. But they haven’t managed to find a suitable teammate for him. They need their own Bottas. A driver who is comfortable being the number 2, but talented enough to lock out the front row and consistently get on the podium with Max. They’ve found good personality fits (Albon is perfect in that respect), but haven’t found anybody who is also talented enough to give Redbull constructor potential.
That said, I really like Bottas, and I think it’s sad he doesn’t have a shot at fighting for the championship. His performance at CotA last year was amazing, and it felt great to watch him really race Hamilton (though the team arguably gave Bottas a safer strategy in this case).
Albon is still really new though. Bottas didn't get to his current form after a few years in Williams. I think Albon has the potential; this year is supposed to be the time to prove it. At least he's much better than Gasly and the team picked Albon over Kvyat. I'm really excited about him. The whole younger squad is really exciting to watch, can't wait for the battle in 3-5 years.
Yeah I really hope Albon does well at Redbull. He’s got a very likeable personality, and he’s clearly got the potential at least. His performance at Interlagos was fantastic, it was very sad to see him get taken out by Hamilton. I’m just not sure if Redbull have the patience to foster his talent on the No 1 squad. That’s supposed to be what Toro Rosso is for.
More than 4 decades later, none of the other manufacturers come close to Toyota still. Why?
Because the change is one in how you understand the world. This is really hard to do, particularly as an organisation. It needs to reinvent yourself from scratch. It means killing your org to live again.
The org will fight it. People that were favored will lose power and standing. They will fight it. Things will get worse before getting better. They will fight it. It will need different way to count success. That will be used against it. It will need new way to trust. They will say it is laxist.
Said otherwise: the current structure work good enough. There is not enough reward and competitive pressure to make the huge opportunity cost of change an accepted strategy.
You can apply that model of change infinitely. Ask yourself why we have not seen huge swath of the web move into Elixir as an example.
I've experienced a few "agile transformations". They almost never stuck. The thing that mostly worked was creating teams with a majority of experienced agile devs, people willing to self improve and execute. And when the job is over, it all starts falling apart. Some team members might be believers now, they become disillusioned and leave. Some might have been good followers, but quickly conform to the old ways. You only have a temporary influence on a single team or project. You can't change a company's culture like that, without it hitting rock bottom first. This is very similar to overcoming addiction.
I've long wondered why NUMMI worked where others failed, something I believe is largely ignored in most literature: the factory closed. All the workers were out of a job for several weeks. And in comes Toyota with jobs for many workers, with the hopes of giving every single worker their job back.
I saw an interesting talk by Alistair Cockburn (one of the Agile Manifesto guys), where he said he never once saw a succesful "agile transformation". Just too much resistance to change to have any chance to succeed.
What did succeed, is to create what he called a "new building", meaning a new subcompany (sometimes literally in a new building) with a different (agile) culture, and only letting in people that are interested in making it work. Slowly let the old company die, the new one grow. It takes years and years.
Regarding Nummi: the same workers work, but it was obvious and well known from the beginning that it was a different way to do things. It was not a change from the previous one. It was a different organisation altogether
For non-F1-followers like me: I spent 5 minutes on Wikipedia so you don't have to, and "they" is Mercedes, who re-entered Formula 1 in 2010 after a 55 year hiatus, and won every year since 2014. Pretty spectacular!
> Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success?
It's not a secret. Many other organizations (not in F1, by your description) operate this way. It's well understood, but...
> Why aren't more teams copying this?
... everyone on the team needs to buy in to this approach. One selfish team member can slowly ruin the whole thing.
The uncomfortable reality of these cultures is that when someone in the culture is not truly committed, or is putting their self-interest ahead of the team, they need to be removed. A lot of leaders are not strong enough to recognize that and take action.
Stuff like this makes me wonder. How strong was the culture really, if it didn’t know how to handle having one errant member among its ranks? That is going to happen eventually, on a long enough timeline.
It is similar to why organizations don't hire 10x engineers only. It is difficult, a lot of work and hiring just one bad manager could cause the 10x engineers to leave or become unproductive. It is far easier to treat engineers like cogs and hire people that check the right boxes and throw them into a standard scrum process.
I believe other teams do copy this, but not in driver pairings. A different F1 example are the pit crews. There's no time or space for blame if a pit stop is messed up. In the first season, Haas has pit stop issues twice in the same race. It wasn't the mechanics that were blamed, but the team principal took it upon himself to diffuse the scenario as the team's failing. This is likely similar across all the team as any doubt or the hesitation for the mechanics would only risk additional mistakes.
Drivers will always be pitted against their teammate though. F1 is technically a team sport, but the real judgement for the drivers is how well they compare against their teammate. Each driver wants to win, that's why they compete.
There's a Youtube talk [Martial Arts Mind][1] by Peter Ralston about a change he underwent when he stopped seeing the opponent as an adversary. It's a very deep subject. Easy to get wrong too :)
Blameless postmortems should come with the equal pay ( as in equal dollar amount, equal value of equity, and equal value of other perks) for everyone in the tech organization.
If it does not, then it is a propaganda tool embraced by people who extract more value from the people below them.
If it accepted that is not a person or persons whose mistakes create problems requiring postmortems meaning it was the collective that made mistakes then it should also be accepted that it is never a person or persons whose accomplishments propelled the company forward rather it is the collective. So everyone in the collective should get paid the amount of money for equal contributions to ups and downs, should not they?
On a scale from "individual" to "collective", both blame and success can be attributed to either extreme (or middle) on a case by case basis. I don't believe it can be possible to claim a universal generalization for all cases.
Yes. But it's a dynamic relationship and radical equity is still not justified even here. Equity and worth is not a function of solely participation. It's a mixture of participation, loyalty, honesty, competence, sacrifice, seniority and priorities in life. You can always name more variables and it will always put the radical argument in a greyer zone.
Edit: I use the word "radical" as in outstanding, outside of the box, noticeably different. It isn't meant as a derogatory term.
> But it's a dynamic relationship and radical equity is still not justified even here. Equity and worth is not a function of solely participation.
It is a function solely of contribution in whatever way one contributes be that by being the smartest person in a room who needs only one minute to do what it takes others three months, or by being people who labor for three months so the smartest person in a room can do something else.
Since the negative contribution is evenly split among everyone ( blameless ) so should be the positive contribution.
What you define is not contribution, it's participation. Killing meritocracy entirely also kills the incentive to improve oneself. Distributing equity non-equally is just one of those dials which if you adjust slightly, you reward people who are able to self improve more. Do it too much, you alienate your team (as you pointed out). Do it never, you reward the lazy by not rewarding the hardworking. I think you are on the right track with your intentions but having a balanced approach is the key and choosing one extreme over the other is not the path forward here.
This has been a fun debate but I believe what I think about the topic can be summarized as this:
Healthy competition without the toxicity is possible in the workplace. It is just hard and needs careful attention to detail. If you ask how much, that's probably the subject of ideology. When ideologies battle, it's either bloody and both sides lose or it's small wins and loses achieved by mutual compromise. No matter where the balance is met, it must progress with dialogue.
> We must strive to understand that accidents don’t happen because people gamble and lose.
The problem is that some accidents do happen because people gamble and lose – or rather, because people cut corners is ways that probably won't matter but sometimes really, really do.
The best approach needs to balance both causes of error. I agree that most organizations tend to err too far in the "blame someone" direction – but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to err by going too far in the other direction.
They cut corner because the system tell them to do so. Not because they are fundamentally flawed into liking to gamble. I can make a perfect product with zero gamble, if i get infinite money and noone need to use it.
As I understand it the key to the blameless and just culture is to keep going to the bottom of it: "You cut corners. You were incentivized to cut corners. Why? Why do those incentives exist? What can we do to remove those incentives in the future?"
The core of the philosophy is assuming people come to work to do a good job, and when they don't do a good job, there are reasonable explanations that involve people making locally rational decisions. The goal is to make the system stable in a way that making locally rational decisions translates to globally good decisions.
As complex systems grow, The Rules™ grow into tangled conflicting messes. The mundane, every-day experts who have to live inside those complex systems must develop, among many other skills, a sense of knowing which rules to follow and which rules to violate in order to get the work done.
After this incident we can say, they clearly violated this rule. They cut corners. However, we have no clear view of all the incidents they prevented in the past because they violated that rule. We cannot see that there were twenty other times when violating this rule in exactly this way was exactly what kept things working.
This is the nature of hindsight bias. After the fact, it's completely obvious exactly which of the conflicting rules should have been followed. It is obvious because we now know the outcome.
If you're in the thick of an incident making high-pressure, and high-consequence decisions under duress there is no way to actually predict the outcomes that will become obvious only after-the-fact.
Taking a balanced approach is good universal advice for everything. But in this context, it misses the point of blameless retros.
Our cultural norm is to stop investigations once we find the culprit who cut-corners. The consequences of that systemic habit are that we fail to learn and understand all of the complexity that actually contributed to the failure. We cut short our own learning. What's more, we also effectively teach everyone in the system to conceal or withhold their full understanding in the next incident. So we learn only the most shallow details about what actually happened for this incident, and we suppress what we might learn in the next incident.
I once worked somewhere that did blameless technical postmortems very well. Whenever something broke, we kept asking questions until we had uncovered what went wrong, and we constantly reminded each other that our failings were in the process, not the people.
It worked great, and we ended up with much more robust systems than most other places I'd worked.
Sadly, they didn't apply the same ideals to social faux pas. We had an older gentleman working for us who, on hearing a younger member of the team propose an idea, said: "okay, I'll play the straight man: why won't this cause [...]"
In the poor guy's generation, "straight man" was a stand-up comedy term for the person who acts deadpan and surprised while their partner makes with the comedy. But after explaining his actions and the expectations/assumptions behind them, he was reprimanded, ostracized in the office, and left before long.
Even though I liked working on the technical systems at that job, I felt isolated and uncomfortable speaking with my peers after that. I've never been good with people, and what if I made a mistake?
That sort of terror is what non-technical folks feel when you ask them to start taking on new responsibilities, and it's why these blameless systems are so important.
"Straight man" still has that meaning today, just like "deadpan" and "foil". It's not a generational thing. It was probably a contextual thing; my guess is that nobody expected terms of comedy and theater at the workplace. But don't blame it on youth...
>my guess is that nobody expected terms of comedy and theater at the workplace
That's a bit of a stretch, metaphors are the grease for the engine of the English language. In fact I've even heard this specific phrase many times before, recently. It's a metaphor in active use. The company was probably looking for a reason to get rid of him.
In fact I argued it's a metaphor in active use! But I also guessed metaphors taken out of context are likely to be misinterpreted. I know plenty of native English speakers who don't know what "straight man" means.
But metaphors are always taken out of context. Nobody says it's time to bite the bullet with a bullet in their hand. Referring to a situation that is not presently happening in order to explain one that is is the definition of a metaphor.
That's not what I meant by context. "In context" doesn't mean "the literal meaning" and it's easy to see that "straight man" wasn't taken literally by the person who took offense, either. Metaphors must be used in context, they just aren't meant to be taken literally; a metaphor about comedy/theater is always in context when watching (or acting) in one. You don't have to explain it.
Likewise, if I talk about a "foil" while cooking in the kitchen, I'm likely to be interpreted one way; if I talk about the same while discussing comedy, it's likely to be taken differently.
>a metaphor about comedy/theater is always in context when watching (or acting) in one
Calling someone in theater a Straight Man isn't a metaphor, that would be an example of a literal usage. A metaphor is when you refer to a distant situation or thing to explain a present one. If you demand that metaphors only be deployed in their "context" you are saying you can only compare situations to themselves.
I don't know if "metaphor" is the word, but in comedy/theater obviously it's not the literal usage either, it's a figure of speech (unless the man is physically straight). That our understanding of this is different is another example that the term wasn't as pervasive or well understood as you initially thought.
Yes, metaphors and figures of speech must be deployed in context, like all of human language. There's a certain kind of humor based on saying things out of context -- I don't recommend you use it at the workplace (or risk being fired). I'm sure you've experienced telling a pun out of context and being misunderstood. The same principle applies.
Human communication is about context. The modern workplace requires more precise consideration of context.
According to your take, you can't use the term "devil's advocate" in this context either -- because it only makes sense in the context of the Catholic church. Metaphors are meant to be used out of context. When I say "I'm in pole position," for example, I don't actually have to be a competitor in an automobile race.
Um, "devil's advocate"? I didn't say anything about that.
But let's roll with it: "devil's advocate" is a phrase appropriate for the situation described in the original post ("let me hear your suggestion, I'll try to find any flaws or objections to it for the sake of debate"), so it has the correct context, whereas "I'll play the straight man to your suggestion" makes little sense outside comedy, and if the offended person had understood it, they could even have thought it meant "you're the person saying funny crazy things, I'm the sensible person hearing them".
> Metaphors are meant to be used out of context.
No. Let me reiterate: every form of human communication needs context in order to be effective. Metaphors must be deployed in context, otherwise they risk being misunderstood, as it happened in this case.
The context of a metaphor is NOT its literal interpretation. If you think that's what I'm saying, I apologize: that's not what I meant at all.
The context is a situation where the metaphor makes sense or applies. A situation where there's a contest and a "best" position is the right context for saying "I'm in pole position", though it doesn't have to be an actual race; a situation where this doesn't apply is not the right context.
"Straight man" makes just as much sense as "devil's advocate," neither of them apply to a workplace situation. The former applies to comedy performances, and the latter applies to biblical characters. Neither can be used in a day-to-day setting according to you. You're drawing a distinction where one can't be made, probably because your ego is preventing you from admitting you're wrong. Have a nice day, I guess.
Oh wait, it's night time, so I shouldn't use that metaphor -- goodbye.
> "Straight man" makes just as much sense as "devil's advocate,"
I disagree. It's easy to see why "straight man" doesn't make sense in this situation if you try to explain to me how it makes sense. I can't. I can explain how "devil's advocate" makes sense though: it means arguing the opposition to an idea not because you necessarily disagree, but because you want to explore the negatives/other possibilities. What does "straight man" mean to you?
> The former applies to comedy performances
Correct.
> the latter applies to biblical characters.
Incorrect. If you think this, you're confusing a metaphor's literal interpretation with its meaning.
"Have a nice day" isn't a metaphor, at this point it seems you're being purposefully obtuse.
> straight man: the person in a comedy duo who speaks lines which give a comedian the opportunity to make jokes
All you have to do is change "comedy duo" to "coworker pair" and "jokes" to "explanation of architecture."
> devils advocate: the popular title of the person appointed by the Roman Catholic Church to challenge a proposed beatification or canonization, or the verification of a miracle
All you have to do is change "person appointed by the Roman Catholic Church" to "coworker" and "challenge a proposed beatification or canonization" to "challenge another person's ideas."
> purposefully obtuse
Is that worse than being unintentionally obtuse, like you're doing?
By the way, have you tried just looking up the word "metaphor?"
> a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Do you see the words at the end? "Not literally applicable."
> All you have to do is change "comedy duo" to "coworker pair" and "jokes" to "explanation of architecture."
But that doesn't work, because it requires changing the meaning/imagery of the metaphor beyond what regular people would recognize. You know, what actually happened in the situation of the original post.
Yes, I can change "straight man" to "spaceship" and "jokes" to "launch into space", but it'd be almost as nonsensical.
> By the way, have you tried just looking up the word "metaphor?"
Yes. Note you misunderstand the definition you quoted. Let me say it once more, then we're done: the CONTEXT of a metaphor is not ITS LITERAL MEANING, so quit yapping about literalness. Context matters. "Straight man" doesn't have the required context, "devil's advocate" does.
I don't expect you to acknowledge what I'm saying. At this point I must assume your ego won't let you budge an inch. Have a nice day! (which is not a metaphor, by the way).
Not having everyone on the team be as familiar with English, especially its idioms and figures of speech, is a great reason to avoid using them and stick to (legalistically) simplistic vocabulary. Unfortunately it also makes its usage feel cold and dry which in turn affects the company culture. There have been plenty of times I wanted to use a phrase that was perfect for the situation at hand and all its connotations would have helped provide lots of context “for free” in the discussion, but couldn’t because I wasn’t sure if certain people on the team would understand due to past misunderstandings among the team.
They might feel self conscious. Or maybe they think they understand it fine even though they’ve misunderstood it. That seems to be what happened to the man who was ostracized for using the perfectly legitimate ”play the straight man” phrase. People don’t always make the best choices and sometimes it’s not immediately obvious why they make terrible ones.
If the meaning you (incorrectly) infer is offensive, you might have a hard time asking... Consider this: what if the person who took offense was gay, was recently harassed at a past workplace, was sensitive about the issue, maybe wasn't a native English speaker, and was told by an older coworker that he would play "the straight man" to his team pitch.
And even then, consider that the offended person replied "say what!?" and in turn the older coworker didn't understand the reaction.
Talking to people is hard. Maybe funny metaphors shouldn't be used unless you know the other person's sense of humor. By the way "playing the straight man" while listening to another person's technical plan for a feature doesn't really parse for me; it sounds like a clumsy use of a figure of speech. I'd be surprised too by this usage.
My guess is that he meant "play the devil's advocate" and got it mixed up half way through. That happens to people all the time with metaphors, especially when our minds are hard at work on the actual problem at hand, sometimes ending up pretty funny, like "we'll burn that bridge when we get to it."
> I've never been good with people, and what if I made a mistake?
This climate of fear made me absolutely miserable. To the point that I have vowed never to be an employee again. I'm not spending 8h a day in an environment where the thought police is breathing down my neck. I'd rather beg on the streets.
I often hear about this stuff but I have never seen it myself. Do people really ostracize others for saying a sentence they don’t like? I can see it if somebody constantly says stupid or offensive things but not for a few mistakes (are they even mistakes?).
I can't vouch for ostracism specifically, but we just had someone at our company add a Slack bot to correct anyone who says the word "guys", and let me tell you I did not feel like it would be appropriate to complain.
Meh, I don't think it's something you should look to change jobs based on. People get weird when they're stressed, and the whole world's pretty stressed right now.
In the height of outrage culture and "safe spaces," yes -- this is a real thing, and yes, "safe spaces" are growing to encroach on your workplace and home soon!
Watch what you say citizen, only those on the highest of horses are allowed to express themselves how they please.
I'm a cofounder at Kintaba (https://kintaba.com) where we spend a lot of time with companies that are implementing postmortems as part of their larger incident management process and it has been fascinating to see how varied the adoption of the practice is even in SV despite the value being well accepted for over a decade in tech (longer in other research circles).
I often recommend anyone who is interested in the topic to check out Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding Human Error [1].
It's a very approachable read and goes into great detail about the underlying theories of safety research that support the value of blame-free cultures and postmortems and addresses common counter-arguments, particularly around the idea that lack of blame = lack of accountability.
Also worth checking out the (free) google SRE Book chapters on Incident Management [2] and Postmortem Culture [3].
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI would really love to read about a blameless postmortem that happened in a dying company where everyone was backstabbing each other. Now, that would be a good story!
In fairness, this story does convey that. The "second story" part is great.
I do wish there was a little more about how management came around to seeing it, how they rectified bonuses and pay and PIPs. There is an untold journey here.
It doesn't have to be a dying company. Many companies that try to transition from startup -> small company -> medium company -> megacorp tend to run into periods of change and insanity in every one of those transitions. I suspect its one of the reasons why most companies die out at some point: the failure to focus on product and focusing instead on politics. Teams turtle down, avoid responsibility (i.e. blame) at every opportunity, the product turns to shit as nobody wants to move a muscle in case anything breaks.
If anyone knows how well it applies to this situation, please do tell me!
For how to do it... there is a community at https://www.learningfromincidents.io/ trying to help.
The consensus so far is to test waters and do some "in parallel", if necessary rogue-ish. The output is so superior in term of learning that you may then use this result as a trojan horse.
You need to carry your water.
a) are the developers bad because they were hired that way? maybe the hiring process is broken
b) are the developers bad because they are not managed/trained properly? maybe managers aren't doing their job, and maybe it's not even their fault because they did not get training in how to manage people in the first place
c) if you implement extra layers (or "synergy coordinators") it probably means that the company hasn't figured out how to communicate properly
I’ve worked with people that I was responsible for training in DevOps, from a starting point of having only ever done GUI-based Ops. Basically starting from complete technical incompetence, and plenty of them succeeded, because they were good people with good attitudes. I’d wager a small team of people like that would always be more productive than a team of any sized comprised of arrogant, combative, CYA assholes.
I watched the latest season of the F1 documentary on Netflix, and what stood out beyond anything else to me was that every team pitted their own drivers against each other, had a "you win or you lose" mentality, screamed at people for messing up, and so on.
All teams except one. One team iterated how they "win as a team and make mistakes as a team", mistakes are an opportunity to learn, and so on. One team showed pretty clearly how they had a good culture surrounding failures.
I'm not at all surprised that this one team is the team that has consistently won the last 6 years in a row.
Why aren't more teams copying this? Why is this one team not more secretive about their recipe to success?
Because the psychological Traits and Needs of all humans are not the same.
Most people who build teams have a sense of their own Needs and Traits and pick strategies/team members that align/compensate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
There is a distribution of Traits/Needs that you need to be aware of within any population, group, team etc.
If you are not aware of those variations and randomly create groups and try to impose strategy, what works and fails will always remain mysterious.
And then Lewis would be gone and we would just be losers.
Is this not an extension of "we win as a team, we lose as a team"? Would this be possible with the same consistency in teams where both drivers are in clear competition with each other for the seat next season?
If you want to see what the same management style looks like with competitive drivers, you can just look at the last time Mercedes had two competitive drivers. That would be in 2016, when Nico Rosberg won the drivers championship with Mercedes. The relationship between Hamilton and Rosberg had become so toxic, that Toto Wolf himself admitted he had no idea how he was going to solve it. It culminated with Hamilton trying his best to hold up Rosberg in traffic in the last race of 2016, because Hamilton needed to keep Rosberg of the Podium if he was going to get the title. You can watch the highlights on YouTube with the team telling him to speed up, while he more or less just refused. The only reason any of that was resolved, was because Rosberg retired after that season.
This story is pretty much repeated in F1 history any time you have two people on the same team competing for the title. Last year LeClerc and Vettel fought so much, and so dangerously on track, that it actually led to both Ferrari drivers crashing into each other and retiring in one race (something which mirrors one of the most controversial crashes in F1 history, when one McLaren teammate crashed into the other at Suzuka in 1989). The entire season was also full of their drivers arguing on the radio about team orders. Then you have the other most dominant driver, Verstappen, who Redbull have been unable to find a suitable teammate for.
To specifically answer your questions, at Mercedes “win as a team” clearly always means “help Hamilton win”. It’s not possible to operate a team where drivers are not fighting for their seat, and history has shown it’s not possible to have a good team culture when both drivers are actually competing with each other for the title.
Mercedes had to protect themselves from this and made the smart choice in choosing Bottas as he was well known for a calm and team focused demeanor. With Bottas, Mercedes could further build the team around Hamilton without causing issues between the drivers.
It would've been really interesting to see the team structure if Rosberg returned in 2017. Mercedes dodged a bullet by getting Bottas at the right time.
Is it fair? No. Drivers like Barrichello and Massa never got a title, while arguably they are champion-level drivers. I think Bottas is someone in that position right now.
The other question is would you rather be in Bottas' shoes of being on the top team but the number 2 driver, or like Ricciardo or Hulkenberg which are also top tier drivers but haven't had a clear shot to compete or even the chance to get a podium for the latter. Motorsports (and Formula 1) is a cruel world.
Ricciardo made the same move Lewis did, and the delay in the new regulation opens up opportunity for him. How good or what could it be is very uncertain, though. I think he's very unfortunate in timing; I think he would take the chance of the Mercedes seat if he weren't in contract at that time. And if he knows McLaren were moving to Mercedes engine, he might consider that too. Nobody knows what Renault showed him that made him sign though. Or maybe $80M can wipe that pain away..
It definitely helps :)
Redbull haven’t really resolved this problem though. Max obviously has championship potential, and is their number one driver. But they haven’t managed to find a suitable teammate for him. They need their own Bottas. A driver who is comfortable being the number 2, but talented enough to lock out the front row and consistently get on the podium with Max. They’ve found good personality fits (Albon is perfect in that respect), but haven’t found anybody who is also talented enough to give Redbull constructor potential.
That said, I really like Bottas, and I think it’s sad he doesn’t have a shot at fighting for the championship. His performance at CotA last year was amazing, and it felt great to watch him really race Hamilton (though the team arguably gave Bottas a safer strategy in this case).
More than 4 decades later, none of the other manufacturers come close to Toyota still. Why?
Because the change is one in how you understand the world. This is really hard to do, particularly as an organisation. It needs to reinvent yourself from scratch. It means killing your org to live again.
The org will fight it. People that were favored will lose power and standing. They will fight it. Things will get worse before getting better. They will fight it. It will need different way to count success. That will be used against it. It will need new way to trust. They will say it is laxist.
Said otherwise: the current structure work good enough. There is not enough reward and competitive pressure to make the huge opportunity cost of change an accepted strategy.
You can apply that model of change infinitely. Ask yourself why we have not seen huge swath of the web move into Elixir as an example.
This resonates with me.
I've experienced a few "agile transformations". They almost never stuck. The thing that mostly worked was creating teams with a majority of experienced agile devs, people willing to self improve and execute. And when the job is over, it all starts falling apart. Some team members might be believers now, they become disillusioned and leave. Some might have been good followers, but quickly conform to the old ways. You only have a temporary influence on a single team or project. You can't change a company's culture like that, without it hitting rock bottom first. This is very similar to overcoming addiction.
I've long wondered why NUMMI worked where others failed, something I believe is largely ignored in most literature: the factory closed. All the workers were out of a job for several weeks. And in comes Toyota with jobs for many workers, with the hopes of giving every single worker their job back.
What did succeed, is to create what he called a "new building", meaning a new subcompany (sometimes literally in a new building) with a different (agile) culture, and only letting in people that are interested in making it work. Slowly let the old company die, the new one grow. It takes years and years.
They also have a budget of close to $500 million, which can't hurt. Ferrari and Red Bull are the only teams that come close to that.
Fourth largest budget is Renault at almost $200 million less.
We'll see if they continue to stack up with the $175 million budget cap that's coming in 2021.
It's not a secret. Many other organizations (not in F1, by your description) operate this way. It's well understood, but...
> Why aren't more teams copying this?
... everyone on the team needs to buy in to this approach. One selfish team member can slowly ruin the whole thing.
The uncomfortable reality of these cultures is that when someone in the culture is not truly committed, or is putting their self-interest ahead of the team, they need to be removed. A lot of leaders are not strong enough to recognize that and take action.
Drivers will always be pitted against their teammate though. F1 is technically a team sport, but the real judgement for the drivers is how well they compare against their teammate. Each driver wants to win, that's why they compete.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi7ph8GrRDk
If it does not, then it is a propaganda tool embraced by people who extract more value from the people below them.
Edit: I use the word "radical" as in outstanding, outside of the box, noticeably different. It isn't meant as a derogatory term.
It is a function solely of contribution in whatever way one contributes be that by being the smartest person in a room who needs only one minute to do what it takes others three months, or by being people who labor for three months so the smartest person in a room can do something else.
Since the negative contribution is evenly split among everyone ( blameless ) so should be the positive contribution.
This has been a fun debate but I believe what I think about the topic can be summarized as this:
Healthy competition without the toxicity is possible in the workplace. It is just hard and needs careful attention to detail. If you ask how much, that's probably the subject of ideology. When ideologies battle, it's either bloody and both sides lose or it's small wins and loses achieved by mutual compromise. No matter where the balance is met, it must progress with dialogue.
The problem is that some accidents do happen because people gamble and lose – or rather, because people cut corners is ways that probably won't matter but sometimes really, really do.
The best approach needs to balance both causes of error. I agree that most organizations tend to err too far in the "blame someone" direction – but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to err by going too far in the other direction.
The core of the philosophy is assuming people come to work to do a good job, and when they don't do a good job, there are reasonable explanations that involve people making locally rational decisions. The goal is to make the system stable in a way that making locally rational decisions translates to globally good decisions.
has this ever, ever happened?
After this incident we can say, they clearly violated this rule. They cut corners. However, we have no clear view of all the incidents they prevented in the past because they violated that rule. We cannot see that there were twenty other times when violating this rule in exactly this way was exactly what kept things working.
This is the nature of hindsight bias. After the fact, it's completely obvious exactly which of the conflicting rules should have been followed. It is obvious because we now know the outcome.
If you're in the thick of an incident making high-pressure, and high-consequence decisions under duress there is no way to actually predict the outcomes that will become obvious only after-the-fact.
Taking a balanced approach is good universal advice for everything. But in this context, it misses the point of blameless retros.
Our cultural norm is to stop investigations once we find the culprit who cut-corners. The consequences of that systemic habit are that we fail to learn and understand all of the complexity that actually contributed to the failure. We cut short our own learning. What's more, we also effectively teach everyone in the system to conceal or withhold their full understanding in the next incident. So we learn only the most shallow details about what actually happened for this incident, and we suppress what we might learn in the next incident.
It worked great, and we ended up with much more robust systems than most other places I'd worked.
Sadly, they didn't apply the same ideals to social faux pas. We had an older gentleman working for us who, on hearing a younger member of the team propose an idea, said: "okay, I'll play the straight man: why won't this cause [...]"
In the poor guy's generation, "straight man" was a stand-up comedy term for the person who acts deadpan and surprised while their partner makes with the comedy. But after explaining his actions and the expectations/assumptions behind them, he was reprimanded, ostracized in the office, and left before long.
Even though I liked working on the technical systems at that job, I felt isolated and uncomfortable speaking with my peers after that. I've never been good with people, and what if I made a mistake?
That sort of terror is what non-technical folks feel when you ask them to start taking on new responsibilities, and it's why these blameless systems are so important.
That's a bit of a stretch, metaphors are the grease for the engine of the English language. In fact I've even heard this specific phrase many times before, recently. It's a metaphor in active use. The company was probably looking for a reason to get rid of him.
Likewise, if I talk about a "foil" while cooking in the kitchen, I'm likely to be interpreted one way; if I talk about the same while discussing comedy, it's likely to be taken differently.
Context matters.
Calling someone in theater a Straight Man isn't a metaphor, that would be an example of a literal usage. A metaphor is when you refer to a distant situation or thing to explain a present one. If you demand that metaphors only be deployed in their "context" you are saying you can only compare situations to themselves.
I don't know if "metaphor" is the word, but in comedy/theater obviously it's not the literal usage either, it's a figure of speech (unless the man is physically straight). That our understanding of this is different is another example that the term wasn't as pervasive or well understood as you initially thought.
Yes, metaphors and figures of speech must be deployed in context, like all of human language. There's a certain kind of humor based on saying things out of context -- I don't recommend you use it at the workplace (or risk being fired). I'm sure you've experienced telling a pun out of context and being misunderstood. The same principle applies.
Human communication is about context. The modern workplace requires more precise consideration of context.
But let's roll with it: "devil's advocate" is a phrase appropriate for the situation described in the original post ("let me hear your suggestion, I'll try to find any flaws or objections to it for the sake of debate"), so it has the correct context, whereas "I'll play the straight man to your suggestion" makes little sense outside comedy, and if the offended person had understood it, they could even have thought it meant "you're the person saying funny crazy things, I'm the sensible person hearing them".
> Metaphors are meant to be used out of context.
No. Let me reiterate: every form of human communication needs context in order to be effective. Metaphors must be deployed in context, otherwise they risk being misunderstood, as it happened in this case.
The context of a metaphor is NOT its literal interpretation. If you think that's what I'm saying, I apologize: that's not what I meant at all.
The context is a situation where the metaphor makes sense or applies. A situation where there's a contest and a "best" position is the right context for saying "I'm in pole position", though it doesn't have to be an actual race; a situation where this doesn't apply is not the right context.
Oh wait, it's night time, so I shouldn't use that metaphor -- goodbye.
I disagree. It's easy to see why "straight man" doesn't make sense in this situation if you try to explain to me how it makes sense. I can't. I can explain how "devil's advocate" makes sense though: it means arguing the opposition to an idea not because you necessarily disagree, but because you want to explore the negatives/other possibilities. What does "straight man" mean to you?
> The former applies to comedy performances
Correct.
> the latter applies to biblical characters.
Incorrect. If you think this, you're confusing a metaphor's literal interpretation with its meaning.
"Have a nice day" isn't a metaphor, at this point it seems you're being purposefully obtuse.
Have a nice day!
All you have to do is change "comedy duo" to "coworker pair" and "jokes" to "explanation of architecture."
> devils advocate: the popular title of the person appointed by the Roman Catholic Church to challenge a proposed beatification or canonization, or the verification of a miracle
All you have to do is change "person appointed by the Roman Catholic Church" to "coworker" and "challenge a proposed beatification or canonization" to "challenge another person's ideas."
> purposefully obtuse
Is that worse than being unintentionally obtuse, like you're doing?
By the way, have you tried just looking up the word "metaphor?"
> a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Do you see the words at the end? "Not literally applicable."
But that doesn't work, because it requires changing the meaning/imagery of the metaphor beyond what regular people would recognize. You know, what actually happened in the situation of the original post.
Yes, I can change "straight man" to "spaceship" and "jokes" to "launch into space", but it'd be almost as nonsensical.
> By the way, have you tried just looking up the word "metaphor?"
Yes. Note you misunderstand the definition you quoted. Let me say it once more, then we're done: the CONTEXT of a metaphor is not ITS LITERAL MEANING, so quit yapping about literalness. Context matters. "Straight man" doesn't have the required context, "devil's advocate" does.
I don't expect you to acknowledge what I'm saying. At this point I must assume your ego won't let you budge an inch. Have a nice day! (which is not a metaphor, by the way).
If someone doesn't understand an idiom, why can't they ask?
And even then, consider that the offended person replied "say what!?" and in turn the older coworker didn't understand the reaction.
Talking to people is hard. Maybe funny metaphors shouldn't be used unless you know the other person's sense of humor. By the way "playing the straight man" while listening to another person's technical plan for a feature doesn't really parse for me; it sounds like a clumsy use of a figure of speech. I'd be surprised too by this usage.
This climate of fear made me absolutely miserable. To the point that I have vowed never to be an employee again. I'm not spending 8h a day in an environment where the thought police is breathing down my neck. I'd rather beg on the streets.
I saw another engineer get hit for talking about triggering a job since "using triggering improperly downplays the trauma of survivors".
Not sure what that means other than it is time to set the LinkedIn status to looking.
This is nuts. Where is this? Silicon Valley?
Watch what you say citizen, only those on the highest of horses are allowed to express themselves how they please.
Sounds like some one had done a diversity course and missed the point, to be kind. There are other less charitable conclusions that could be drawn.
sounds like a horrible place to work anyway, blameless postmortems aside.
I often recommend anyone who is interested in the topic to check out Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding Human Error [1].
It's a very approachable read and goes into great detail about the underlying theories of safety research that support the value of blame-free cultures and postmortems and addresses common counter-arguments, particularly around the idea that lack of blame = lack of accountability.
Also worth checking out the (free) google SRE Book chapters on Incident Management [2] and Postmortem Culture [3].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
[2] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...
[3] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/postmortem-...