John Cutlers recently talk with Gene Kim reminded me of the great book; Wiring the winning organization and the earlier podcast; The Idealcast. So much inspiring content. This metaphor about Steve and Gene moving a couch is great in so many ways. (Transcript from their recent talk) Gene: And so you might think that this is all brawn work, no brain work allowed. And yet, you know, there's actually a whole bunch of problems that don't have obvious answers, like, you know, where's the center of gravity, to get through a narrow doorway around which axis do they rotate? And, you know, to get through a narrow winding staircase, who goes first, do they face forwards or backwards? And of course, they don't need consultants or focus groups, right? Just by picking up the couch, fast [00:02:00] trial and error, um, but most importantly, communication coordination, we can have some confidence that Steve and Gene will be able to achieve what they want to do. But there are all these things that we can do as leaders to make their work more difficult. We can turn off all the lights, right? Which makes the work take longer. They can actually, uh, hurt the furniture, hurt themselves. But there's another thing that leaders can do, um, you know, such as introducing a lot of, uh, noise, loud music, or even introducing an intermediary, where Steve and Gene can no longer talk directly with each other. They have to go through work orders, JIRA, tickets, you know, account managers, lawyers, so forth. Suddenly under those conditions, we can imagine scenarios where they will not be able to achieve their goal. So it's so interesting, right? We haven't changed the nature of the couch. We've actually changed what we call the Layer 3 wiring. And so I think the couch is such an interesting metaphor because it really embodies two very important concepts. Coherence. To what degree can Steve and Gene work as a coherent and unified whole? And coupling, right? They are inherently coupled to each other through the couch.
"He (Dr. Ron Westrum) also introduced me to the term socio technical maestro. And it's like five things: high energy, high standards, great in the large, great in the small, and they love walking the floor." Gene Kim https://lnkd.in/gYAAfZbp
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