The no excuses culture
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
Saying "no excuses" and "we're holding people accountable" might fix the excuses problem, but it exacerbates the blame problem. "Holding people accountable" is just blaming people harder and hoping that will pressure then into perfection. It might work for a little while, but it's unsustainable. People will crack. This is especially bad in this story because it's literally coupled with a threat of termination.
The real solution, I think, is to not play the blame game. Instead of "whose fault is this" you can just operate in facts: "what happened", "how can we fix it", "how can we avoid it in the future". Sometimes the facts reflect badly on someone ("he showed up high and made the wrong decision") but more often there's no blame needed to address the problem ("he made the wrong decision because nobody trained him"). Instead of creating a culture where people turn against each other to "hold each other accountable" for problems, you want to create a culture where people team up to solve problems.
The story here is a success story, but I don't think it can be attributed to the "no excuses" rule--I've seen similar policies fail miserably. Instead, I'd attribute their success to their encouragement to identify problems early and ask for help. But that probably could have been done with less friction if they had addressed the blame problem.
By setting a tone with questions like "What happened? How can we fix this problem from happening in future?" the team will end up finding solutions with technology or process.
As a manager, I feel you're job is to try and get your team to problem solve - using their tools and knowledge to come up with solutions.
In the example from the comment above, if someone is showing up high, or doing something really bad, then it's up to the manager to have the discussion about with the employee. Obviously if bad patterns repeat themselves then that's ground for termination.
First, this creates selection for a culture that punches below its weight. Never willing to stetch itself. Underperformers apply here.
Second, this is fine when you don't have external dependencies who you can't simply fire. You may have to work at the speed of an organization that doesn't share these values and this becomes the rate limiting step to your growth.
Third, if your company is a rocketship and you have a lot of leverage over your employees, you may be able to pull this, but in practice you're going to have to pick your battles. Failure to create a safe work environment can erode trust and make for a toxic and fearful workplace.
Having a safe work environment isn't the same thing as not holding people accountable.
Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative solutions.
I think for any of us to try and go into specifics on that particular case, without a lot more information (unless we were there), is an exercise in pointless speculation. I think it goes without saying that all generalizations are flawed, and I'm sure the company did need more than just "stop giving me excuses". But a culture of no accountability can be a cause that needs to be addressed.
Read on the Toyota Production System for alternative solutions.
I devour everything on TPS / Lean / Kaizen that I can get my hands on. :-)
The way I see it, the symptom is giving excuses the day of, and the problem is people thinking they are entitled to a job with only putting forth minimal effort.
What Steve Blank writes here is the outer dialog and what seems to be missing is the inner dialog - listen to what your reports say! When an engineer says to you, at the end of the day, "this component just doesn't make any sense and I don't know what to do to make it work" don't just slap them on the back on the way out the door and say "I'm sure you'll figure it out, just try a little harder," maybe you as a manager should engage a little more then in the moment.
If they don't spare a thought for what future problems can come up and make allowances and contingencies for these risks then they can't manage. Who cares if you tell them about problems early if there's no ability/wiggle room to change directions?
If management don't want surprises, try thinking ahead. It's called risk management. Who is to blame when a predictable issue eventuates? Not engineering. If you have no slack in the schedule get ready for shit to hit the fan.
Perhaps this is necessary: I can't think of how else to manage a classroom than to have hard deadlines for things like homework assignments. Even in college, by definition, the work is finished when the semester ends.
I'm personally guilty of missing deadlines at work, and if I were permitted to be honest about it (or if it even mattered), my three excuses would be:
1. Managing the complexity of my job is over my head, because there are too many internal dependencies.
2. I'm going to miss this deadline because x[n] didn't happen, and I can't make those things happen.
3. I was kind of hoping the task would vanish, as roughly 75% of urgent tasks seem to.
1) in the freedom of choice way
I think that only wing incompatible with authoritarianism is pro-democracy crowd.
The Libertarian Party has had no problems with nominating authoritarians: Bob Barr comes to mind. Gary Johnson willingly sent people to prison for drugs as governor. The LP is more of a flag of convenience for protest votes.
I would prefer my government to offer more liberty, than, say my employer.
That there are authoritarians in academia isn't too surprising - it's all about politics ;)
Well no. A lot of management thinking (5 Whys etc) has gone into breaking down problems into micro-blockers.
If your graphic designer is constantly sick, then that is a problem, and it doesn't mean that your VP deserves to be fired for failing to open up Photoshop himself. It's not the VP's job to do as it as the VP is not a graphic designer. The VP isn't a hero for having a go- what the VP produces is likely to be shit.
'No excuses' cultures tend to, far from raising accountability, attract the kind of mediocre performers who want to be told what to do, don't want to stretch themselves (as they're frightened of failure) and are looking for the next person to throw under the bus. No thanks.
Some would say that's the difference between a graphic designer and a VP. Steve Jobs had a similar view:
> Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn't have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you're the janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, "is crossed when you become a VP.
> By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.
> The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was to build a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving.
Let's call this disingenuous bullshit what it is - management by fear. Don't tell me you're about 'collective problem solving' in an environment where people are constantly fearing for their jobs.
My interpretation is he's simply advocating that if someone is aware of an issue that will set a project deadline back, don't keep it a secret and surprise everyone when the deadline isn't met.
Instead of "management by fear", build a culture where missing meeting deadlines is OK as long as a valid reason was communicated to the stake holders BEFORE the due date (no surprises). If a someone who's a project dependency had a family member pass away which will likely lead to a project delay, Blank is suggesting that's something that can be communicated honestly + transparently to a superior (and very much understandably - should be no fear involved). The upside is the superior can potentially reallocate resources to keep the project on track while not be getting caught off guard with a project unexpectedly derailed.
If this is his point, he's a lousy writer.
Blank is talking about acknowledging and dealing with risks early.
True that. He also mentioned firing people for not complying with his new rules several times. And also that he did. Those seem like the more substantive acts of his reign, as communicated in this post.
However, we don't know the exact circumstances behind the firings. I'm giving Steve the benefit of the doubt that he didn't fire folks who slipped deadlines just once, but removed though who consistently didn't deliver or acknowledge risks early.
Effective policies need teeth. Particularly if your company is in a lean position (emerging from bankruptcy). It reminds me of the "War time CEO" chapter from Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing about Hard Things".
That's like expecting your relationships to go well with no upkeep on your side, only a "tell me if I'm doing something wrong"!
A common attitude of effective managers as documented by First, Break All The Rules can be summed up by, "I never waited too long to make the right hire. I never fired the wrong one quickly enough." Having the wrong employee is very toxic for your organization and culture.
The rules that Steve laid out do not actually put pressure on people. They amount to, "Be accountable for what you say, try to make it work, and let people know quickly once you hit a roadblock." It is about effort and communication, not achieving results.
People who don't put in effort and don't communicate can't be made to, and can't stay. But people who do, can. And, on average, this will work out well.
Just want to clarify: It's subjective perspective. It is pressure and it is about achieving results, but it's not unreasonable or unexpected for any business. I pay you, you do work. Period. Or the company fails.
>> People who don't put in effort and don't communicate can't be made to, and can't stay.
Depends on the personality of the individual. Make sure you work with them first and figure out if you CAN get them to cooperate. If you don't bother trying but just put up the rules and say "follow this", there is the possibility you'll dump a good employee and have to spend the next 6 months getting HR to replace him/her.
Right. Whether there is pressure is a subjective judgement. But the fact that you feel pressure DOES NOT make it an objective fact that someone else is putting pressure on you.
To get to an objective fact, you would need to find fair and neutral third parties. Neither of the two people directly involved can actually judge.
As a neutral third party, my impression of Steve Blank is that he is probably a very good person to work for. I have been in environments similar to the one that he described. And I found them very good environments to be in.
To paraphrase what someone else said, "If a person is saying you're pressuring them, it's not your place to say you aren't"
The challenge with Steve's rules is that people have to fight defensive behavior within themselves. If you believe that Steve will use your actions against you, it is really hard to follow his rules. If everyone follows his rules with trust that things will work well, following them is easy and things work well. If you can't trust him, then you don't belong in that organization.
But given what I know about him from years of observation at a distance, he means what he says and says what he means. I do not believe that he will use people's actions against them. And it would quickly not work out for him if he did.
For the rest of us, setting clear expectations produces the opposite of fear, it gives you confidence in what you are expected to do.
My experience is, there are often other dimensions to the issue of commitment.
There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company. It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner." That's just how things are. Demanding that employees increase their attention to their work won't change this, or at least not for long. As the article suggests, you can work on developing a culture where people are more likely to be forthcoming and cooperative, but that only goes so far.
There are some employees who do attend to their work the way an owner would, often to their own detriment. Overwork is a real problem for their own wellbeing, and their overall ability to grow and change. It can be a problem for the employer as well, for lots of reasons, including an over-reliance on a few key people.
You can make sure that everyone has enough of a stake to consider themselves an owner, as in a co-op, but co-ops don't seem to scale. That's fine for plenty of businesses, but not for the kinds of businesses that venture capital wants to invest in.
EDIT: The clip art illustrating the article, Pinocchio, suggests a moral element in the author's world view, it conflates lying with missing deadlines and making excuses and not keeping people informed. If people are lying to you as a manager, you should ask yourself why.
> There is a conscientiousness that comes from being an owner of a company.
The examples Blank uses in his article is VP-level (highly paid, large equity grants, etc). I think a lot of people are interpreting his advice in the context of someone who isn't managing people.
> It's rare to have an employee who maintains the same level of attention as an "owner."
Agree. But if you are a manager, you are the "owner" (and responsible) for the work of your direct reports.
Ahistorical and naive. If a VP in this organization thinks they might fall under the blade of "no excuses," he will sacrifice any number of his "isn't managing people" people.
Edit: Management should be the ones held accountable for projects slipping their deadlines. The individual contributors don't just auto-assemble into on-time results.
A manager shouldn't have to ping every subordinate every day for status updates, that's annoying to both and should be unnecessary. Management only works through delegation, you need to trust your subordinates to do delegated tasks without hand-holding, but you also need to give them a protocol for exceptions, which is exactly what this is.
Managers usually have other work besides managing people, from their own projects to strategic planning and budgeting. If you are required to also micromanage the projects of your subordinates, you have the wrong subordinates.
A regularly-scheduled meeting tends to become the ONE channel for communication, and with such a meeting on the calendar it is a little unconvincing for a manager to say that they want to hear about blockers before the meeting instead of during it.
The piece is full of good advice on how to set up a culture where things actually get done.
Of course that would require management to be able to actually do something. The best managers I worked for did just that, and I copied their style as much as possible.
Managers that isolate themselves from their department are the very worst kind. One guy I knew literally had a code-lock on his door to make sure he wasn't bothered when he was doing 'important' stuff (which was all the time, his door was always closed). Guess what happened to productivity in that particular company.
Consider the following. Asking for help ends up blocking other employees _also_ laboring under their own deadlines, which incentivizes most employees to ignore requests for help.
Early at IMVU we really struggled with our crash rate. It was a 3D desktop application for _mainstream computers_. This was back before Windows 7 and everyone had terrible onboard graphics chips with equivalently terrible drivers.
During a board of advisors meeting, our CEO presented our crash metrics and justified it by saying "We might not be able to improve these metrics much - we're one of the only applications shipping 3D graphics on almost every computer."
Steve Blank immediately ripped into him: "That's an engineer's justification! Figure it out!"
I felt pretty guilty because I was the one who'd planted that idea in our CEO's head just days before.
Of course there _were_ ways to improve application reliability in the presence of driver crashes. You just have to move the rendering code into another process like Chrome does, detect when it crashes, and restart. :)
I find that I like Steve Blank less and less.
You might as well yell at your lawyers, your accountants or a physicist. Some things are.
The problem is that, once in a while, a professional opinion is wrong. So the Blanks of the world remember only the occasions where they bullied someone and lucked out -- then assume their Non-Excusing was the magic ingredient.
I've worked in numerous Fortune 500's, and without a doubt the biggest piece missing from the dysfunctional teams is always accountability. Or lack of responsibility and ownership (said another way). The high performing teams don't tolerate excuses or abdication of responsibility. They may not come right out and say it explicitly, but between the lines of success, that's what's going on. If you're on a team that sucks, it's probably because no one cares about doing a good job.
There are many ways to increase accountability and responsibility, but sometimes people do need to lose their jobs. Trying hard is not sufficient when you're making six figures a year. Steve Jobs (I think) had the quote - "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, excuses stop mattering". In my world, that's once you start making 100% more money than the median. I've never seen a big organization that couldn't lose 25% of its people and not miss a beat. In some cases 50%.
Anyways, our culture has moved beyond responsibility and accountability. People joke about participation ribbons and "everyone gets a trophy" - but speaking generally, most of the younger employees I've encountered don't know what it takes to really succeed. They don't understand how hard you actually have to work to be better-than-competent at something. I know it sounds very "get off my lawn" - but the change (generalizing of course) is real enough.
It rarely does. It's more usual that once you get past a certain level, the Jobs Rule is reversed. Project failures and corporate problems are mysteriously and inexplicably never caused by bad management or poor executive decisions, and blatant incompetence stops being an impediment to promotion.
The truth is, the high performers meet the deadlines with ease, and go beyond them pretty much effortlessly the majority of the time, so holding them accountable doesn't make them scared, it gives them a platform to feature their ability.
When someone is performing above expectations and others around them are not meeting expectations and not being held accountable, resentment sets in.
One of the best ways to lose your top performers is not to hold everyone accountable.
One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.
You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.
Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.
The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.
It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:
http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...
There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."
It's true they do have ways to get people do do what is directed but they aren't very efficient and organization at the micro level might be good but not at the macro.
There is a reason the military is so absurdly costly and apparently has trouble decisively ending conflicts. Because all the parts are in place doesn't necessarily mean organization at a higher level.
I also offer as evidence the growth of the use of contractors. Because we apparently can't put three guys in a rowboat for less than a million bucks. That's not organization, even if all uniforms are pressed to specification.
The successes the military does enjoy are more a matter of literal brute force and a big budget rather than organized long term planning IMOP.
People in the military usually talk about it being a clusterfuck on the macro level. I think most of the people with this mental model of the military are just office middle managers.
It also made me think of effective management. Imagine that while Rowan was in the jungle looking for Garcia one of his many bosses stopped by and told him to carry a message to Rivera.
Does he do as he's told without complaint? That means dropping his other task. Does he ask his boss which is more important (a question that is often met with "both are important"). Or more directly, which should he do first ("work on them in parallel").
And all this time, while priorities are being reassessed, Garcia is moving through the hills and no messages are being delivered at all.
Petulant, undetermined people do exist in subordinate roles. However, oftentimes managers put up barriers but then weep and moan into their hands - why oh why can't my job be to sit and ask for things to be completed?
No man, who has endeavored to carry out a coursework where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average girl - the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.
Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your school library, teammates are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please get books on Mercury".
Will the teammate quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?
On your life, she will not.
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat shop” and with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned.
In your pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for Calvin, striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold the line in dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be getting an F.
An excuse (ex + causa) is literally an external cause, ie. beyond the responsibility of what has been asked of them.
>Managing people is difficult
>They [military] are damned good at it
Regarding uncountable dead soldiers, who (hopefully) weren't supposed to die, the track record looks kinda skewed.
I had a boss like that, he was an asshole.
The idea that the ideal worker (especially in the information industry) is one that will do what you ask without asking questions or requiring explanation is extremely narcissistic. You don't somehow become a better person than everyone else just because you managed to start a business.
>And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered
>the questions, and explained how to find the information,
>and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of
>the other clerks to help him find Garcia - and then come
> ^^^^^^
>back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose
>my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.
The author supplanted the subject of research with the mythical "Garcia" but even that metaphorical substitution is problematic because if Corregio:Garcia::research:letter then really all the clerks need do is return to the requester and say "I found Corregio".
It rhetorically opens the question of whether Rowan found Garcia or merely found "a" Garcia.
EDIT: subject verb agreement in first sentence. Add qualifying phrase in second sentence.
And for many tasks you simply don't know if it is going to work until the day of. Especially when you are trying to schedule aggressively.
I realize this entire thread is filled with confirmation bias. What I see is that this essay has its own Wikipedia entry, made it into popular culture, and survived for 117 year, which is quite remarkable. So I would be very interested in reading what makes this essay great, because I fail to understand it.
I was enlisted. The military is a mismanaged, incompetent bureaucracy. You will never see a privately owned business as terrible at everything as the military because private businesses can't manage through fear the way the military can. The military is the last bastion of contractual servitude for a reason. Bad leaders would have literally no one left working for them if we were given a choice.
Note that he spent about a third of the post explaining `I didn’t mean “deliver or else.”`. It's an indication that it's hard to pull off.
I have no opinion on this this strategy as such (i.e. I think it sounds pretty good), but please don't try this in your org unless you are very experienced, and feel confident that you can communicate it well.
Not trusting and respecting in your employees will corner them to behave like children and you will eternally (be unhappy to) be their parent. Treat people with trust and respect and expect the same. It will make for a much more happy and a much better performing team and ultimately, company.
If you actually do everything right in your organisation, you'll end up with a "no empty excuses" culture anyway. If you try to enforce a "no excuses" culture without doing all the other things right, then your team is likely suffering and often won't get the chance to express themselves in actually pursuing what they think needs to be done instead. Sometimes, your team members have an equally good idea about where you should be focusing your efforts to get the most value out of them or avoid future pain points, despite what most management people think.
So if you go about this wrong, you might lose that, but what's worse you might end up losing the wrong people. Sometimes things are out of your control. And even when you can get help, when everyone is focused on doing their best to avoid being fired, help from someone else is hard to get.
So if you fix everything that would make following such a management strategy a huge disaster, you quite possibly end up not having to enforce such a strategy, because you got people willing to help each other and people who know what matters and what needs to be done.
You end up with a "no excuses" team after you fix all these, but that's an emergent fact not the fact that got you all your success.
We see this problem in software, especially in DevOps and "agile" shops, because the process is so forgiving of delay. In a manufacturing plant, no product comes out until all the component parts are ready. So there's a "no excuses" culture about running out of parts, or having an assembly line station down unexpectedly. Software rarely has that.
Organizations with real "no excuses" cultures have spares and reserves. They have a backup plan if a key person is sick or unavailable, or something important doesn't show up. They have slogans like "two is one and one is none". This is seldom seen in software development.
[1] http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/digital/pdf/articles/2014-...
It us also price for doing bew things. Web shops that crank one similar project after another tend to be on time - they work like factory.
The article you linked to says precisely the opposite and is more in line with the blog post. LeMay made it clear that results were expected and got them.
I'm in the "tone deaf management bullshit" camp. It starts with the assumption that your people are basically incompetent losers and it's up to you to stomp around and whip them into shape.
It doesn't work in most areas, and it especially doesn't work in software dev.
If your people aren't acting like responsible professionals, either your culture is broken, or you're hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons - or both.
Given the chance most adult professionals will be adult and professional. Some will even take pride in doing a good job.
If that's not happening, unprofessional management won't fix it.
I ran a 40 person development organization that never missed a schedule with that philosophy. Everyone empowered to bring problems up for help, everyone trusted to work independently.
What does that have to do with this article?
Soon as anything is a potential issue raise it, find a mitigation and move on. Simple and works surprisingly well both on an individual basis and at scale.
The due date rolled around, and half the class turned in their papers late, and got docked grades accordingly.
The next semester, there was only one paper late one day.
* There are 60 students, all taking 5 classes, with multiple assignments due at random time points in each class.
* To finish any assignment, the student needs several tasks to be performed by other students in different disciplines.
* The exact amount of effort required for any of those tasks is unknown.
* The college has ordered the professors to assign just a bit more work than can possibly be completed, or equivalently, has under-estimated the number of students needed to complete all of the assigned tasks.
business
entrepreneuer
its it's
there they're their
He was sick of business majors misspelling business, and said after the new policy he didn't have to give anyone an F for that. Nobody complained about it, either.
Give people reasonable standards to live up to, and they will. In fact, they'll thrive on it.
I always misspell that word. I should know better by now. I will go flagellate myself for penance.
Well, that's not much of a memory aid, but maybe it will help anyway.
They're obviously not following Scrum in Action at the letter, but I really saw a striking resemblance with the "agile & lean" company where I work
If I just set deadlines, then I've recreated part of Scrum which has deadlines at the end of Sprints. Deadlines existed long before Scrum was defined.
I think of Agile, Scrum, and Lean as just names for common ideas about the nature of how work can get done efficiently. Very few of the ideas from these practices are unique to those practices. The reasoning for why those ideas work doesn't go away if you don't call it Agile/Scrum/Lean.
The important thing to recognize is that the ideas have merits on their own, and their inclusion in any particular lexicon or philosophy is incidental.
"I will fire you if deadline is suddenly not met and no one else is there find out before if you don't say so" is on the opposite extreme from agile "everything is collective task, we check up on you every four hours and you are neither autonomous nor responsible".
Where in the world do you get this idea? For one, there is no such thing as "agile", in the sense of a prescriptive methodology that would make such a declaration. There are just individual methodologies that claim varying levels of adherence to the Agile Manifesto[1]. And even then, the popular "Agile" methodologies like Scrum, XP, etc. never say that no one has personal responsibility for anything. Some say that teams are self-organizing and that you succeed or fail as a team, but I think everybody understands that that later part doesn't mean you can just come in and stare at the walls all day with no consequences.
we check up on you every four hours
If someone is "checking up on you every four hours" it's almost 100% certain that whatever process you're using has absolutely nothing to do with "agile".
Agile methodology is not "here's a large task, I don't want to hear from you again until it's completed".
Agile methodology is designed for a tech lead to know what each member of the team is doing.
That might be the case for some specific "agile" methodology, but if there's a core essence to Agile, it's about embracing and responding to change... nothing to do with tech leads.
A strict literal reading of the agile manifesto doesn't include daily standups, yes, but if you read it at anything other than the most superficial level, frequent communication is necessary.
Frequent communication doesn't have to be synchronous, prescheduled, or in-person, though, and it doesn't have to be through a heirarchy (team lead).
Also, the phrase "Agile methodology" is almost an oxymoron (and absolutely incorrect in terms of most of the methodologies it is applied to); a development methodology in the usual sense cannot be Agile, though a team's higher-level methodology that controls choice of and change to the development methodology can be.
Besides, the Agile Manifesto explicitly states at least one form of daily interaction: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Having this in the list and then pretending that having standups are the functional opposite of "what Agile really means" is just nonsense.
Every time I see one of these "Ah, but Agile doesn't have to be that way", it makes me think of lynx and w3m. There's the way the majority of browsers work, and then there's ones like these. Yes, you can make the correct technical argument about what a web browser is, and then there's the way that almost everyone thinks of when the word 'browser' is used. File a bunch of bugs about how your front-end is failing in w3m, and then sit back and watch the WONTFIXs roll in.
"Some say that teams are self-organizing and that you succeed or fail as a team"
That is opposite of personal responsibility. There is very little space for making individual decisions and being responsible for them. If you like, you can force your vision, but whole team will be responsible if it was wrong - not you. If you like, you submissively accept other peoples opinions and it will still be the same thing accountability vise.
"I think everybody understands that that later part doesn't mean you can just come in and stare at the walls all day with no consequences."
No you can not and that is good thing. However, it is totally different then case described in the article where employee had to manage own long term tasks without any supervision at all. Article implies that employee was responsible for communicating delays without anyone actively asking about it.
"If someone is "checking up on you every four hours" it's almost 100% certain that whatever process you're using has absolutely nothing to do with "agile"."
Tasks are supposed to be split into small tasks of maximum of half day length, you report on them as you go, there is daily standup and progress is supposed to be evaluated every week.
I see it as a continuum, with a lot of room between "absolute autonomy and no responsibility to the team" and "slave-like adherence to someone else's position". In between there is a place where you take a position and have to sell the rest of your team on it and then once everybody buys in, the whole team does own the decision.
But I think here we're talking about design decisions, architecture and what-not. What I mean earlier was more about responsibility for actually delivering the things you say you're going to deliver. So if, on your self-organizing team, you volunteer to take on the task "Write Fromgizzit-A I/O module" then there is indeed responsibility around actually delivering the code in question, as opposed to coming in every day, spending all day reading HN, and not delivering anything.
If you and code reviewer ends up not agreeing on something, then you are not responsible for delivering it.
But more importantly, agile tasks are max half day long, so your inactivity would be very fast recognizable and responsibility is limited by that. You are not responsible for communicating issues nor recognizing them, you are not responsible for overall deadline nor anything like that. The only thing you are responsible for is not slacking for half a day, everything else is taken for by other people.
We come up with a target that we plan on achieving in 6 weeks and then we have said 6 weeks to execute on that plan. For example, if our goal is to add four features to a product we write it down and the intent is to deliver in six weeks.
That being said, no excuses. When it comes time to deliver we should be able to deliver on anything that we committed to. BUT - and I think this is what Steve does a poor job of spinning - it's not that we have to have our original plan fully executed; rather, if we found a problem along the way it's expected that we raise the issue and course-correct. If one of those four features turns out to hit a snag we alert the PMs and generally just cut back our scope.
The thing is that we are accountable for our work. Accountability does not mean that you'll necessarily accomplish everything on your plate - it just means that at the end of our timeline we don't throw up our arms and say that it didn't get done. We've been transparent with our stakeholders the entire way and so when something goes awry they knew about it well ahead of time and could do their own expectation management with whomever their stakeholders are - thus putting everyone in a much better position.
While I would refrain from calling this a "no excuses" culture - which sounds really dickish and annoyingly managerial - I would say a culture of accountability is an extremely strong and empowering thing. It puts the onus on you to execute but enough latitude to express when execution is no longer feasible within the expected window.
The bulk of the post is about compensating for the lack of excuses with compassion and teamwork, and avoiding creating a culture of blame. This is important. Excuses hide accountability, but blame makes communication impossible.
I'd rather stayed at school an hour longer than doing homework in the afternoon.
Lowered my grade in every class, but my free time was totally worth it.
In the end I still got to study computer science, like I always wanted, so I don't see their point in retrospect...
The title of the article would probably be more palatable as "No surprises" since by "No excuses" he really means no bullshit excuses a day before the deadline. Then again, an article titled "No surprises" probably wouldn't have gotten this many upvotes.
https://www.macstories.net/news/inside-apple-reveals-steve-j...
It's not that "reasons don't matter", so therefore you can know your job is now in the executive suite.
It's rather that once you're an executive, you are (presumably) granted enough power and authority to actually fix problems on your own initiative, before they become visible to the people above you. So if a problem becomes visible to the people above you, it means you didn't exercise all that power and authority at your disposal to prevent that.
I think this causal direction is more useful, because it suggests that there sometimes still are "reasons" that can matter as justifications for failure—as long as those "reasons" are things outside of the reach of the executive's power+authority. For example, a COO won't usually be fired if an political/military emergency grounds all flights and so nobody's stuff gets delivered—because there's nothing they really could have done about that, no amount of planning that would have circumlocuted the problem.
My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome.
In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault.
The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.
Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback.
A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business.
It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present.
But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.
High ranking officers can be relieved of command for doing the right thing, but breaking the rules to do it, a la this based-on-a-true-story movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_fil...
I pulled my kids at homeschooled when it turned out the public schools were a mess where we moved for one duty station. I am "The buck stops here" kind of parent. Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up.
My kids are intensely loyal to me. They know I can be trusted to do what is in their best interest, no excuses.
To be clear, I wasn't talking about things that have negative impacts on your child, but rather things that society blames your child for, and then redirects that blame to you.
An example: if your 10-year-old child just grabs a loaded gun off a table and shoots someone, whether this ends up deemed "accidental" or not, whether someone else is to blame for leaving a loaded gun there or not, people will still (at least partially) blame you for that—for (presumably) not instilling gun safety rules into your child.
But if your 10-year-old child is handed a gun by another adult, and told to shoot someone, blame for that would never land on you: society would deem that coercion, due to the power-imbalance between adults and children, just as much as if an adult were told to shoot someone with a gun held to their own head.
You might blame yourself for the trauma your kid suffers from having shot someone, sure. But, in the situation above, I don't think even you would think you somehow held ultimate causal responsibility for the shooting occurring in the first place. It'd be like blaming yourself for a drunk driver driving through the front of your house and killing someone you love: essentially an "act of god" that happened to have been performed by another human being.
I try really hard to be careful about talking about parenting because I am aware that I was fortunate to be in a position to insist on no excuses. I was able to be a full time mom, in part because my ex was career military, and also my parents were very big on the idea that kids need a full time care taker, so they helped make it possible for me to put my kids first.
But I am talented at certain kinds of insights and one of my rules was that if my kid did not like someone, they were not left with them. So, I did feel responsible for making sure they were generally not left in the care of some dumbass nutcase who might hand them a gun. Nothing as extreme as you describe ever happened, because I was incredibly vigilant about details like vetting folks whom I left my kids with.
So, your example really does not work for me and I imagine we are not going to see eye to eye on this point.
I don't know the age of your children, but speaking of them in a general sense (i.e. they'll still be "your child" until they're 18), I presume they will at some point go to a store on their own, take public transit, etc.? That is, they will be out in public without you, if just for a few minutes, and an adult will be able to just wander up to them and coerce them. Homeschooling doesn't do much to stop this; only bubble-boy paranoia can (and even then...)
But really, even then, people can still break into your home. (Or, as I said, hit your house with their car.) You'd have to live in a bunker.
I fundamentally do not agree with you. My sons were raised with real agency and genuine respect from the get go. They did not cave to bullying by adults, even as children. When away from me in public school, they inferred that they were entitled to enforce the standards I had set at home and they were not inclined to take shit off anyone.
This is not an argument you will "win" with me.
Suffice it to say that I acknowledge that I am fortunate to have had latitude and insight that many parents do not have. I try like hell to not blame other parents when they fail and, instead, to empower them to do better. But my children are grown, I know the results of my handiwork and I basically am a kickass parent.
We should probably just end this discussion here. No one ever wants to believe that any parent can meet the standard I consistently set for myself as a parent.
The point is:
You argued people get deemed responsible for things entirely outside their control, and as an example you pointed out parents are expected to pay for something their kids broke.
The first person to responded pointed out that you're usually not deemed accountable for things entirely outside your control, and in the case of a kid breaking something, you're expected to pay because you have a large amount of control over your kids habits, and you certainly have a large amount of control over your kids whereabouts, so them throwing a stone to break a window is something you could have avoided.
And no one deems you responsible you for things that you couldn't truly control about your kid. As an example, if your kid hits someone with a medicine ball after their gym teacher instructs them to use them in a slightly dangerous way, no one would have you pay the other kid's hospital bill.
In insurance and legal settings, you are not responsible for "acts of God." Obviously, no one can control everything. But trying to figure out where to draw that line separates the wheat from the chaff, the ordinary businesses from the good ones.
Parenting is where I have substantial experience. And it gets all kinds of push back. It is a subtle form of sexism: My experiences do not count because they are mom experiences. It is kind of like the use of the dismissive term "mommy bloggers." I never hear the term "daddy bloggers."
Einstein said something once like "Talented people solve problems. Geniuses prevent them." A healthy no excuses culture is one where the emphasis is on preventing them. I did that as a parent.
But feel free to give me yet one more BS excuse as to why my point of view and examples are somehow invalid, as if that is clever and nothing I have ever heard before.
What about 256 meteors?
Maybe that's not a bad CIO. Maybe nobody is helped by firing him for sport.
But if one meteor—or, more commonly, flooding or a power/internet outage—can cost your large corporation $100MM+ dollars of lost revenue, beyond just the cost of replacing the data-center—then you've set up your architecture all wrong to achieve the KPIs you're being measured on as a CIO, to the point that you probably don't know how to do what you were hired to do. Easier to fire and replace at that point, because the "average" replacement will likely be much better.
On the other hand, firing someone if a DDoS takes down their business is not really justifiable these days, because the average CIO doesn't have enough experience with DDoSes to know how to build for that case. In such a case, the replacement CIO also wouldn't know, so you'd be throwing away built-up experience by firing them.
In the long run, such businesses tend to reap what they sow.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of...
If a child turns out to have a mental disorder, a parent is not held responsible for the outcome of actions of the child.
If the brakes of my car fail due to a manufacturing defect and my passengers die, I will not be held responsible.
You mean "circumvent".
Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, or ambage) is locution that circles around a specific idea with multiple words rather than directly evoking it with fewer and apter words.
I think this pretty much says it:
> By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.
---
What's an excuse? Most dictionaries define it as some variant of "justifying" an event. Some editorialize and use words such as: apologizing for, or making light of. Let's just take the essence, justification.
Therefore, a "no excuses culture" is a culture in which there's no justification for events. Such a culture will likely fail in the long run as it fails to acknowledge the blind spot it's purposely ignoring. I doubt any business people would be proud of not knowing why they're missing targets...
I bet a hat that it was primary the prioritization and planning process that did the trick.
Gee.
It seems like most of the excuses could be boiled down to "Well, you told me to complete a project, but then later you told me not to complete it, so I didn't."
If the total output is more important, I will do what is the most effective action now. E.g. instead of spending time pressing on third parties to give me information, I will work on what I have information for now and leave them proceed at their own pace. Again, that may be good thing if deadline is less important then effectivity.
It sounds to me that previous management did not valued deadlines and did not even made deadlines possible, so naturally employees did things previous management valued.
As many of the commenters on the original piece note, the idea of a "no excuses culture" will be familiar to anyone who's familiar with the culture of the (U.S., anyway) military, and generally speaking it works quite well there. It helps cut through B.S. and keep everyone focused on the idea that results are the thing that matter, which is important when results can literally mean the difference between life and death. And while it can sound to an outsider like a cruel standard, I personally found my exposure to it freeing -- it means not having to deal with the blame-seeking and post-hoc litigation of small mistakes that we all have to struggle with every day in other contexts. So in that respect, I'm all for it.
The thing is, though, in the context of military culture "no excuses" isn't a stand-alone principle the way it's presented here. It's embedded with a bunch of other, complimentary principles that help sand off its roughest edges.
An example would be the principle that responsibility flows uphill: leaders are responsible for failures of their units, even in cases where the failure is entirely due to mistakes by subordinates -- mistakes that they may not even have known were being made. (Because why didn't the leader know those mistakes were being made? It's their job to train their people to do the right things, and to make sure they're actually doing them.)
This compliments the "no excuses" idea, because it limits its usefulness as a tool for powerful people to push ones farther down the food chain to do unethical things. You're responsible for the things your people do, so there's a strong incentive to make sure not just that they get results, but that they do so in ways that you would be comfortable being judged by.
Without that, "no excuses" becomes a kind of blind eye standard -- "get results, I don't care how." Which can put immense pressure on the person on the receiving end of that directive to cut corners, fudge evidence and cross ethical lines if they have to in order to get those results. And if they do, the leader can then feign innocence: "I never told them to do those horrible things!" Well, yeah, but you put them in a position where the horrible things were they only things they could realistically do. You set them up to fail.
So while I applaud the general idea, I worry that in the absence of complimentary values "from now on showing up with an excuse the day the project is due will cost them their job" becomes just one more way for bad managers to push blame that should rightly go to their own incompetence down down the org chart.
Now to play devils advocate - I'm generally in favor of carrot not stick.
I think firing someone for it once is on the harsh side, but if someone repeatedly doesn't share key information, how can you keep working with them?
See point #3: https://steveblank.com/2012/05/14/9-deadliest-start-up-sins/
No excuses for failures given, just facts and requests for help
No excuses for failures accepted, just facts, and offers to help
Relentless execution
Individual honesty and integrity
We can just proclaim "PROBLEMS BE GONE!" and so it shall be! It's also so clear to me now!
What a load of crap. I've been on at least six developer teams, and the one thing that's proven true every time is that third party externalities will always find a way to hobble progress, introduces stalls in productivity, and wear down morale.
But there are deeper issues, particularly with software development, and undisprovable beliefs about which implementation of technology is THE ONE TRUE WAY.
People will always use that as a wedge, to alleviate the amount of work on their plate, and declare efficiency as the driving principle. But then! Non-technical people, clueless as ever about the machines that govern their livelihood (as glorified CRM receptionists) fail to understand, the truth is that it's just technical people pushing work around, spreading it in different arrangements, according to their liking.
Let's bind everything to UNIX users
and LDAP permissions, that way the
system administrators can control
progress, and must be aware of all
tangential events.
Gee, I can't create a folder structure
on this file system, because I have to
wait for a sys admin to provide permissions
just so I can create an index.html file
at the location I need.
How about we throw everything in a MySQL
database, and persist our data over there?
Awesome, but wow, our table schema is
getting kind of huge. Managing it is
a chore unto itself.
Let the DBA team control every aspect
of the RDBMS, so that every change to
the database schema requires their
involvement. This way, we'll always
have to ask them for permission to
introduce a new table or column.
Okay, how about we just design our
tables, to be gigantic structured
text blobs, of unlimited size, so
that we don't have to wait for a DBA
to respond to our schema change
requests? Sounds great! It's less work!
NoSQL vs. SQL. Which is the one TRUE way?
Man, this CGI programming is really
hard, and our PERL codebase is tough to read.
Let's try PHP since it's so much easier to code.
Wow, our PHP code is so disorganized.
We should organize it into classes.
That didn't help. PHP permits too
many ambiguities, and it's counter-productive.
Javascript everywhere, at all times?
Why not a full re-write of the entire
system, because all we know how to use
is one client-side technology?
Object Oriented Programming or Functional
Programming. Which is the one TRUE way?
I'm having trouble sorting out which
functions are in scope, because there
are so many modules in this file tree,
and I can't easily discern which file
references which, and in which order.
So many functions are similarly named,
and many developers are simply overriding
namespaces to control scope. We should
restrict who can create new files in
this tree, so the library stays sane.
Let's bind everything to UNIX users
and LDAP permissions, that way the
system administrators can control
progress, and must be aware of all
tangential events.