Storytelling

Recently, a former colleague re-joined the company for a special project. His nickname "Van Z" and past exploits were soon revived by long-time veterans, and to his amazement a lot of people he never met before knew of him and talents. This kind of company lore is great, it binds colleagues together in a shared understanding of what the company is all about in a much more fundamental way than the mission statement.

Babur & Companions
sharing tales around the campfire

The stories of past projects, remarkable customers and colleagues, and memorable moments are a living legacy of where we have been as people, as colleagues and as a company. These stories are repeated, embellished and woven together to reinforce what matters most.

The coffee corner in a great company culture is the campfire of its tribal identity, where colleagues confirm each others value and identity. Conversely, if the coffee corner where you work is the place to bitch about bosses and do some casual backstabbing you're well advised to work elsewhere, because the culture is showing severe symptoms of incurable decay.

My phone is keeping a track record of where I've been and what I've done, which is really useful for time writing and billing. More than that, it tells me my own story, helping me to remember and feel satisfied about the work I've done and the places I have been. It goes beyond the statistics of location and time to establish a narrative based on my comments and place names, and this is hugely satisfying.

Right now I'm working to lift our team reporting, daily standups and weekly review meetings to that next level of usefulness. As a project manager I need these reports and meetings to keep a firm grasp on our work. As a leader, I need them to reinforce what we are all about, which means that I need them to keep the narrative of our story as a project team alive.  Just like the phone app delivers more than bare stats, I want my project management to be about more than control.

What I find challenging is allowing the right amount of personalization and storytelling without fostering the kind of loose banter and improductive blah that clogs up far too many meetings already. In theory, meetings already work like this, which the confirmation of last time's minutes, the regular agenda items and a recap. In practice they're either really short and businesslike or really long and tedious, depending on the leader and the group.

My current approach is to frame each talking point in a narrative way, connecting it explicitly to what happened recently and what is about to happen. I also try to draw parables using existing company lore. Meanwhile the subjects under discussion are determined by the meeting agenda, and errant lines of conversation are pruned back with a meaningful glance at my watch. So far so good.

Creeping elegance

Programmers tend to be perfectionists, and are familiar with a phenomenon known as creeping elegance. While writing code, it becomes an obsession to write it as tersely and elegantly as possible, which comes at the expense of time, readability and focus on the final product.

Projects can also experience creeping elegance, in this form an insidious variety of scope creep. Say there's a process optimization going on in a very basic environment. Little documentation, lots of informal procedures, opaque and implicit knowhow ingrained in the employees, organic structure, the works. The project brief states that the goal is to document knowledge and procedures, design and roll out a standardized process, and train employees in the new and formal way of working. The allotted time is nine months, 5 internal people are put on the project for 20% of their time, and three consultants are hired.

A year later, a cold cup of coffee overhears a debate about indentation in the new documentation template, mixed with comments on the frequency of detailed status reports. The cup quietly reflects that, just like twelve months ago, neither the template nor the report are used operationally, but once the project is done they will surely be things of awesome perfection, terrible to behold and a slap in the face of any IT department who gets by with a lesser standard.

What happened? Creeping elegance. It's very hard to decide when to stop once you're improving something. At what point has enough knowledge been documented? When is a process good enough? That's undefined. It's not like a building plan where you're done at some point, when the building stands tall and happy tenants are preparing dinner inside.

Operationally, this is easy. Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is the name of the game. Steady progress. But when improvement becomes a project, it's very hard to keep the creeping elegance genie in the bottle. The only solution is strict timelines, and a project manager with enough common sense to nip creeping elegance in the bud. When the sand runs out in the hourglass, whatever is agreed on is delivered as the final product, and operational CSI takes over. Mission accomplished.

I want my 3PO

Whatever happened to Robots? You know, humanoid metal friends that were once widely expected to be all over the place by now, but that didn't happen. Shame. I would have like to have one of those. I hate ironing.

This weekend OGD is organizing Technival, a wonderful collection of geeky and fun activities wrapped in Saturday and sunshine (or so we hope). One of the many cool things to do is fight virtual robot wars with real drones, using Parrot AR drones and iPads. However, it's still us at the controls.

There are actually quite a lot of 'robots', building cars, vacuuming houses and manipulating fuel rods. Most of these are basically automatons, with about as much interactivity as a coffee machine. Not really Asimov-grade R. Daneel Olivaw material.

In the virtual world there are also a lot of bots. Contrary to their meatspace co-inhabiting counterparts, these are highly interactive. While not quite capable of passing the Turing test, they are quite able to kill n00bs in MMORPG games, do some basic chat-based customer support on websites, and navigate virtual environments with some aplomb. Virtual bots are altogether much more sophisticated than the physical varieties. However, uploading Sansha Sleeper spawn algorithms into a Rhoomba vacuum cleaner will not produce an (evil) R2D2, not quite. The complexity gap between what we can program and what we can build is too great, and somehow programming the physical to perform at the level of the virtual bots is a lot harder.

Why the missing link? Is bipedal walking really that hard? Is there an energy-density problem preventing bots from roaming freely? Or are we just unable to program any simile of a spark into a lifeless creation?

All three are big factors leading to the dearth of robots on the streets today. Walking is pretty tough, batteries are expensive, heavy and weak, and however many cores we equip our computers with, they still lack originality. Topio, for example, moves well and plays table tennis, but is not much of a chess player, even though his hardware and processing capability could theoretically play the game. It simply wasn't built for this purpose and is unable to adapt.

Thankfully there are some promising trends. There are fairly mature navigation and collision-avoidance systems for cars, and parking-assist is gaining popularity. Ere long cars will be at least partially capable of driving themselves. The aforementioned Roomba vacuuming bot is popular and faces increasing competition, with models from Samsung, Phillips and others vying for your living room floor, and doing a good job of it. The Parrot drones at Technival are capable of hovering themselves steadily, maintaining equilibrium with their gyros and rotors, and are quite good at recognizing each other mid-flight.

One day I hope to have a metal man show up at my front door to deliver himself fresh from the factory into my service. I really do hate ironing.

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Update: Concidentally, today's XKCD is hugely relevant: http://xkcd.com/948/