Elliot Morris

Here we go. First “real” blog, 30 minutes, white page. How do I even do this? Should I write sections headings and fill them in recursively? That’s how I do PRD’s and such, although it feels a bit too planned for something like this, I think I’m just going to let my fingers run.

As I said before, the primary blocker I’ve been having in my writing, and my projects in general, is trying to say everything I have to say all at once. I need to pick a small, tiny, minuscule topic, and somehow try to ignore how everything is connected to everything else.

Ach, screw that, let’s talk about one of the big problems. Agreeing on a definition of value.

How on earth are we meant to say one thing is better than another? I’m advanced enough in my career that I don’t bring this up so much at work anymore, as it’s not really a helpful conversation to have when trying to decide on a technical strategy. However, if folks aren’t reasonably aligned on this, your organizations effectiveness is going to be hard capped in a particularly illegible way.

I suspect you’ve probably heard of the concept of “Gel” when it comes to technical teams, I read about this first in 1987’s Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, I think that book coined the term. Gel is, to use a personal definition, the tendency for two independent agents in a system to come to similar conclusions without having to explicitly communicate. It’s telepathy by the backdoor, and it can exist when folks values align such that their intuitions and deductions tend to lead them to the same place.

Whilst there are some downsides to gel (monoculture reduces rigor), the upsides are great enough that organizations generally try to encourage it. Some organizations even manage to realize that this isn’t possible without some sort of shared consensus principles to derive value judgments from, which is where the fun begins.

To solve this problem, organizations tend to produce and publish lists of corporate values. In the most common case, these are assembled by consensus, are vapid, self-similar, self-congratulatory documents, and are completely ignored by the majority of people. Nonetheless, I don’t discount these entirely, the are a potential definition of value, and they get credit just for acknowledging that this is something that needs to be considered. You have to watch out though, as is the norm with initiatives concerning formal definition of dynamic concepts such as this, any org that manages to be successful probably didn’t need the artifact in the first place, and conversely any org that really does need something, will almost certainly be incapable of producing anything useful.

More commonly, where shared values actually come from is by humans doing what humans do naturally, manifesting values and culture in an undefined, unguided sort of way. This is best, but is also unpredictable. If you’re smart, you can try to build an environment that encourages this sort of thing, but you can never really guarantee it.

I’m not optimistic on the future of shared values. Work from home, despite all its many upsides, has clearly eroded the natural value-alignment that tends to occur when two people share the same physical space. At least in my experience in the UK, the best of this tended to happen at the pub, in that sort of tribal ritual/group therapy session I’m sure most of us who worked in tech pre-pandemic are familiar with. This was especially advantageous as discussions often didn’t have to be couched and distorted such to avoid damaging fragile executive egos. Keep in mind that any substitute mechanism of alignment that occurs during work hours will be subject to this constraint, so will again be hard capped on its effectiveness.

Some folks might be reading this and be thinking that sort of control over value alignment sounds appealing, we can make sure everyone’s on the same page from base principles right? I’m going to assert that it’s incredibly difficult to actually change a persons values and you shouldn’t even try. In fact I believe it’s impossible by definition, perhaps I’ll explain why in a later post.

Many may think alignment is about changing hearts and minds, but it isn’t, it’s more akin to intimacy. There is a gestalt understanding of what everyone in your org thinks and feels, it’s ludicrously multi-dimensional, impossible to pin down, inherently inaccurate, but it is there. If you can tap into it, you can massively reduce your communication overhead, and be able to work through concepts that would be actually impossible to deliberate on otherwise. Yes, there are going to be elements of it that make you uncomfortable, that you might find icky, counter-productive or even offensive. Nonetheless, acceptance is a prerequisite to intimacy, which is a prerequisite to alignment, which is a prerequisite to high performing organizations.

If you’re looking for a prescription here at the end, I don’t really have one beyond the solution that solves every organizational problem. Hire only the right people, surrender control almost entirely, and hope.