It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

Open Source, Management, and Volunteerism

5 February, 2019

My grandfather was a Petty Officer in the Navy in the Pacific in World War II. He never made it to Chief Petty Officer, to his great annoyance, but he learned not long after he arrived in the Marshall Islands that there were plenty of ways to get things done without having that rank. The story goes that in those days only Chiefs were issued toolboxes on the base, so if somebody carrying a toolbox asked you to come along and help with a project, you did. Grandpop discovered this and, not being one to be bound by Navy regulations, would just pick up a toolbox when he wanted to raise a crew for some task, and people would come along and help. Conversely, if he didn’t have a toolbox, no one was interested.

One of the things I like about working in open source, and at Red Hat specifically, is that you don’t need to be carrying a toolbox to get people interested in working with you on a task. All you really need is a good idea and some knowledge of who the people are who might want to help. I’m not sure why this should be so — maybe it is that so much of our work is in open source communities that are powered by volunteer effort, or maybe we just all believe we know enough to decide for ourselves whether we want to help with something. Either way, many of the best things we have done at Red Hat have come not from top-down decisions but from “coalitions of the inspired” getting together and pursuing something that looks worthwhile.

There are some drawbacks to this culture. It tends to put a strain on people who are willing to volunteer, because not everyone is — when I was in Brno, we had a lot of manager committees to look after the site, and it was always the same 20 managers who showed up to help (out of 100). It also makes it hard to know whether people are doing what they’re really supposed to be, or working on side projects they find interesting.

I am fairly sure, however, that I’d rather have it this way than the way I imagine things work at other large companies — doing just what’s required, and lots of politics. Plus I don’t see how I could carry a toolbox to all the meetings I go to.

Things That Cascade

4 February, 2019

I’m about to spend four days in a management offsite for Red Hat. This is the kind of thing I’m normally quite upbeat about, and I’m sure I will enjoy this one a lot as well. However I confess to some degree of cynicism, made worse by the fact that I have a ton of work to do having just returned from the BVI and I’m annoyed I’m going to fall further behind while spending three days in meetings.

One of the things that is amplifying my cynicism is a lot of talk leading up to this event about “Cascading The Strategy.” “Cascading” in this usage is a business-speak verb for “Define a strategy at the top and get all the managers to faithfully explain it to their staff, and so on through the whole organization.”

Unfortunately this word has for me — in a business context at least — a whole bunch of entirely negative connotations:

A Cascade only flows one way. The second tier does not have any influence on what the first tier Cascades, and so on. This is not at all in accord with the way we run our business at Red Hat, where open (and high-volume!) feedback on everything is very much the norm.
It reminds me of the infamous Waterfall Process, in which a “product” flows downhill through various stages until it finally reaches its users. Know what else flows downhill? Ask a plumber…
It reminds me of sewers and the sewage treatment process itself, in which effluent often flows down a Cascade in order to aerate and purify it (see photo above).

I’m fairly sure that the folks who use this term aren’t thinking of these connotations at all, but rather something beautiful like this:

Angel Falls in Venezuela is the world’s tallest waterfall at 979 m (3,212 ft). By Diego Delso – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12638921

Even in this case, however, it’s important to keep in mind what happens to someone standing at the bottom of a 979-meter waterfall.

Avoidable Drama

3 February, 2019

The Moorings, looking west from the north side of A dock. B dock was destroyed in the hurricane and is being replaced, hence the barge and crane. If you look carefully to the left of the barge you will see the mast of a sunken boat sticking out of the water — a Hazard to Navigation.

I was chatting with a friend in the BVI last week who had seen an interview with someone — I don’t recall who, unfortunately — who made the point that there are two kinds of drama to be dealt with in life: Avoidable Drama and Unavoidable Drama. Hurricanes, and interacting with your family, are examples of Unavoidable Drama. There is nothing you can do to mitigate or prevent it, you just have to deal with it as best you can.

Avoidable Drama, on the other hand, can and should be avoided, unless you are a Dramatic Person and thrive on that sort of thing. (Probably worth mentioning that most Dramatic People don’t realize they are inducing Avoidable Drama, rather they believe they are victims of Unavoidable Drama. But that is another blog post.)

Anyway — Avoidable Drama was in full force during our return to The Moorings dock A on Friday afternoon. Total disorganization on the dock was made worse by a few as yet un-dealt-with shipwrecks in the harbor (Unavoidable Drama). This was further aggravated by a whole bunch of catamaran crews with no idea what they were doing (Unavoidable Drama). The combination turned what should have been a straightforward procedure into a stressful interaction with lots of yelling back and forth between us and The Moorings boat handlers that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth at the end of a really nice trip.

Why was this avoidable, when there are so many unavoidable elements present? Well, all that had to be done to remove the drama and lower everyone’s temperature would have been to tell all the boats coming in to hold in Road Harbor (where there is plenty of sea room) until cleared to enter the marina. This would only have required a single organized person with a radio, a pencil, and a pad of paper. Instead, the standard procedure was to tell every boat that radioed for permission to enter to come to the end of dock A and wait for further instructions. Unfortunately, because of the above-mentioned Unavoidable Drama (shipwrecks), there is only really room for one boat at the end of dock A. Try to put us and 8 clueless catamaran captains there at the same time, and hilarity ensues.

(What did we do when faced with this situation? The only safe thing to do: We entered a random open slip and tied up the boat. We were lambasted by the dock maser for this, but the alternative was crashing into something and endangering people and property, so…)

If there is a moral to this story, it is that the way to avoid Avoidable Drama is by putting a bit of process in place. Of course, if you put too much process, then you create more Drama than you avoid. So be careful…