Six Simple Rules
KEY POINTS:
- Six Simple Rules emphasis that in today’s complicated business environment, you need to setup organisational structures based on cooperation.
- To deal with complexity, organizations should depend on the judgment of their people and on these people cooperating to utilize the organization’s capabilities to cope with complex problems.
- This view is well aligned with the ideas of Grounded Architecture.
The book Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, by Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman, is another source of inspiration for my vision on the Architecture function. Morieux and Tollman introduced a concept of Smart Simplicity with six simple rules or strategies based on economics, game theory, and organizational sociology. These rules enable organizations to promote new behaviors and improve performance.
The book emphasis that in today’s complicated business environment, you need to setup organisational structures based on cooperation. To deal with complexity, organizations should depend on the judgment of their people, which requires giving them more autonomy to act. It also depends on these people cooperating to utilize the organization’s capabilities to cope with complex problems.
This view is well aligned with the ideas of Grounded Architecture. In this section, I will explore the connection between the ideas of Grounded Architecture and Six Simple Rules.
Background: Limitations of Hard and Soft Management Approaches
One of the book’s central premises is that conventional management approaches, which the authors split into hard and soft, are neither sufficient nor appropriate for the complexity of organizations nowadays.
The hard approach rests on two fundamental assumptions:
- The first is the belief that structures, processes, and systems have a direct and predictable effect on performance, and as long as managers pick the right ones, they will get the performance they want.
- The second assumption is that the human factor is the weakest and least reliable link of the organization and that it is essential to control people’s behavior through the proliferation of rules to specify their actions and through financial incentives linked to carefully designed metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to motivate them to perform in the way the organization wants them to.
When the company needs to meet new performance requirements, the hard response is to add new structures, processes, and systems to help satisfy those requirements, hence, the introduction of the innovation czar, the risk management team, the compliance unit, the customer-centricity leader, and the cohort of coordinators and interfaces that have become so common in companies.
According to the soft approach, an organization is a set of interpersonal relationships and the sentiments that govern them.
- Good performance is the by-product of good interpersonal relationships. Personal traits, psychological needs, and mindsets predetermine people’s actions.
- To change behavior at work, you need to change the mindset (or change the people).
Both approaches are limited in today’s world and are harmful to cooperation. A hard approach introduces complicated mechanisms and compliance and “checking the box” behaviors instead of the engagement and initiative to make things work. The soft approach’s emphasis on good interpersonal feelings creates cooperation obstacles as people do not want to ruin good feelings.
Six Simple Rules Overview
Six Simple rules cover two areas: autonomy and cooperation. The first three rules create the conditions for individual autonomy and empowerment to improve performance.
- Understand what your people do. Trace performance back to behaviors and how they influence overall results. Understand the context of goals, resources, and constraints. Determine how an organization’s elements shape goals, resources, and constraints.
- Reinforce integrators. Identify integrators—those individuals or units whose influence makes a difference in the work of others—by looking for points of tension where people are doing the hard work of cooperating. Integrators bring others together and drive processes. They work at the nexus where constraints and requirements often meet. Give integrators the power and interest to foster cooperation in dealing with complexity. Remove managerial layers that don’t add value.
- Increase the total quantity of power. When creating new roles in the organization, empower them to make decisions without taking power away from others. Providing a few tools simultaneously is more effective than offering many tools sequentially. Regularly enrich power bases to ensure agility, flexibility, and adaptability.
The book’s authors emphasize the difference between Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency. Autonomy is about fully mobilizing our intelligence and energy to influence outcomes, including those we do not entirely control. Self-sufficiency is about limiting our efforts only to those outcomes that we control entirely without having to depend on others. Autonomy is essential for coping with complexity; self-sufficiency is an obstacle because it hinders the cooperation needed to make autonomy effective.
This difference between Autonomy and Self-Sufficiency leads us to the second set of rules compels people to confront complexity and use their newfound autonomy to cooperate with others so that overall performance, not just individual performance, is radically improved.
- Increase reciprocity. Set clear objectives that stimulate mutual interest to cooperate. Make each person’s success dependent on the success of others. Eliminate monopolies, reduce resources, and create new networks of interaction.
- Extend the shadow of the future. Have people experience the consequences that result from their behavior and decisions. Tighten feedback loops. Shorten the duration of projects. Enable people to see how their success is aided by contributing to the success of others.
- Reward those who cooperate. Increase the payoff for all when they cooperate in a beneficial way. Establish penalties for those who fail to cooperate.
Simple Rule 1: Understand What Your People Do
First rule states that you need to truly understand performance: what people do and why they do it. When you understand why people do what they do and how it drives performance, you can define the minimum sufficient set of interventions with surgical accuracy.
General Guidelines
You can truly understand performance by:
- Tracing performance back to behaviors and how they influence and combine to produce overall results.
- Using observation, mapping, measurement, and discussion to do this.
- Understand the context of goals, resources, and constraints within which the current behaviors constitute rational strategies for people.
- Finding out how your organization’s elements (structure, scorecards, systems, incentives, and so on) shape these goals, resources, and constraints.
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture can help understand what people really do in organizations in two ways:
- Using the Data Pillar to provide a complete overview of various data sources that can show where activities are happening, what trends are visible, and how people cooperate. One of the principles of the Data Pillar build maps, not control units supports understanding and orientation rather than being a simple metric tool.
- Leveraging the People Pillar to connect people and enables them to learn what is happening in different parts of the organization.
Simple Rule 2: Reinforce Integrators
Reinforce integrators by looking at those directly involved in the work, giving them power and interest to foster cooperation in dealing with complexity instead of resorting to the paraphernalia of overarching hierarchies, overlays, dedicated interfaces, balanced scorecards, or coordination procedures.
General Guidelines
You can reinforce integrators by:
- Using feelings to identify candidates: emotions provide essential clues for the analysis because they are symptoms rather than causes.
- Finding operational units those that can be integrators among peer units because of some particular interest or power.
- Removing managerial layers who cannot add value and reinforce others as integrators by eliminating some rules and relying on observation and judgment rather than metrics whenever cooperation is involved.
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture is related to reinforcing integrators.
- My view on architects as superglue positions architect them as critical integrators and integrator role-models in an organization.
- Via the People Pillar, Grounded Architecture can help identify integrators and connect them to leverage their work.
- The Data Pillar can support integrators with data and insights.
Simple Rule 3: Increase the Total Quantity of Power
Whenever you consider an addition to your organization’s structure, processes, and systems, think about increasing the quantity of power. Doing so may save you from increasing complicatedness and enable you to achieve a more significant impact with less cost. You can increase the quantity of power by enabling some functions to have an influence on new stakes that matter to others and performance.
General Guidelines
To increase the quantiyy of power consoder the following actions:
- Whenever you are going to make a design decision that will swing the pendulum—between center and units, between functions and line managers, and so on—see if making some parts of the organization benefit from new power bases could satisfy more requirements in dealing with complexity so that you don’t have to swing the pendulum in the other direction in the future (which would only compound complicatedness with the mechanical frictions and disruptions inherent to these changes).
- When you have to create new functions, make sure you give them the power to play their role and that this power does not come at the expense of the power needed by others to play theirs.
- When you create new tools for managers (planning, or evaluation systems, for instance), ask yourself if these constitute resources or constraints. Providing a few tools simultaneously is more effective (because it creates a critical mass of power) than many tools sequentially, one after the other.
- Regularly enrich power bases to ensure agility, flexibility, and adaptiveness
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture supports increasing power quantity with its operating model.
- I aimed to increase the quantity of the decision-making power and keep architectural decision-making distributed across the organization and embedded in the development teams. Development teams traditionally have the best insights and most information relevant for making a decision.
- Additionally, the Data Platform opens many people in the organization, giving them data in insights that can increase their power in daily work.
Simple Rule 4: Increase Reciprocity
In the face of business complexity, work is becoming more inter-dependent. To meet multiple and often contradictory performance requirements, people need to rely more on each other. They need to cooperate directly instead of relying on dedicated interfaces, coordination structures or procedures that only add to complicatedness.
General Guidelines
Reciprocity is the recognition by people or units in an organization that they have a mutual interest in cooperation and that the success of one depends on the success of others (and vice versa). The way to create that reciprocity is by setting rich objectives and reinforcing them by:
- eliminating monopolies,
- reducing resources, and
- creating new networks of interaction.
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture is directly related to increasing reciprocity.
- The success of architecture depends on their superglue impact and success of units architects support. People from developer teams that architects support have an impact on architects’ performance evaluations. Likewise, the developer teams depend on architecture support.
- In addition, the People Pillar directly supports one of the ways of reinforcing reciprocity: creating new networks of interactions.
Simple Rule 5: Extend the Shadow of the Future
Increase the importance to people of what happens tomorrow as a consequence of what they do today. By making very simple changes you can manage complex requirements, while also removing organizational complicatedness. With the strategic alignment typical of the hard approach, these simple solutions—for instance, career paths—often come at the end of a sequence that starts by installing the most cumbersome changes: new structure, processes, systems, metrics, and so on. Simple and effective solutions are then impossible.
General Guidelines
You can extend the shadow of the future in four ways:
- Tighten the feedback loop by making more frequent the moments when people experience the consequence of the fit between their contributions.
- Bring the end point forward, notably, by shortening the duration of projects.
- Tie futures together so that successful moves are conditioned by contributing to the successful move of others.
- Make people walk in the shoes they make for others.
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture can extend the shadow of the future in multiple ways.
- The Data Pillar creates transparency and provides data necessary to model the future. I’ve used such data to create many simulations and roadmap options.
- The principle of applying economic modeling to architecture decision-making directly supports describing what happens tomorrow as a consequence of what they do today.
Simple Rule 6: Reward Those Who Cooperate
When you cannot create direct feedback loops embedded in people’s tasks, you need management’s intervention to close the loop. Managers must then use the familiar tool of performance evaluation, but in a very different way.
General Guidelines
To reward those who cooperate managers:
- Must go beyond technical criteria (putting the blame where the root cause problem originated). In dealing with the business complexity of multiple and often conflicting performance requirements, the smart organization accepts that problems in execution happen for many reasons and that the only way to solve them is to reduce the payoff for all those people or units that fail uo cooperate in solving a problem, even if the problem does not take place exactly in their area, and to increase the payoff for all when units cooperate in a beneficial way.
- They must not blame failure, but blame failing to help or ask for help.
- Instead of the elusive sophistication of balance scorecards and other counterproductive cumbersome systems and procedures, they can use simple questions to change the terms of the managerial conversation so that transparency and ambitious targets become resources rather than constraints for the individual. Managers then act as integrators by obtaining from others the cooperation that will leverage the rich information allowed by this transparency and help achieve superior results.
Grounded Architecture
Grounded Architecture can help rewarding cooperation by helping people to ask for help or help others.
- The People pillar provides the context and networks of people to more easily collaborate.
- And various data sources in the Data Pillar can help creating transparency about cooperation opportunities and problems.
To Probe Further
- Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, by Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman, 2014.