If you spend any time in the ecosystem of work processes, methodologies and frameworks you have undoubtedly encountered people that claim that one way or another is the only way to do things and if you disagree, then you are stupid, uneducated or even evil. These are the fanatics bordering on cultists clinging to one way to rule all ways and there is little point arguing with such people, unless you like me enjoy a bit of an argument just to see what their point of view actually is.
There is of course no one way of doing things.
Just as people are different, so are teams and organizations. Claiming that Agile for example is always the right choice makes no sense as you will always have people that do not work well in Agile settings, whatever they might be. It is equally wrong to claim that we must have strict rules, or structures for how to do things, for the same reason. Some people, teams and organizations thrive in loose structures that allow them to use their creativity and make quick decisions on the fly, while others thrive, or even are required to have more structure and processes in place.
Selecting the right balance is key, but it does not just matter for productivity, it is also very important for health and motivation.
Ad-hoc behavior is harmful for your health
I recently read about a developer that despaired and lost all interest in his work because the workplace was chaotic with a start-stop culture. This is sadly not an uncommon situation and if you have never experienced a start-stop culture, that is when work is constantly started and never get finished because it is being shut down and something else takes its place. This is one of the most detrimental ways of working as it induces a lot of stress in the individuals that are exposed to it.
There are many studies that show that unclear expectations and an unstructured workplace causes stress. Not only will this have negative impacts on the ability to do deep thinking, but it also causes long term ill effects, which can eventually become serious health issues. I have seen more than my fair share of people passing out in meetings, burning out and even being hospitalized after being picked up in an ambulance.
Stress is no joke.
The tricky part about ad-hoc behavior and unstructured work is that every individual have different tolerance levels for stress. For some it will be a slight nuisance, for others cause for frustration and for some it is directly harmful. This is why it is so important to make sure you understand the cost this comes with for your people, your teams and your organization.
Ad-hoc behavior can come from many sources. One source is that the organization is a startup and both financial constraints and the behavior of the founder drive the organization towards ad-hoc. The false pursuit of freedom is another where individuals or teams believes that if they can just get away from the "oppression" of management they can make the world a better place. A third is that an organization is made up of many subdivisions, most commonly due to purchasing multiple other organizations and trying to merge those into a larger whole.
In many organizations having too much ad-hoc behavior and unstructured work will manifest as loss of financial value as people are running without the ability to do deep thinking, sick leave is high as people get sick from stress and a high turnover rate as people leave the stressful workplace.
Red-tape behavior and micromanagement
The opposite side of the coin is where everything is controlled and everything you want to do is tightly controlled in strict processes and rules. Just as ad-hoc behavior causes stress, so do red-tape behavior, but for a different reason. Where ad-hoc behavior cause stress due to unclear expectations, red-tape causes stress because it demands so many blockers that progress crawls to a halt. In many cases it feels like actually getting permission to do something require more work than actually doing something.
Besides stress building up from constantly being held back because of long processes to do anything, micromanagement is also a common symptom. That is because just as red-tape tend to be the result of low trust in the people that work in the organization, that is also why micromanagement exist. It is not uncommon that a company start out as an ad-hoc organization and then transition to a red-tape as the organization loose trust in the chaotic nature of the ad-hoc ways of working.
From my own experience and from talking to other people on the subject there seems to be a correlation between when organizations start to expand on the proxy culture. This is where management is multiplying because the workload is too much and by doing so they create an elaborate number of levels of managers that all act as proxies. The opposite happens when organizations realize that the amount of managers doing nothing but attending meetings and relaying information is an expensive way to operate. This tends to lead to a swing towards ad-hoc again and when trust is lost again we see a raise in the number of middle managers again.
In fact, most organizations continuously vary between these two states and the impact that has depends on how large those swings of the pendulum are. If your organization is stable the pendulum will make small swings and if the organization is volatile, then it will make larger swings. These swings tend to be triggered when an organization has built up enough incompetence, so that trust is eroded. If it is trust in Management, then it will tilt towards ad-hoc and if it is in the teams trust has been lost, then the swing moves towards red-tape and micromanagement.
The impact on "creativity"
While you might think that a restrictive red-tape behavior would strangle any creativity and an ad-hoc behavior would have a positive impact, that is not necessarily true. The devil is in the details and most people do not define what they actually mean with creativity and then confuse brainstorming with creatively making decisions that benefit the organization.
If the purpose of creativity is to come up with as many ideas as possible that you throw out and see what sticks, then ad-hoc is the way to go. It has very little deep thinking and most of what comes out are brain farts, but occasionally something amazing will come of it. It is just a matter of how long your company can survive by paying for the people to throwing shit on the wall until something sticks.
If the purpose of creativity is to come up with ideas that are valuable every time, then you want to go with the red-tape option. It will take forever to find that value, and you will spend an insane about of time to figure out what to do next. You will spend more time in deep thinking and filling out forms than coming up with new ideas, which will put you in the same position and the ad-hoc behavior.
This has nothing to do with your process, methodology or framework.
It does not matter if you are an Agilist swearing that Scrum, Kanban or maybe just an undefined Agile way is the ambrosia of the gods that promises eternal bliss, or if you demand that the world bow to a traditional project management methodology like Price 2 or what we refer to as Waterfall. All of them will work just fine as long as you adjust the way you work based on the people doing the work. In the same way none of them will work if you take them too far and either don't take the people into consideration, or you push things too far towards ad-hoc or red-tape.
At the end of the day it is the work you do, the collaboration and understanding you engage others with and the value you actually generate, regardless of position. Not the buzzwords, not the rituals and not the processes. These are just the guardrails that should help you stay on the path of being good colleagues and employees working together towards a common goal.
The balance is everything
In order to maximize this and get a good work environment that will keep people happy, healthy and creative is to find the balance between ad-hoc and red-tape. This will not sit well with people that are either have very active and chaotic minds, or the people that have very rigid minds that demand structure in all things. These are the people that are the most vocal in the discussions in different forums in my opinion, and they are also the ones that drive the swings of the pendulum when they join organizations
The key towards a balanced organization is to ensure you have enough steering so the organization benefit from it, but enough flexibility so that teams and individuals can be at their best. This is an extremely difficult balance and from my perspective the only way you can achieve this is by looking at the problem from both directions.
Top Down for structure
From a management perspective we need steering and structure on the large scale. A governance model should be put into place where representatives of all disciplines within the organization are represented. This governance group should define the high level processes and the high level requirements. Things like what kind of documentation do we demand, what are the legal requirements that everyone should abide to and so on is on the highest level. Here you have the larger processes for funding projects, how budgets should be defined and so on.
This is also where the discipline specific things should be defined, like for developers we should have documentation standards, legal requirements, standard tech-stack for various type of work, standard tooling and what the developers need as input and what they are expected to have as output towards other discipline groups.
Large brushes, but without going too far into the red-tape behavior. The purpose is to define high level requirements for high level processes.
Bottom Up for creative freedom
With the governance group setting the big stage, the teams focus on how to make their group of individuals work best. Withing the structure provided by the governance team how should the teams work to be as productive as possible. This is where team leaders will be very important as most people have no knowledge or competence in team dynamics or group psychology. This is a crucial skill that the team leader need to have to ensure that we don't get strong willed individuals bullying their way for the team happen.
While the governance group have defined a standard for th whole organization, it is ok for teams to deviate from this if they see that the can do that without compromising the bigger picture and that it is adding value to the team as well as the organization. The same thing goes for things like documentation and requirements where the outcome might be defined in the governance group, but the team can decide how to get there.
At this level the teams meet the requirements from the governance group with details on how they will work towards those goals within those structures.
Leadership is the key, not management
Finding a balance between ad-hoc and red-tape require constant leadership and change management. While managers have their place, their job is not to lead the organization, but to manage the work. In order to do this effectively managers also need to have a good understanding of leadership and change management as their position will grant them a larger overview than the team leaders and a more granular one than the leadership levels or the governance group.
I also think that all teams should learn about leadership and I think many would benefit greatly from things like team dynamics, group psychology and even personality types that I know many are against. Understanding how you and others work in a group and what kind of leadership is required in what state is to me the key to a bottom up approach towards a balanced organization.
Leaders lead the way, managers manage what you already have.
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So the question is if your organization is a leader,
or are you stuck on the pendulum as it swings,
unable or unwilling to try to make it stop?
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