Unknown: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SK il framework.
Matt K. Parker: And one of my co workers, so I told you, I'm
gonna go try and interview there, he stopped me and said,
Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't you know, they Peer Program?
Don't you know you have to share a computer with somebody else,
right? It's crazy. It's, it's like agile on steroids. It's
nuts. Don't do it. I was like, Well, I'm miserable. And I have
nothing to lose. And I went and did it. And I loved it.
Jason Baum: Everyone, it's Jason Baum, Director of Member
experience at DevOps Institute. And this is the humans of DevOps
podcast. Welcome back. Thanks, as always, for joining us. The
great resignation. We've all heard the term. We've discussed
it on this very podcast. You've heard various takes on the why.
Well, let me just read you the numbers. In 2021 47 point 8
million workers quit their jobs. Yes, you heard that right. 47
point 8 million. Many believe that number could be higher in
2022.
According to a February Pew Research Center survey, workers
who quit a job in 2021 gave the following reasons. low pay, no
opportunities for advancement, and feeling disrespected at
work.
What are the numbers telling us now 84% of workers are
disengaged at work. Nine out of 10 employees would donate 24% of
their lifetime earnings to have more meaning at work. 60% of
workers mistrust their CEO.
Now, let's revisit that term, the great resignation.
Other terms that are being used today to describe this
revolution includes the great reimagination the great reset
the great realization,
these descriptions talk not of the act of departing, but more
of the mindset and the culture shift behind
how we're re examining the role of work in our lives. That's
something we're exploring. Now, it's up to the organizations to
do the same. And to learn.
What can we do differently? How do we reimagine? How do we
reset?
My guest today is Matt Parker, author of a radical enterprise
pioneering the future of high performing organizations. Matt
is a writer, speaker, researcher, and third generation
programmer. Over the last two decades, he's played a variety
of roles in the software industry, including developer
manager, director and global head of engineering. He
specialized in hyper iterative software practices for last
decade, and is currently researching the experience of
radically collaborative software makers. He lives in a small
village in Connecticut with his wife and three children. And you
can contact him and Learn more by visiting MattKParker.com.
Matt, welcome to the podcast.
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, thanks for having me. Jason. B y the way,
that introduction you just ran. I mean, you should be writing
books that was like filling. I got chills listening to Oh,
thanks. Really amazing.
Jason Baum: I appreciate it. I numbers. I mean, the numbers,
the numbers, really, I mean, do all the talking. Right. All I
did was read them. Those numbers are our I mean, it says it all?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, no doubt.
Jason Baum: You know, when we were first when I was first
looking at the book and learning more about you, there is there's
a line on the back, I believe of the book, the fastest growing
most competitive organizations in the world, have no
bureaucracy and bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit,
which I love. But it like made me like, I am a visual person.
So it instantly put me back in my like, I'm 17 years old, I'm
in a punk rock band. I'm the one drawing the giant A's on my
notebook. And, you know, I'm pretty sure it was a no effects
lyric, you know, that that was that was me. And then you you
grow up and you become jaded. And you go along with the you
know, I mean, we did a our last podcast was about generation
generations. And we talked about Gen Z, and we talk and I'm
always like, the boomers are the most fascinating to me, because
these were the hippies. And now they're the ones basically
telling you what to do. So it's like, okay, is it just age or is
it generation what is it? But I just love the concept and I
wanted to say that but also say, is this real?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, it sounds Yeah, the the
tagline for the book sounds revolutionary to some extent,
right? Like, oh my god, like what's going on? Like no bosses,
no bureaucracies no bullshit like, whoa. And at the same
time, right it's it's not like you know, the punk rock band up
on the stage that's being very loud and obvious about
everything right? This is like a quiet revolution that's been
happening, right. And over the past couple of decades, right?
We've seen the number of companies that fit this bill,
which I refer to as radically collaborative. By the way,
that's not the only term in that you can find and organizational
science, literature and elsewhere, they can be
everything from teal to whole kradic, socio kradic, self
governing, self managing, etc. Radically collaborative is
another name for them. It's the one I chose. And I'll tell you
more about why I chose it later. But anyways, the number of
companies that fit this bill have grown from one to three to
now a percent of companies around the world, roughly, and,
and it and they have demonstrated that that through
that growth, what's happening is that there's very clear sort of
outsized economic results from this type of company compared to
other more traditional organizational archetypes, which
explains a lot of their growth, right? It would be one thing to
say like the sounds good, but actually, it turns out, it
doesn't matter economically, but the actual the two things are
actually strongly correlating right, these companies which are
very focused on creating environments, which supercharge
intrinsic motivation, passion, engagement, meaning purpose,
fulfillment, right are also leading to some very clear
economic results. And a lot of what I'm doing in the book is
trying to both trace this sort of development and explain it.
Right. And I might, as you said in the introduction, right, my
own background is in software engineering. And so I'm not an
organizational scientist myself, I am just sort of trying to
research, synthesize, and really, you know, piggyback off
the work of psychologists, sociologists, organizational
scientists, economists, etc. To help explain why this thing is
happening, right? To point at it to say, here's how it's
happening. But here's some of the why behind it. And in that,
I end up arriving at sort of these four primary imperatives,
I call them these four things that seem both present and all
these companies that are really succeeding with this way of
working, and also probably very necessary to that success. And
just that a nutshell, they're called Team autonomy, managerial
devolution, deficiency need gratification and candid
vulnerability. So anyways, I can go into all that too. But at a
high level, that's sort of what this book is about, and what it
encapsulates.
Jason Baum: Yeah, and thank you, and you know, what I should
have, you know, I have a habit of going all over the place with
these with these interviews. So just so you're warned, but what
I did just there was I went right into the middle of the
book. But I think sometimes, when you hear things that are
that sound radical, right, you kind of need to go to the middle
to understand it to kind of break down your initial wall.
Because I think when you when you say, an organization of no
bureaucracy and or an organization with no bosses,
instantly the wall goes up. I mean, it did it for me, and I
support it. You know, it's just because well, that's not what
I'm used to, how do you, but then you go back to those
numbers. And when I was when I was, you know, putting the intro
together, and I was thinking about it. All I keep coming back
to is, well, gee, it's not working. It's clearly not
working. So yeah, maybe maybe a very drastic approach. And just
saying, Okay, we're going to pull the, I mean, maybe that is
the way to go. But you need kind of start there, right to make
any progress. You need to kind of go to the extremes. And so I
appreciate you kind of just jumping into the middle with me.
And now let's back up and kind of go back to the beginning. And
tell me, first of all, why did you write this book? What was
the wall of why did you feel like, like you said, you're a
software engineer. Why did you feel like this was something
that you had to write?
Matt K. Parker: Okay, so I'm a software engineer. So it was my
dad. And so it was my dad's dad. So I'm a third generation
programmer and growing up, and I sort of looked up to them heard
their funny stories about working in software, I heard
early stories about what it was like to carry punch cards around
and, you know, hand them to the operator and come back the next
day and the operator did tell you, your program doesn't work.
And that's literally, you know, the whole error statement. They
say, What's wrong, you know, anyways, I looked up to them
growing up, I had this image in my mind of how awesome it was
going to be once I started to get paid for programs. Right, I
didn't really start learning programming until I was in high
school. But, you know, it was just such a connection for me so
much passion I had for it. And then I went into industry, and
very quickly realized that what I thought was going to be the
case was not at all the case, right? Like, I thought I was
going to love doing this job. And it turned out very quickly,
I started to hate it, right, because everywhere I went,
whether it was a large financial enterprise, or a small startup,
it seemed like I was, I was in an environment in which people
had said, Hey, how could we take all that fun out of programming
all the creativity out of it? How could we, you know, put
people together and make them work on something for two years,
never deploy it, and then throw away? Throw it away at the end?
Like, what would that do to their souls? I don't know. Let's
try it. And like, I just kept having these dystopian
experiences in which I started to not even want to program
anymore, right? I didn't even want to touch a computer, the
second I left work, and I really even got to the point where I
thought, okay, maybe I just need to pick a new industry, maybe I
need to reevaluate my life. As this was sort of coming to a
head, I got an email from a recruiter that worked directly
for a little company called Pivotal Labs, which had a few
offices in the States at the time, this was late 2011. And
she reached out to me and said, Hey, we saw some of your open
source work. You want to come interview? We're right around
the corner from you? Yes, I do. I'll come interview and all I
really knew about them was their Pivotal Tracker, really, you
know, product management software. And one of my co
workers who I told him, I'm gonna go try and interview
there, he stopped me and he said, Don't do it. Don't do it.
Don't you know, they pair program? Don't you know, you
have to share a computer with somebody else, right? It's
crazy. It's, it's like agile on steroids. It's nuts. Don't do
it. I was like, Well, I'm miserable. And I have nothing to
lose. And I went and did it. And I loved it. Because the
experience of actually making software with others on a basis
of partnership and a quality, the experience of having
autonomy of backlog of going after a goal. But as a team
having the autonomy to figure out day to day, what are we
doing to get there, right? To put software in the hands of
users to quickly validate or invalidate what we thought was
true, to turn that around into something else, right to go
through that learning cycle over and over again, and to see some
pretty amazing results, right? To not only feel good, like,
Hey, I'm having fun programming, again, with people I work with.
But also, we're doing some pretty awesome stuff. And we're
quickly getting results like that really turned my life back
around. It made me it sort of made me reimagined so many
things were possible in the world of software development.
And that experience of radical collaboration I had for many
years, I played many different roles, as you alluded to. And I
began to eventually ask myself, why did this work? What made it
work? What's good about it? Why did it feel good for me? Why did
it lead to good things for customers? And is it just
software? Or is this experience happening in other industries,
right, and through a lot of trial and error and eventual,
like a lot of research and going out to companies and
interviewing them and in a reading my eyes out and trying
to synthesize all that back together, I eventually sort of
stumbled into this whole world of radical collaboration, all
the research around it, how it manifests in many different
industries, and a lot of sort of the, you know, theories about
what makes us all sort of fit together, tie together and lead
to the result that it does.
Jason Baum: I'm not sure if you're a fan, but as you are
describing the early days there of your experience in the
software industry. There's one movie in particular that comes
to mind. I think that Mike Judge is probably one of the smartest
filmmakers, television creators of all time. And he had the
movie back in the 90s office space. And and they they capture
that what you're describing, I think perfectly. You know, did
you put your cover on the TPS report and like to find 10
different bosses ask you did you put the TPS cover on your TPS
report? And like, yeah, like you're saying like, needless,
like, senseless bureaucracy that, like, doesn't make it's
there to drive you insane. I think that's its only purpose. I
think that's, that's so great that like how you just described
it. So tell me more about collaborative organizations,
radically collaborative organizations. You know, what
are they and why are they growing and preference
prevalence around the world?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah. Okay. So what are they? They are
organizations that I think broadly speaking, we can say,
they've sort of looked out and said, Wow, people can do really
amazing things when they actually care about what they
do, and they love what they do and they enjoy doing it and
doing it with the people around them. It's a How can we design
an organization in which we are you know, supercharging this
power of intrinsic motivation, right. How are we creating an
organization in which we are supercharging the ability for a
group of people to come together and collectively innovate in
ways that no single person could have done on their own. Right?
And what stands in the way of that? Right. So a lot of
companies around the world have come to the conclusion that
there's fundamentally two things that stand in the way that that
most traditional companies have. And it's domination and
coercion. Right? Most companies are structured in what
sociologists refer to as a dominator hierarchy. And that's
really just a statement for a system in which people are
ordered by rank, right in which power privileges, resources,
judgments, etc, are privileged and distributed by that rank and
concentrated at the top. Right. And so that static sort of
privileging of that power leads to an important corollary, which
is coercion, right? It gives people within that hierarchy
coercive power over the people beneath them in the hierarchy.
Those two things are what sociologists and psychologists
refer to as a growth inhibiting environment. They're an
environment that actively undermines security, autonomy,
fairness, esteem, trust, belongingness, meaning purpose,
right, just by design, they're there every day, inhibiting
those things. And those things are really what stand at the
human level, the human sort of foundation of radical
collaboration, right? environments that are rich, and
trust, security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, etc, are the
kinds of environments that we want to create, because those so
strongly correlate with these outsize economic outcomes with
innovation with collective performance, etc. And so these
companies have said, Okay, what does it mean to create an
organization, which is still structured? Right, and yet, it's
not structured as a hierarchy? Well, the term for that is
called a heterarchy. Right? I heterarchy. The difference
between heterarchy and hierarchies, hierarchies are
structured on a basis of linking, as opposed to a
hierarchy was structured on the basis of ranking. Right. So how
are the roles within the organization linked together?
How are they complementary? What does success mean for any given
role? And what does that roles domain have authority? In other
words, what does that role have autonomous decision making
rights about? There's a lot of thought that goes into? How do
we create that for each role within the company? And how do
we make sure these roles are complementary, not
contradictory, that they're clear that anyone who accepts a
role within this organization or organization has a clear domain
of authority that empowers them to make meaningful decisions
because that's what autonomy it is. Tanami is the process of
making meaningful decisions having choice. That's what it
really boils down to, both for individuals and for teams. Okay,
so then what you end up seeing sort of at a high level on the
structural side, in these radically collaborative
organizations is Team autonomy and managerial devolution team
autonomy is probably what it sounds like, to all of your
listeners, right is is teams that have autonomy, a backlog,
right teams that are going after a goal but decide day to day how
they get there, right? It's teams in which authority has
been pushed to information, right, the people on the
frontlines getting all the information about what's
working, and what's not also have the appropriate domains of
authority to make decisions based on that information,
instead of running it up the hierarchy and flagpole and
hoping somebody at the top makes a decision for them. Okay? And
then managerial devolution really refers to a process of
decentralizing those power structures, really taking the
process of how do we iterate on this business, right? And the
business of how we do business, right? How do we iterate on our
structure, on our roles, on our relationships, on our teams, on
our practices, processes, et cetera? How do we do that in a
way that's not based on domination and coercion, but
based on partnership and equality. And so there are many
different ways these companies have developed and experimented
with decentralized forms of governance. And so at a high
level, that's sort of what you can see. And I just want to give
you a couple of companies as an example. Yeah, it'd be great.
Yeah, so I was gonna say, what, what is the like real world
application? Yes. Doing this? Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you an
example of a large company for so hire is the number one
appliance manufacturer in the world and they're increasingly
the number one smart home appliance manufacturer in the
world. Ha, i e, Rs, how they're spelled higher. They're actually
the parent company of GE Appliances. That's how big they
are. They own GE Appliances. Okay, so higher over the past 40
years, went from a very command and control top down and very
ineffective bureaucratic organization, to a pioneer and
radical collaboration, right. And the way they structure the
80,000 people that work at higher now is through something
that they refer to as micro enterprises. So they took those
80,000 people and they said, actually, what we need to do is
to break all of this up into small teams of entrepreneurial
units, right micro enterprises, teams that own their own p&l,
right teams that own their own balance sheets, teams whose pay
is derived from the value that they generate, right and that we
need to create a sort of marketplace or a sort of
incubator for being able to spin up these micro enterprises.
Their CEO refers to this, by the way, as a host of dragons
without a leader. He says that every, every micro enterprise is
like a dragon. And the dragon is the mightiest animal and Chinese
culture. And all of these teams can sort of start their own
products and services on this internal marketplace, right
without the guidance of a leader. And he says that's the
highest level of human governance. And that's what they
all have created at higher. Okay, so that was the process of
getting there. By the way, since they didn't start with it was
like all over the place, right? They tried many different
varieties of organizational structures before eventually
pioneering this approach. One other example that I'll give you
is a company called Morningstar. Now, Morningstar is quite
different. But it's still radically collaborative, unlike
Haier, which is all these sort of autonomous micro enterprises
that can relate to each other at will, or go outside the company.
And, you know, it's sort of almost like a mini free
enterprise, right? Or an internal free enterprise.
Morningstar is quite the opposite. Morningstar has a very
specific thing they do. They take tomato, raw tomatoes, and
they turn them into tomato products, like dice to moves,
puree, right, all the kinds of stuff that eventually winds up
in like your Heinz ketchup bottle, or your Canada tomato
sauce, probably came from this company Morningstar, because
even though they were only started 30 years ago, they were
start. They're the number one tomato processor in the world,
the largest tomato processor in the world by volume.And their
entire structure is radically collaborative. The founder
started it with the belief that all of these companies out there
doing tomato processing were overly bureaucratic, were not
giving people any sort of autonomy or sense of equality in
the job, not letting people make meaningful decisions. They said,
Guess what? We're all going to be equals. And we're all going
to start every year without titles. And every year, we're
going to say to ourselves, how are we going to take this year's
tomato crops and turn them into products for our customers,
dyes, tomatoes, puree, etc? What are we going to do? Who's going
to do what what commitments are we making to each other? He
said, we can all do this in the real world. We are all adults
out there. We're all buying homes, having families doing all
kinds of things, buying cars, right? We're all collaborating,
cooperating or competing with each other, right? Through
autonomy. Well, why can't we do that within our company, it
turns out you can and they became the number one tomato
processor in the world by doing this. They call them Colleague
Letters of understanding. That's what they write every single
year. And they've maintained them throughout the year two is
their understanding of what they need to do changes. But they're
basically encapsulating the commitments that each individual
makes to some other individual or group of individuals in the
company. Here's what I'm doing for you this year. And that's
how we're going to make this happen this year. So anyway,
it's a very different sort of structure for radical
collaboration. But I think it just sort of paints a picture of
the breadth that we have in this whole spectrum,
Jason Baum: and very different companies that you just gave
examples. Okay, I look, I want to say this. I think this is
fascinating. And I am I love this. I am a fan of this. Now
let me put the host devil's advocate hat on. Okay, so it's
it's a company where everyone's kind of in the same same boat,
leadership wise, they're all the same level. They're all working
collaboratively. And there's not necessarily a hierarchy yet. I'm
assuming they're like you said, there's a CEO. So there's some
type of hierarchy. This sort of sounds like communism, Matt.
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, I can see. Yeah, you know, and I sort of
had these. I guess you could say, fears going into it, like,
what is this office really, and, and what I came out was sort of
the opposite. I think a lot of I mean, like, actually, I think
what you could say is Morningstar is sort of the
opposite of communism. It's like libertarianism, right? Hire, as
a company said, hey, you know, what's awesome about the free
market, its ability to scale. And its ability to do that
without any centralized command and control, right? There's no
five year plans, there's no like, you know, crazy budgeting
that goes on to run a free market, right? It's actually all
these autonomous agents that are contracting with each other
competing with each other collaborating all at will,
right. And it's leading to these amazing things that we see
around the world. Can we take that? Can we take that sense of
freedom, right, that sense of agency, ownership,
accountability, that that we see in those sorts of systems,
right, those sort of free enterprise systems, and can we
bring them down to our company level? Right? And so I know why
you would, you would say like, Hey, this sounds like communism.
But I think actually, when you look into it more and more, you
realize it's sort of the opposite i Here's another
example. By the way, Matt Black systems is a small case study
that they do in the book, and they are a small manufacturing
company. They make instruments that go in like the cockpits of
airplanes, right and they went through their own radically
colaborative transformation, they were trying all kinds of
stuff to turn the business around, they tried lean, they
tried agile, they did all these things they brought in all of
these consultants, nothing was working. And they sort of came
to the same realization. Like, what if it was just very clear
to everyone the value they created, the commitments they
were making to each other. And what if the money they took home
with them at the end of the day was related to that, right there
related to their ability to all collaborate and create,
ultimately value for our customers. And so they created a
fractal organization that's yet another sort of radically
collaborative organizational type. And so at matte black
systems, every single person is a virtual company, every single
person has their own individual profit and loss statement, every
single person has their own balance sheet. The second they
did this, by the way, the second day, just distributed a balance
sheets into the company, the workers got together and said,
Wow, you know, what we should do, we should sell off 50% of
the manufacturing equipment on our work floor that's just
sitting there collecting dust, because as long as it sits here
on our balance sheet, right, we have all this debt hanging over
us, right, we should sell it off. And we will all be more
profitable as a result, right. And so you can think about like
that as sort of making it very clear, and giving a lot of sort
of both decision making power, but also making it very clear
with what the consequences of a decision is, to people right to
a group at large.
Jason Baum: The tools we use as a team have a direct influence
on how we work together. And the success we create. We built
range with that in mind, by balancing asynchronous check ins
and real time collaboration, branch helps remote and hybrid
dev teams build alignment and baton back on the calendar
branch connects dozens of apps like JIRA and GitHub, in one
place, so everyone can share progress and updates on work,
making standups more focused and engaging for everyone. Visit us
range.com/devops To learn more, and try arrange for it.
Anyway, I think that's fascinating, you know, when a
company gives you like shares, for example, that's their way of
saying, Well, you have a stake in the company, and it's like,
okay, but it's gonna take you four years to be vested, you
might not get that there's a percentage taken out of this.
And you know, when we go public, it's not going to be. So that's,
it's like, that's always a nice to have, but it's not like I
don't think anybody's gotten a share. And it's like, I own the
company. You know, but your own balance sheet. Yeah. And all of
a sudden, you're thinking, how can I save us some money, like
there's some ownership there, because there's some true
ownership there. That's, that's, that's really interesting. I
also love that you are giving examples of companies that are
larger, because the thing that was always said to me when I you
know, sometimes I I talk too much. And I'm like, sometimes
the one who like says, oh, we should do this. And it's like,
some align those so told to me once is Do you know how long it
takes to turn a cruise ship. And it's I, I get it. But the fact
that you are giving these really like these, in hires case, like
these enormous, massive companies, and they're doing it
to me, there's no excuse why? No one can say, well, yeah, that
works for maybe a small company that can be lean. But you know,
for a big organization that doesn't a big company, I can't
really work. So I, you know, gosh, there are so many places
we could go here. Because I think you're making this sound
much more real to me, which is, which is good. So how do we make
people understand this? How do we get more companies to say,
you know, do more people need to leave jobs. I actually said
once, when we were first talking about the grit break
resignation, I'm worried that all these people leaving the
jobs that they hate are just going to these new companies
that just lost someone because they hated their job. And now we
are just constantly going for back company by company by
company. No one's actually changing anything. So how do we
change it?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, well, all right. So this is a question
that I tackle in the book. I mean, on the one hand, we can
say, why has it grown in the first place? Right? How why have
we gone from 1% to 8% of companies around the world,
somehow fitting this bill? Right. And I think there's many
different things that we can point to. But I don't want to
undersell the fact that a lot of this ultimately does come back
to the fact that these companies are economically successful,
right, that they are actually having outsize sort of outcomes
in the marketplace, right? That they are out competing, much
more traditional and much more slow competitors, right. So that
alone, right, I think leads to an an element of growth, because
all right, people may be stuck in their ways. People may want
things to be a certain way or don't want to give up certain
sorts of sorts of power. But at the end of the day, companies
want to succeed, they want to compete, they want to make
money, right? They want to grow, right? And so if you care about
those things, you are naturally going to be looking at certain
competitors coming at you and saying what Are they doing
different? And when one of those competitors is hire, right, or
Morningstar, or you know, any other company, like even some
smaller, like startups, right, that are doing these sorts of
things, too. And suddenly having success in the marketplace in
bigger companies are like, what are we doing wrong? You know,
you're going to ask yourself those kind of questions, and
you're going to either start to emulate what they're doing, and
thereby trying to like, have the same success that they're
having, or you're going to just continue to see your
marketplace, your position in the market, erode, etc. So
there's that aspect to it that I think is just working in our
favor. That being said, I don't think it's enough. And you asked
me in the beginning, why did I write a book? It's partly
because I don't think it's enough, right? I think
conversations like this books like the one I've written,
which, by the way, is just one of many in this whole genre,
looking at this sort of phenomenon that's happening now.
Right, but I just want to make my own contribution to it and
point it at my own peers, right. I've talked about manufacturing
companies and stuff so far, but I also looked at many technology
companies that are doing this, and trying to understand what it
what makes it work in the world of technology, right? Not just
the one I came out of but and others that are doing radical
collaboration as well. And and I want people to be able to look
at those take inspiration from it, and be able to start to
begin radically collaborative experiments and transformations
within their own space. Yeah, I'll stop there.
Jason Baum: Ya know, it's, I keep going, I hear you talk
about this all day. So where I want to go next is to my
question, because you said, you know, companies, it's the money,
right? It's if the money it's talking, though, listen, you
know, obviously we're capitalists. At the end of the
day, if you're a capitalist communist doesn't matter. Right?
We're all motivated by by capitalism. So and ourselves to
write those numbers that I read at the beginning, why do people
leave? They're not getting enough money? There are is no,
no advancements, no opportunity for advancement, and they're
feeling disrespected. Okay, feeling disrespected. I think in
some ways with this, we can understand how that would
change. Right? opportunities for advancement? Well, that's
certainly taken care of, what about the pay? So in these these
types of structured, where we're so used to you climb the ladder?
If the ladder is not there anymore? How do you climb from a
PayScale? Because I'm still interested in climbing. I don't
necessarily care if I'm called a, you know, Chief, you know,
creative couch potato, but like, how am I making money? You know,
like, is that still part of it?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's a great question, too.
And it's one that I devote a fair amount of words to in the
book, because when when you look at systems of domination and
coercion and traditional companies, a lot of it does
revolve around the way people are paid. The way people get
raises, or don't get raises, right, the way compensation
happens, and performance reviews around etcetera, etcetera,
right. And promotions, obviously, are tied up into it.
So many of us want to climb the ladder, because we need more
money, we want more money for our families for a better life,
etc. send our kids to a better college, all that kind of stuff,
right? And so, if you if you eliminate coercive forms of pay,
right, then how do you actually grow your own pay within a
radical collaborative company, if it's not pretty pleasing the
boss and trying to win that promotion right over your peers?
Right? So you get a bigger piece of the pie? What is it? All
right? Well, actually, there's many different answers here. One
of them I already sort of have pointed to, right, when we talk
about backpack systems and hire, they both have forms of pay,
that are very tightly correlated, and they're
essentially a function of the value created either as
individuals or as teams, right? Either as a fractal company,
right, a virtual company of one like in the matte black systems
example, or as a micro enterprise, right, a small team
who's basically saying our pay is derived from the amount of
profit that we can point to that we're generating on our own sort
of internal free market. Okay, so that's one form of pay, but
there are many others. Who Gore's another company I should
mention, right, it's, you know, 15,000 people around the globe.
Now, it's doing several billion dollars worth of revenue every
year. They're the people behind like, coretec, waterproof
fabric, glide dental floss, elixir guitar strings, right.
They're an innovation and r&d, manufacturing innovation
organization, right? They've been doing this since 1958.
Guess what they were started by four chemists who got together
and said, We hate working for this big bureaucratic company
that we work for. They're they're squashing all of our
innovation. Why don't we get together and do something
different? And why don't we make a company that makes innovation
and supporting that, like the goal here, right? They got
together and they made a radical collaborative organization. And
it's really one of the longest lived experiments in America
that we can point to in this way of working. Okay, so the way
they do pay is that your peers decide your pay. Whatever team
you're on, you decide your peers pay and they decide yours.
That's how they do it. It's called peer set salary. Right?
That's their approach to doing it. Here's another approach to
self manage pay grant tree. For instance, in the UK, which I
talked about in the, in the, in the book, as well as peer group,
are both companies that do self managed PE, where essentially
you say, how much money you want to make you say openly to the
rest of the company, you give yourself that amount of money,
you give yourself a raise if you want to, but you do it
transparently. Right? Keep in mind, too, that the checks and
balances within these companies are real. And many of these
companies hiring and firing have been devolved into the
organization as well, like nirsoft. Now, calling Corp is a
great example of this. Anyone in the company, right? Any team can
get together and decide this person's gotta go, and they can
fire you. Well, okay, so if you're standing there and
saying, I'm going to make a million dollars, now, I deserve
that kind of salary, your peers could turn back to you and say,
ha, you're done. Now, that's insane. You can't do like being
in a co op. It is. Co Ops, co ops, are another form of radical
collaborative structure that is gaining prominence now in the
world. In fact, one of my friends who used to work at
Pivotal Labs left created his own consulting company and has
turned it into a co op. Right? And so he and all the other
consultants in the company collectively own it. Right. So
anyways, there's all these fascinating approaches. One more
I'll mention by the way that your audience might find
interesting is called the Deming taste system. It's named after
W. Edwards Deming, right, the forefather of lean
manufacturing, and certainly a progenitor for systems thinking.
Right. Really fascinating thing here. Well, one of the things he
thought a lot about was pay, right. And based on his approach
to thinking in systems, he said, Actually, we shouldn't pretend
that our companies are a meritocracy, right, we shouldn't
pretend that we can figure out what it is that we can say this
person's contribution is due to them this amount, and therefore
they should make this amount of pay. He said, actually, a bad
system will be a good person every time. Right. And so our
focus has to be on improving the system. Right? That has to be
our primary focus, let's create a pay system that reflects that
primary focus, right? Let's make sure that everyone knows coming
in how much money this role makes day one, what, how much
raise you get every single year that you're in that role? Right?
And let's also take profit sharing and distribute that
equally. So that quarterly dividend distributed equally to
every single member of that organization? Right, okay. Well,
despite the fact that he won, like the one of the Coppa
economic freedom medal from Ronald Reagan, right, he not a
lot of companies were keen on his idea around pay at the time,
right. But companies now a lot of companies are doing this.
They're creating their own versions of the Deming pace
system, they're making it open and transparent, and
collectively also deciding the numbers themselves. Here's what
this rule makes, here's how much raise you get every year, we
don't pretend like we can look at you and say what your
performances and give you a raise based on that we're
actually focused on the system itself. And that's how our pay
works.
Jason Baum: I love that version, what you just said it actually
and the fact that you, you kind of ended on that one is, I'm so
glad because I was actually going to go back to the
performance review real quick. But also, before I get that
pure, manage pay, that's terrible. By the way, my peers
are going to tell me what to me. I don't know, I better be very,
I guess it encourages you to be be nice to everybody. That's
what that's what that will do. But the performance review, and
kind of what you just said, like being told, Hey, you're doing a
good job. Well, I think if it's kind of, you're either going to
be doing a good job or a bad job a bad enough job that you're
going to be let go. So I think if you're still there,
obviously, you're doing a good enough job I think in a world
like for so this is DevOps, right? This is humans of DevOps.
In a when we're encouraging blameless culture, we're
encouraging a culture of incidents are okay, they're
going to happen. You know, like, it's how we learn. It's, it's,
it's, it goes back to I always compare this to parenting,
because it's like, how would we talk to our child? It's like,
accidents are okay? Like, you're allowed to make mistakes, how
are we going to grow if we don't make those mistakes? So when you
when you have these reviews, and it's like sometimes they're just
literally, you know, can checklists that you have to go
through when it's what are you really gleaming from them? I
personally don't like doing performance reviews or having
performance reviews because I don't think they accomplish
anything other than it's just another form of bureaucracy. I
think you need to have immediate check ins you you constantly are
in the loop as to what's going on. When you have these daily
check ins or weekly, bi weekly or whatever you're style is, but
continuous feedback, right? It's the continuous feedback. So
there's nothing no surprises, there's no quarterly surprise
coming your way. And when pay is told to you upfront, this is
what this position makes. You know, there's no $50,000 scale
or something when you're, you know, getting talking to the
recruiters or whatever. And then when you're there, yeah, this is
how much is increases every year. And you can expect that it
takes away so much of the pressure that we have on
ourselves to know what we're going to be dealing with every
year. Totally.
Matt K. Parker: Yeah. I mean, yeah, no, I actually, you know,
you said, I don't think these performance reviews, do
anything. I think they do do something. And I think it's very
bad, right? I think ultimately, right? Performance reviews.
They're based on a very outdated, antiquated and
debunked theory of human motivation. It's called
behavioral ism, right? It's turned back in the early 20th
century, when people started studying behavior in rats. And
then they began to extrapolate a lot about what they learned
about rats to people, right. And then from even the scientific
statements made along those lines, which are no longer even
considered valid science, right, we have then taken a version of
that a warped version of that into pop culture right now we
have pop behavioral ism. And so it systems of management in most
companies and pay systems of pay and most companies are based on
a belief that you have to use carrots and sticks to get
performance right. And this is actually been debunked by the
last 75 years of research into behavioral science. Broadly
speaking, we can refer to two basic theories about human
motivation. One is called Theory X. The other is called Theory Y.
Right? Theory X is a pictorial mnemonic, by the way, imagine a
worker holding their hands up and the next in front of them,
what are they saying, screw, I'm not going to do anything unless
you force me to. I'm lazy, I'm recalcitrant. So unless you're
putting a pretty big carrot in front of me, you're not gonna
get performance out of me. That's Theory X. And if you
treat your workforce, as if they all conform, that theory acts as
if they're all lazy and recalcitrant. And you whip them
with disincentives. And you you know, carrot them with pay
incentives and stuff like that. The thing is, what we've
discovered is that although they started as human beings with
intrinsic motivation, you turn them into human beings who can
only be who will only perform based on extrinsic motivations,
theory acts as a self fulfilling prophecy, theory wise, another
pictorial pneumonic, imagine a worker holding their hands up in
a while like this, what are they saying? They're saying, Yay, I'm
glad to be here. I like working right. I like my job. I'm
passionate about programming. For instance, I want to do that
I started as theory Why, what did I become after 10 years in
our industry Theory X, right? I didn't want to do anything
anymore. I was so demotivated by everything. Right. And I'm not
the only one, you said in the in the introduction, 84% of people
around the world are disengaged at work. And by the way, a fair
number of those are actively disengaged, they're actively
creating toxic situations for themselves and the people around
them, they are so upset with the way things are, right. That's
the kind of thing that we create with old school ideas about
people about behavior and about motivation. And that's what we
have to change. And that's part of this radically collaborative
revolution.
Jason Baum: I think that is an excellent place to kind of to
stop, I want to keep going. So I think we're going to have to do
this again. Maybe in a Twitter space, maybe another another
venues, the more that we could, I would love to continue this
conversation with you. I think this is absolutely fascinating.
And, Matt, you're not off the hook just yet. Because we always
like to close with 111 more question. I don't like for this
to be a gotcha question. But I kind of do it. It's always a
little more personal. This one's This one's not necessarily as
personal. What's one question you wished I'd asked you? And
then how would you answer it?
Matt K. Parker: Okay, well, this, I wish that we had had the
time to talk about one of the imperatives actually two of the
imperatives that we haven't really covered at all. I'll pick
one deficiency need gratification? Here's how I
would answer it. If you had said What the heck is that? Here's my
30-second Answer. Human beings are different from other
animals. We don't just need water, food, shelter, right? We
need love, security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, trust,
meaning, we are meaning beings. We're not just physical beings,
right? The companies that I profiled in the book, right, and
that I talk about a lot of their practices, a lot of what they
have thought about is how do we create environments that are
high in what psychologists refer to as deficiency need
gratification, right high in environments in which people
mutually satisfy each other's need for those human needs for
security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, etc. Right? And they
have little practices that they do every day. They have big
practices that they do once a year, and everything sort of in
between for maintaining a culture. That feels good, right?
All the Ellen with us, psychologists like Abraham
Maslow, Carl Rogers, Romae, many others in the sort of mid 20th
century, they were all saying, We believe that what is good for
people will also be good for organizations. And we wish these
companies believed us. And we wish they would focus on
creating great environments for people, because I think it'll
help them be great organizations. The truth is,
they didn't know they didn't have the empirical data to say
for sure whether or not that was true. That's no longer a, maybe
it's true, it's a definite truth. Now, we have lots of
empirical data that says there is a strong correlation between
between environments that are good for humans and environments
that are good for organizations and results that are good for
organizations. So I'll end with that. It's just another aspect
of this whole dimension that is really important to consider and
explore. If you're going down this path.
Jason Baum: it's
We're gonna change up the structure of this podcast,
because I'm so motivated now. And inspired. So I have a follow
up to this, too, that we spent a lot of time on my, on my
conversation last week, on generations, and we talked about
Gen Z, and what motivates them. And this is they are, I think,
in many ways the millennials are are value driven, certainly, but
not as passionate. Gen Z, is value driven, and they're gonna
be in your face about it. Do you see Gen Z? Like everything else?
I think, do you see them being as they get into the workforce,
and they learn more about the structures, and they're vocal?
Do you think that there's an opportunity here with Gen Z
coming into the workforce for this to really take off?
Matt K. Parker: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it's being
referred to now as the passion paradigm, in sort of behavioral
science, literature and organizational literature,
exploring this sort of explosion in the value placed on having a
job that you're passionate about doing work that you care about,
that you find meaning in, right, it's growing and growing and
growing. And I don't know, I, I personally don't have the data
in front of me to say that, truly, there is like a
significant and meaningful difference between the way this
was expressed in the previous generation and the current
generation or anything like that. But the fact that it's
growing, his true nonetheless, right. And maybe it's growing
across the board for everyone alive today. Or maybe it's just
a small segment of it. But it is a meme at the end of the day,
that that is captivating, more and more people. And it's
spreading that meme, right? That that I think is part and parcel
of continuing this quiet revolution in the way we work,
right? I'm using meme not in the sense of, you know, pictures on
the internet. I'm using it in the original sense that Richard
Dawkins proposed it right. A meme is a unit of cultural
propagation. It passes from person to person, it's how we
spread our culture, right? And the fact that that's spreading,
and it's finding more and more currency in the world.
Absolutely. Points to there's something big on the horizon,
right? Like this great resignation, right, as you
mentioned, in the beginning, right, is actually about
creating a world in which we have more meaning and purpose in
our lives, right, in which we say, enough is enough, right? We
are not going to take it anymore, we actually deserve
better, and we can create better. I'll end with this. A
coworker a long time ago, he looked at me one day, and he
said, We're adulting wrong. And he sort of was, you know, he
didn't really explain it at the time. But I think that his
statement, we're adulting wrong, encapsulates what so much of us
feel, but the flip side of that is, why not adult right? We can
make any sort of world we want. There's nothing about this world
that, that, that and especially the human side of this world,
that is necessary or final, right, we can get together and
change what we do, what we experience, how we experience it
together and make it what we want it to be. And I think
that's what this was all about. And, and as much as Gen Z is and
it's sort of on the forefront of expressing this potential.
Absolutely. We should leverage it and run with it and follow
Jason Baum: We are adulting wrong. Matt, thank you so much.
their lead.
Matt Parker, Matt K parker.com. And I think this this was such a
great conversation. I had such a good time. I hope you did too.
Radical enterprises the book, Matt, thanks again. And thank
you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much. And thank you
for listening to this episode. The humans of DevOps podcast,
I'm going to end this episode the same way I always do
encourage you to become a member and join us in the community at
DevOps Institute DevOps in the wild, to get access to even more
great resources just like this one. Until next time, stay safe,
stay healthy, and just fall State Human prosper.
Unknown: Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget to join our global community to get
access to even more great resources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part of something bigger than yourself.
You belong.
We recommend upgrading to the latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
Please check your internet connection and refresh the page. You might also try disabling any ad blockers.
You can visit our support center if you're having problems.