Hanzatsu

by Don Moen

Multi-tasking is a topic that has had both popularity and controversy. Is conventional wisdom correct in thinking that multi-tasking is a desirable capability that we should strive to develop? Conversely, is the human brain actually even able to multi-task? Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell⁽¹⁾ has gone so far as to describe multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” Is our perception of success while multi-tasking in actuality a benefit of reducing cycle time?

I believe that our ability to complete a task is dependent on our ability to give that task focused attention. With this in mind, multi-tasking then becomes a methodology by which we attempt to drive down the average cycle time (the period) of focused attention each task receives across a portfolio of tasks, all of which we perceive to have a similar priority. If effect, rotating our attention between several tasks with the expectation or hope is that in doing so we will complete all those tasks together more quickly.

I would assert that reducing the average period of focused attention can indeed lead to more rapid completion of tasks, however, I would argue that most of us have not found the practice to live up to the ideal of the expectation. Why? Because we don’t understand the real nature of the problem.

I believe we can better understand this phenomenon if we consider the relationship between the total time required to complete a set of tasks and the period of focused attention we apply to each.  Many assume this relationship to be a straight-line progression where we believe that reducing our period of attention will result in faster overall completion of tasks. But in reality the relationship is non-linear, as shown in the graph below.

To try to get a better understanding of this, let’s first move toward the outer edges of this curve.

Moving from left to right on the curve, as you give each task more focused attention, in effect, your ability to complete the task during that segment of attention becomes more likely. However, on the far right of this graph, where we apply longer and longer periods of focused attention to a task, we don’t see a continual reduction in time to complete as we might expect. Rather we can begin to see the time to complete the set of tasks rise as we can lose the sense of priority and urgency that actually helps us to drive tasks to conclusion. Indeed, the extreme example of this is just processing tasks serially until each is done and not multi-tasking at all.

Conversely, think about moving from right to left on the graph. This is where we are applying conscious effort to reduce the period of focused attention and it can move us toward more rapid completion of all tasks. However, only to a point because at the far left of this scale, where we radically reduce the period of focused attention, the brain is forced to pause and refocus continuously, causing the overall time to complete to rise steeply. Indeed, under these circumstances we can also experience a mental paralysis from an increase in compounding factors such as stress and anxiety which can drastically reduce our performance.

What this suggests to me is that it would be optimal for us to operate in the central portion of this curve. It is here that we can achieve a real & sustainable reduction in the total time to complete all tasks.  The curve is a great depiction here because it implies that there is a range in the period of focused attention, discoverable at an individual level, where we can hit a “sweet spot” of optimal effectiveness. Interestingly, Francesco Cirillo created a time management method, the Pomodoro Technique⁽²⁾, many years ago which gives a both a good starting point and some practices that can help us to discover that sweet spot.

The real magic of multi-tasking is that with observation and experimentation we can learn to apply a specific period of focused attention to the tasks we take on, and in doing so create an optimization for greater personal throughput and flexibility.

⁽¹⁾Hallowell, Edward M., Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life. 2007. Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-48244-1

⁽²⁾ Cirillo, Francesco, The Pomodoro Technique 2006. LuLu.com. ISBN 1-4452-1994-8.

This quote is excerpted from Barbara Kellerman’s book The End of Leadership.  (If you’d like a PDF of the poster you can obtain it here.)

Executive Summary

A major cornerstone of software process evolution during the last 20+ years has been around the question of how best to address variability in the work.

• In the waterfall approach, we aim to predict and control every detail of the development process, thus (supposedly) driving out variability by creating a perfect plan and sticking to it.
• In first-generation agile approaches (e.g. Scrum by the Book), we work around variability by keeping scope flexible throughout the entire release and – at least canonically – only making short-term commitments that teams feel extremely confident about.
• Today – especially in larger organizations with complex products that require extensive integration and synchronization across multiple teams, product families, functional groups, and legacy systems – market and competitive forces are driving us to seek new approaches:
  • We require mechanisms that allow us to make feature-level commitments across a 6+ month time frame and subsequently maintain very high probabilities of being able to deliver the “must have” functionality that those  features depend on.
  • To achieve this, we need techniques and tools that allow us to quickly and reliably identify patterns of variability, mitigate these when they appear, and  – when cost-effective mitigation isn’t attainable — manage the variability in a smart and transparent way.
  • In the software industry we are still in the early stages of this evolution, but we have started to see compelling results from system-focused approaches (e.g. as found in certain types of lean thinking and practice) that allow us to optimize flow and systematically drive out unnecessary risk and delays.

Background

In software development we operate in an environment of high complexity and technical uncertainty. We constantly encounter new types of problems, some of which can only be solved by making systems do things that they weren’t originally designed to do.  Inevitably, when we make changes to these systems, we trigger side effects that result in large amounts of unplanned work.

Separately, we operate in a highly dynamic market context where customer needs are constantly changing and it is often difficult to know what customers want (and more importantly don’t want) until they themselves have seen some amount of real-world functionality. Even so, many customers – in particular large and influential ones — expect us to make and meet delivery commitments in the 6-12 month time frame (or longer).

All this creates conditions that lead to high stress and high variability around scheduling, which can easily create compounded, cascading delays.  As it happens, this issue of schedule risk is one of the top reasons we spend time, effort, and money making use of product management methodologies in the first place.

Waterfall

Historically, waterfall methodologies sought to mitigate schedule risk by creating detailed upfront plans which were intended to help us predict and control every detail of the development process.  In essence, the waterfall philosophy is that a well-designed and well-run project will by definition contain no significant variability, or at the very least that whatever variability exists will average itself out over the duration of the project (i.e., regression to the mean). This approach often appeared satisfactory before the work was begun, but in reality the plan was so brittle that there was no way to recover once a major delay was introduced.  Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of waterfall projects are thought to have been completed late, above budget, with poor quality, or a mix of all three.

Scrum

First-generation agile approaches like the initial implementations of Scrum (and to some extent Extreme Programming) were revolutionary in that they not only acknowledged that variability would emerge during the work, but actually sought to embrace it.  This led to a rewriting of the social contract between development teams and their funders: Scrum promised more throughput and better quality in return for flexible scope.

Properly speaking, in Scrum we abstain from making delivery commitments beyond the horizon that we can see with high clarity and confidence.  By not promising what we can’t deliver, we significantly reduce the chance that we will miss release commitments.  In other words, in Scrum we assume that systemic variability is not something we can reliably impact at the team level – an assumption that may in fact be quite credible given a specific team’s organizational context.

Just as importantly, by making this assumption explicit, we use transparency and expectation management to help business stakeholders and customers understand that they cannot expect to know in advance when a large and highly defined chunk of work will be ready to ship. That said, we seek to organize our work so that *something* will be shippable at any given time – a condition that is easier to achieve in contexts where release engineering technologies and practices are advanced, and one that is harder to achieve when there are large amounts of legacy code and/or large numbers of legacy sub-systems.

A further innovation of Scrum was based on the insight that engaged, coherent, and motivated teams who are not forced into extended states of peak utilization (i.e., “death marches”) tend to have more positive variability in their capacity.  In other words, these teams can stretch and adjust during short periods to optimize the flow of work, in part because they have some reserves to draw on (“slack” in queuing terminology), and in part because they feel a meaningful allegiance to the work and one another.   By putting team members’ well-being at the center of the process, mature Scrum teams have in some cases been able to match the variability in the work as it emerged. The caveat is that this tends to happen reliably only insofar as the team and the work are highly synchronized, and neither the team nor the work are constrained by technical or organizational dependencies.

Finally, having a “voice of the customer” directly involved in the work on a day to day basis – a game-changing innovation from XP — has, compared to waterfall methods, tended to improve the odds that wrong assumptions about customer desires and expectations will be discovered more quickly.  This helped to reduce at least some of the most egregious waste that tended to occur in large projects (e.g., multiple years of work thrown away).

Evolving Agile

For several years, evidence has been emerging that larger development organizations with multiple products running on complex legacy systems have not reliably seen consistent, sustained improvements after the initial boost that occurred early on in their Scrum adoptions. I believe this is because the Scrum approach to dealing with variability is not well-suited to address the complex level of dependencies and synchronization  — both technically and around market interaction — inherent in these sorts of projects.

Instead, more recent approaches – especially those inspired by lean thinking – aim to improve throughput and predictability by studying the variability inherent in the work as well as in the organizational system that surrounds it. By measuring and visualizing these attributes and, in genera, increasing situational awareness about why and how the variability is manifesting, we can begin to discover opportunities that allow us to optimize for the whole (that is, across the entire value stream).

It’s important to understand that these optimization opportunities may themselves display an enormous amount of variability.  In some cases we may see improvement by mitigating the factors under our control that prevent smooth flow; in others we may benefit by systematically investing in capabilities that allow us to improve flow; still elsewhere we may be best served by creating appropriate buffers where variability cannot be reduced cost-effectively.  The litmus test about whether an intervention is successful should be whether it produces sustained improvements in throughput, quality, AND predictability of schedule across multiple releases. An action that improves only one of these performance metrics is unsatisfactory, as is an action that produces improvement on a one-time basis but fizzles out as soon as conditions change.

I also want to highlight my belief that Scrum and XP-led innovations that helped increase human connection and stimulated more rewarding working conditions are, if anything, even more essential in this project management approach than in past models.  It can be tempting for  analysts and engineers to tackle system-level problems from a deterministic, mathematical, and tool-driven perspective, which would be fine if we were optimizing an engineered system but is utterly unsuited to understanding and improving living systems.  One of the key challenges for us as a generation of software leaders is how to implement effective measures to study and manage variability that do not suppress — and, instead, ultimately enhance — the engagement, alignment, and job satisfaction that are needed to grow and sustain high-performing agile organizations.

Today’s post comes courtesy of my esteemed colleague Don Moen, Scrum Master extraordinaire at Vertafore:

I recently attended a meeting of BeyondAgile, a community group in the greater Seattle area, where we were led through a kanban simulation game by Dhaval Panchal. He had designed this game with a particular aspect of kanban in mind: signaling.  This was truly an “Aha!” moment for me.

While I have been studying and researching kanban for several months, I had come to believe that the techniques of establishing and adjusting WIP limits remained a mystical practice, apparently only to be known and understood by select initiates of a secret order.

Not so! While I understood that ‘kanban’ can be basically translated as ‘signal card’ somehow the ‘card’ stuck in my mind but the ‘signal’ did not.  Perhaps my mind was biased from my scrum perspective? What this game illustrated to me can be summarized in one sentence:

If your system is not seeing “stop the line” behavior when bottlenecks occur, you should reduce your WIP until it does.

That’s it.  Revolutionary! This simple practice gets to the very root of kanban in that it allows you to adjust WIP limits until everyone in the system is aware of problems in the flow and stops to consider what to do about it.

Thanks Don for the inspiring clarity and simplicity!

From the book “Finding Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

(p. 5-6) “Because the nervous system is so constructed that it can only process a small amount of information at any given moment, most of what we can experience must be experienced serially, one thing after another … We can only swallow one bite, hear only one song, read one paper, have one conversation at a time. Thus the limitations on attention, which determines the amount of psychic energy we have for experiencing the world, provide an inflexible script for us to live by.”

(pp. 127-130) “Time stress has become one of the most popular complaints of the day. But more often than not, it is an excuse for not taking control of our lives. How many of the things we do are really necessary? How many of the demands could be reduced if we put some energy into prioritizing, organizing, and streamlining the routines that now fritter away our attention? It is true that if we let time run through our fingers we will soon have none left. One must learn to husband it carefully, not so much in order to achieve wealth and security in some distant future, but in order to enjoy life in the here and now.

Time is what one must find in order to develop interest and curiosity to enjoy life for its own sake. The other equally important resource is the ability to control psychic energy. Instead of waiting for an external stimulus or challenge to grab our attention, we must learn to concentrate it more or less at will. This ability is related to interest by a feedback loop of mutual causation and reinforcement. If you are interested in something you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it.

Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them. Until one starts to collect them, insects and minerals are not very appealing. Nor are most people until we find out about their lives and thoughts. Running marathons or climbing mountains … are rather boring except to those who have invested enough attention to realize their intricate complexity. As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action – physical, mental, or emotional – is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored.

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, then on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a momentary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such events is no solution either, because the information will keep smoldering in the recesses of the mind, draining away psychic energy to keep it from spreading. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible on things we choose to focus on.

In a study of people who became severely handicapped by disease or by accidents – blind or paraplegic – Professor Fausto Massimini and his team found that several had adapted remarkably to their tragedy, and claimed that their lives had become better as a result of their handicap. What distinguished such individuals is that they decided to master their limitation through an unprecedented discipline of their psychic energy. [..]

The same ability to transform a tragic situation into at least a tolerable one is shown by [people] who survive solitary confinement or prisoners in concentration camps. In such conditions, the outside, “real” environment is so barren and dehumanizing as to induce despair in most people. Those who survive are able to ignore selectively the external conditions, and redirect their attention to an inner life that is real only to themselves. [..]

These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude towards these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is requiring over one’s attention.

Normally, attention is directed by genetic instructions, social conventions, and habits we learned as children. Therefore it is not we who decide what to become aware of, what information will reach consciousness.  As a result, our lives are not ours in any meaningful sense; most of what we experience will have been programmed for us. We learn what is supposed to be worth seeing, what is not; what to remember and what to forget; what to feel when we see a bat, a flag, or a person who worships God by different rites; we learn what is supposed to be worth living and dying for. Through the years, our experience will follow the script written by biology and culture. The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.”

From “Theory U” by Otto Scharmer, page 196:

I asked Peter Senge to describe what he does when he creates. “To create music, you have to have violins. You have to have instruments, okay? But the music doesn’t come from the violin. The violin is an instrument. For me, at an experiential level, giving a talk or working with a group in a workshop can be the same. I create that reality in my own consciousness, and then I play the instruments. I just really, really enjoy myself; I kind of fall into my love of the people. And I know, at some level, when I’m doing those programs and things begin to operate this way, nothing can go wrong. No matter what happens, it’s exactly what needs to happen right then. [..]
That doesn’t mean it’s always happy. Sometimes it’s very intense, but you literally have the experience that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. That doesn’t mean it turns out according to your plan. It means that whatever turns out is exactly what is right in that moment, and that is the music.”

Some salient quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal book “Finding Flow”:

(p. 88-89) “Much has been written about what makes families work. The consensus is that families that support the emotional well-being and growth of their members combine two almost opposite traits. They combine discipline with sponteneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love. An optimal family system is complex in that it encourages the unique individual development of its members while uniting them in a web of affective ties.Rules and discipline are needed to avoid excessive waste of psychic energy in the negotiation of what can or cannot be done [..]. Then the psychic energy from bickering and arguing can be invested in the pursuit of each member’s goals. At the same time, each person knows that he or she can draw on the collective psychic energy of the family if needed.  [..] In a complex family, [we] have a chance to develop skills and recognize challenges, and are thus more prepared to experience life as flow.”

(p. 89) “When we talk to another person, even about the most trivial subjects such as the weather or last night’s ball game, the conversation introduces a shared reality into our consciousness. Even a greeting such as “Have a nice day” reassures us that we exist because other people notice us, and are concerned about our welfare. Thus the fundamental function of even the most routine encounters is reality maintenance, which is indispensable, lest consciousness disintegrate into chaos.”

(p. 110-112) “A group of people is kept together by two kinds of energy: material energy [e.g. money, defined responsibilities]; and the psychic energy of people investing attention in each other’s goals. Unless [we] share ideas, emotions, activities, memories, and dreams, a relationship will survive only because it satisfies material needs. As a psychic entity, it will exist only at the most primitive level.

To experience the simple pleasures of [shared flow], one has to pay attention, to know what [a person] is “proud of,” what she is “into”; then one has to devote more attention to share those activities with her. Only when there is harmony between the goals of the participants, when everyone is investing psychic energy into a joint goal, does being together become enjoyable.

The same holds true for any type of interaction. When there is reason to think that we are appreciated, job satisfaction is usually high; whereas the greatest source of stress in the workplace is the feeling that no one is interested in supporting our goals. Infighting among coworkers, inability to communicate with superiors and subordinates are the bane of most jobs. The roots of interpersonal conflict are often an excessive concern for oneself, and an inability to pay attention to the needs of others. It is sad to see how often people ruin a relationship because they refuse to recognize that they could serve their own interests best by helping others achieve theirs.”