LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #85:

THE POLITICAL WORKFORCE

“Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” ~ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Today, we do a bit of a deep dive into the relation between politics and work and how we can improve it. We have a short look at why retrospection is important, how we tend to overlook the most important problem solving strategy and why we really can’t trust our senses.

The Political Workforce

You might or might not have followed the fallout at a software company called Basecamp after the founders made the decision to ban all “political and societal discussions” at work, because they found it to be unproductive, and they thought “work is work”, and there should be no place for such discussions at work. You can get a quick overview of what happened at the verge.

The situation is especially rattling for the tech community because the two founders of Basecamp. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are very outspoken about a vast array of topics, and wrote no less than five books about leadership and how to build successful companies.

But what interested me is not so much the hypocrisy of the management reaction at Basecamp, but more the general question of how could it happen that leadership arrived at the conclusion that political debate has no place at the workplace?

Work is inherently political, and tech doubly so. The reflection on it spans the field between how our workforce looks like and who gets promoted and who doesn’t on one side, and the discussion about the impact of our products and services on society at large at the other.

If your company is doing anything with Machine Learning, chances are that both the complexity and the severity of the question multiplies.

Having these discussions can be hard to accept for founders. It means they give up parts of their freedom of deciding what is “good” and what is “bad”, what the company will do and what it does not want to do. And exactly this dualism of “yes/no” decisions that is so typical for entrepreneurial types with a strong bias for action (that end up founding and running companies) is so dangerous and hurting the efforts of seeing the multitudes that make up the world.

Having political debates is not easy, and seldom they are resolved. The debate itself is  what is important. The constant navigation of complex issues and the negotiation about how to interpret and act on it. Leadership often don’t have the patience for it. They want things resolved, and checkmarks next to items on lists. Seeing something going on for a long time makes them nervous, and lets them think time is wasted, and money is spent unproductively.

But there is no other way. Being apolitical is not possible. Just as Paul Watzlawick said that you cannot not communicate, you also cannot not be political. The mere fact that we’re humans inside a political system makes us political. If you think you’re apolitical (in the sense of “staying out of it”) you’re reinforcing the status quo, which in itself is a political stance. That’s ok, you can be happy with the status quo. But don’t pretend to be “outside of the political realm”. Which, by the way, would be someone the ancient greeks would call an “Idiot”, someone who doesn’t care about the public good.

And who wants to be called an idiot?

We need more political debate at work, not less

Here’s the initial blog postI wrote that started my thoughts about why being political is crucial for companies.

If you think you can leave political discussions out of the workplace, you’re claiming that your work has no impact on society at large, which is naive at best, and most likely totally wrong.

Racial Literacy in Tech

Jessie Daniels, Mutale Nkonde and Darakhshan Mir write: “Without a deliberate effort to address race in technology, it’s inevitable that new tech will recreate old divisions. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

They go on to give an overview over what the current situation in Tech regarding to racism is, and describe a path forward that is grounded in reflection, developing the needed emotional intelligence for change, and concrete action.

Is your name spiky or round?

Hey, want to briefly talk about bias and what it does to us? Let’s see if your name is spiky our round. No such thing as a round name, because names are words, and words don’t have a physical body? Get this: People judge you by the physical shape the associate with your name.

The Importance of Retrospectives

Here’s a puzzle that’s easy to solve - after you know how it works.

The same goes for our work. While it’s impossible to understand what is going on while it is going on, it’s usually much easier to figure it out once it is over. That’s why Scrum places such an emphasis on the Retrospective event happening after every sprint. It’s a place to reflect on ourselves, our teamwork and our work, and create new ideas for improvement. Understanding what is going on is nearly impossible. Understanding what has happened is much easier. I recommend doing such sessions on a regular basis, regardless if you’re doing Scrum or not.

A great problem solving strategy most people overlook

“Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away” Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and talk about perfection. I think it’s fine to settle for “working”. One thing I noticed when working with organisations or teams is how people approach problem solving. The typical approach is to add something to the current situation. For example, if a certain type of recurring meeting is unproductive, we add a rule to it (e.g. “Send out the agenda a day in advance so that people can prepare.”). Or if we have the feeling we need to coordinate more, we add a chat channel. Very rarely it occurs to people that sometimes, removing something can solve the problem. If the meeting is unproductive, why not cancel it? If two teams need to coordinate, why not delineate their work so that this need goes away?

Removing things to solve problems is a powerful strategy most people overlook.

These balls are the same color

To round off this edition of Let’s Be Fwends, let’s have another cool optical illusion, which might or might not be another allegory about how you cannot trust your instincts when trying to understand the outside world.

That’s it for this edition of Let’s Be Fwends, thanks for making it until the very bottom of this issue. Are you going to have a political debate at your workplace? Let me know how it worked!