Title: Management 3.0 By Jurgen Appelo

Q: Holism
A: Holism is the idea that the behavior of a system cannot be fully determined by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the system behaves. It is often seen as the opposite of reductionism, although complexity scientists believe that complexity is the bridge between the two, and both are necessary but insufficient.

Q: Cynefin
A: It describes a typology of contexts using four domains: Simple, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic (with Disorder as a fifth domain in the middle) and is used to guide approaches to decision making and policy making.

Q: Simplification and Linearization
A: • Simplification is the act of making the structure better understandable (moving it from top to bottom in my model).
• Linearization is the act of making behavior better predictable (moving it from right to left in the model).

Q: The creative process model by Wallas and Smith
A: Suppose you are responsible for improving the performance of a website, the five-step creative process might look like the following:
1. Preparation: Finding out what the location and dimension of the problem is, such as the time it takes for (some) queries to execute on the database server.
2. Incubation: Pondering on the performance problem, both consciously and unconsciously, while taking a shower, playing poker and discussing the latest Batman movie with friends (possibly all at the same time).
3. Intimation: Realizing that the solution might have to be found in a better data model, and not as you thought earlier, in more efficient queries or better hardware.
4. Illumination: Suddenly having the insight that a solution can be realized by “denormalizing” some database tables which allows for faster data retrieval.
5. Verification: Trying out the new solution and verifying and improving it until it has the intended results.

Q: Creative Phases
A: • Preconventional creativity is the kind commonly exhibited by children younger than 7 years old. It is mainly formed using visual perception and involves spontaneity, emotional involvement, and sometimes the repainting of a child’s bedroom walls.
• Conventional creativity is the second phase of creativity. It is often found in children between 7 and 11 years old and involves
actual thinking, but this is dominated by constraints and conventions imposed by the child’s skills that are being developed.
• Postconventional creativity is the last phase and is found in children older than 11 years and in adults. In this phase people can produce new things despite knowing what the constraints and conventional approaches are.

Q: Creative Techniques
A: • Processes: Some creative techniques, such as Creative Problem Solving, Productive Thinking Model, and Synectics, describe the process to follow to generate creative solutions. Most of them involve a number of steps that can be repeated until sufficient ideas have been generated. They can encompass other more specific techniques for the execution of individual steps.
• Problem Definition: Some techniques deal specifically with problem analysis and redefinition to make it better understandable. They include techniques such as Chunking (dividing a problem in smaller chunks), Five Ws and H (asking Who? Why? What? Where? When? And How?), and Boundary Examination (refining the problem).
• Idea Generation: These are techniques that concern themselves with finding as many potential solutions as possible for the problem. Both Brainstorming (generating ideas in a group while suspending judgment) and Talking Pictures (generating ideas through association with pictures) are examples of this category.
• Idea Selection: The ideas that have been generated need to be selected at some point. Anonymous Voting (making people feel safe about expressing their opinions), Consensus Mapping (sequencing ideas into a usable plan), and Sticking Dots (determining priorities) are examples of this category.

Q: Motivators and Hygiene factors
A: • Motivators: Challenging work, achievement, personal growth, recognition, responsibilities, and so on.
• Hygiene factors: Job security, salary, status, working conditions, policies, fringe benefits, and so on.

Q: Self-determination theory
A: Self-determination theory is a general model of intrinsic motivation that differentiates between three main intrinsic needs. These needs are universal, innate, and psychological:
• Competence: The need for a person to experience oneself as capable in coping with the environment
• Autonomy: The need for someone to actively participate in determining one’s own behavior, with autonomous choice of actions
• Relatedness: The need to care for and be related to others, and to be involved in the social world

Q: The 10 Desires of Team Members
A: 1. Make sure that people feel competent at what they are doing. Give them work that challenges their abilities but that is still within their grasp.
2. Try to let people feel accepted by you and the group. Compliment them on their achievements (but only if you mean it).
3. Make sure that their curiosity is addressed. Even though some activities can be boring, there should always be something new for them to investigate.
4. Give people a chance at satisfying their honor. You must allow teams to make their own rules, which team members will follow happily (or sometimes grudgingly).
5. Infuse the business with some idealism (purpose). You’re not just there to make money. You’re also making a (small) contribution to make the world a better place.
6. Foster people’s independence (autonomy). Allow them to be different from other people, with their own tasks and responsibilities. And compliment them on their original and interesting hair style.
7. Make sure that some level of order is maintained in the organization. People work better when they can rely on some (minimal) company rules and policies.
8. Make sure that people have some power or influence over what’s happening around them. Listen to what they have to say and help them in making those things happen.
9. Create the right environment for social contacts (relatedness) to emerge. There’s usually no need to venture into the romance area, but friendships can easily arise, provided that managers take care of a fertile context.
10. Finally, it is important for people to feel that they have some status in the organization. They shouldn’t feel like dangling somewhere at the bottom of a big hierarchy.

Q: What if Employees Want Extrinsic Motivators?
A: If there is no way around the extrinsic motivation, you could ask employees to be creative and describe all the possible ways that they can think of to rig the system. Then ask them how the
extrinsic motivators should be (re)defined to prevent these same problems. When the employees ask for external motivators, they have to solve the problem of undesired side effects because you don’t want them.

Q: Ways to Personality Assessments
A: The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire is a tool which distinguishes between 16 personal traits, is useful in predicting a person’s behavior in many settings. It provides an integrated picture of an individual’s whole personality. Have a look at the 16PF model when you are most serious about personality tests and when people have sufficient time available to do the tests.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is the most widely used personality assessment tool in the world, although its effectiveness has been disputed in scientific circles. The MBTI model sorts a number of psychological differences into four opposite pairs. The model is sometimes accused of suffering from the Forer Effect. Consider this test if you care more about people’s enthusiasm than scientific justification. The results are fun to discuss, and they enable easy comparisons, if you don’t take the results too seriously.
The Enneagram of Personality proposes nine personality types, represented with a nine-pointed diagram in a circle. It is said that the tool is an effective method for self-development, although it is sometimes criticized for not being falsifiable and accused of having its roots in mysticism. Nevertheless, such a test can be fun to do with a team. And if team members are reluctant to have their personalities assessed scientifically, this unscientific Enneagram can be a welcome compromise. A bit of relativism and a good laugh are worth sharing with team members, even if it’s only to stimulate team building growing and awareness of differences.
The Big Five Factors of personality is a model that consists of five personality traits  and is considered to be the most comprehensive model available, providing a conceptual framework that integrates all earlier findings and theory in personality psychology. However, a common complaint about the Big Five model is that it is too high level to be useful. The Big Five model is a great choice if you want a personality assessment that is scientific in its approach, like the 16PF model, but that doesn’t dig too deep. This could draw in some people who would otherwise feel uncomfortable about such a test, or who lack the time to do a full 16PF assessment.

Q: Do-It-Yourself Team Values Kit
A: 1. Print the Big List of 50 Virtues and give a copy to each of your development team members.
2. Tell your team that, they must select between three and seven virtues from this list. These must be the virtues that they consider to be the most important, given their current project, situation, and personalities. They can choose some standard Agile values, but they can also select some other ones.
3. Optionally, do exactly the same with the stakeholders outside the team. Get a representative number of them together and have them select between three and seven items that the stakeholders think would be the most important values for the project.
4. Then get together with the team and compare the lists, which must have been created independently. Most selected virtues will probably be different, but some choices will be the same or very similar. It is likely that the environment and the system itself have different views on what’s important. Talk about the mutual expectations until you reach consensus on a merged list of three to seven values.
5. You now have agreed on the final team values. Make them clear to all team members and stakeholders by displaying them on posters, mugs, task boards, coffee machines, screensavers, and lunch menus.

Q: Three aspects are important for a property to be emergent
A: • Supervenience is the observation that the property will no longer exist if you take away the individual parts of the system.
• The property is not an aggregate, meaning that it is not simply the result of adding up the properties of the individual parts.
• There must be downward causality, meaning that the emergent property should influence the behavior of the individual parts.

Q: Darkness Principle
A: This principle states that each agent in a system is ignorant of all behaviors of the system. If an agent “knew” the entire system, the complexity of the whole system would have to reside in that agent.

Q: How to Empower Teams
A: Don’t Create Motivational Debt
Wear a Wizard’s Hat
Pick a Wizard, Not a Politician
Reduce Your Fear, Increase Your Status
Choose the Right Maturity Level
Pick the Right Authority Level
Address People’s Ten Intrinsic Desires
Gently Massage the Environment
Trust
Respect

Q: Universality Classes
A: • Class I: These are the systems with “doomsday rules.” No matter what pattern of living and dead cells you start out with, everything just dies within a few generations.
• Class II: These systems are a bit livelier, but not much. Each initial pattern quickly collapses to a set of very boring static configurations.
• Class III: These systems are at the opposite extreme: They are too lively. Each initial pattern in the system results in total chaos with no configuration stabilizing and nothing being predictable.
• Class IV: These are the systems with a set of rules not leading to dead, static, or chaotic configurations. Emerging patterns in this category are lively, creative, often surprising, but also stabilizing.

Q: How to Align Constraints?
A: Give People a Shared Goal
Communicate Your Goal
Allow Your Team an Autonomous Goal
Compromise on Your Goal and Your Team’s Goal
Create a Boundary List of Authority
Choose the Proper Management Angle
Protect People
Protect Shared Resources
Constrain Quality
Create a Social Contract

Q: Visiob vs. Mission
A: A vision statement outlines what the organization wants to be. It concentrates on the future. It is a source of inspiration. It provides clear decision-making criteria.
A mission statement tells you the fundamental purpose of the organization. It concentrates on the present. It defines the customer and the critical processes. It informs you of the desired level of performance

Q: Six maturity levels of Weinberg
A: • Oblivious: We don’t even know that we’re performing a process.
• Variable: We do whatever we feel like at the moment.
• Routine: We follow our routines (except when we panic).
• Steering: We choose among our routines by the results they produce.
• Anticipating: We establish routines based on our past experience with them.
• Congruent: Everyone is involved in improving everything all the time.

Q: Memetics and Memeplex
A: Memetics is the study of evolutionary models of information transfer, often in a cultural context.
We refer to a collection of interdependent memes as a memeplex.

Q: Seven Approaches to Competence Development
A: • Self: Self-discipline and self-development refer to one’s own initiative to adopt particular patterns of behavior. Nobody needs to tell me that I should answer other people’s calls and emails within a reasonable amount of time. It is part of the behavior I have adopted myself and that I intend to stick to.
• Coach: Coaching is the method of training a person with the aim to develop specific skills and behaviors. A coach might help someone in establishing proper email usage patterns, making sure that she doesn’t leave other people’s emails unattended.
• Tests: A test says (or should say) that some authority has verified that a person has shown the necessary skills, behaviors, and willingness to carry out certain tasks—like picking up a working phone and dialing a correct number.
• Tools: Signs and signals are a way to steer people’s behavior by making sure that they know what they need to do. Just one hour before I wrote this paragraph, I ticked off “call back customer” from my own To-Do list. I configured the system to notify me in case I forget about such important items.
• Peers: Peer pressure refers to the influence exerted by peers in a group to encourage a person to change her behavior to conform to the norms of the group. The first time a person keeps me waiting, I gently and understandingly remind her when I am still waiting for a reply. The second time I make sure to communicate honest and heartfelt annoyance. The third time I bite her head off.
• Supervisors: Supervising is the act of making sure, on behalf of an organization’s management, that people are doing their jobs properly. For example: in some organizations it might be a good idea to check occasionally whether people are handling their calls and emails properly and timely.
• Manager: Leading and governing are part of the manager’s job. It is about setting good examples and about ruling and judging in case someone has acted against the interest of the organization—like damaging the corporate reputation by completely ignoring a potential customer.

Q: Tips for Performance Metrics
A: Distinguish skill from discipline
Do not rate knowledge or experience
Rate multiple activities
Rate multiple performances
Use relative ratings where possible
Keep the feedback loop as short as possible
Use both leading and lagging indicators
Never create the ratings yourself

Q: Self-discipline
A: Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one’s self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behavior, even though one would really rather be doing something else

Q: What enables people to keep discipline?
A: 1. It starts with the realization that something is important. If you don’t understand the value of something, you will never have the discipline to start (and keep) doing it.
2. It requires basic time management skills. If you cannot fit something important into your busy weekly schedule, it will never happen.
3. When understanding and time management are properly tackled, it is crucial not to forget.
4. Possibly the toughest one, people need to be motivated. No motivation, no discipline.

Q: The four ingredients for self-discipline on one-on-one meetings
A: 1. Realize that one-on-ones are important. Of course, that’s why I’m giving it a section in this chapter, and why you are reading it.
2. Tackle the time management problem by giving these meetings a fixed time slot in your schedule, say half an hour per person. I noticed that it helped me to schedule them for all team members in the same afternoon, every two weeks. This made it easier to shield the meetings collectively from other urgent activities.
3. I found the not forgetting part not to be a problem because the employees themselves were quick to stand at my desk in the rare cases when that happened.
4. Motivate yourself by making one-on-ones more interesting (or even fun) to do. You can organize your one-on-ones while having lunch, while pair programming, or while secretly using a messaging system during an extremely boring meeting

Q: Nine capabilities of communicators
A: • Connecting. Some people are good at making connections with other people. They create many pathways through which communication can potentially take place. Such people may have many friends on Facebook or LinkedIn; they frequently attend meetings and conferences; and in the office they know just about everybody. Both Hubs and Connectors excel in this capability.
• Filtering. Knowing many people doesn’t mean that you’re actually listening to all their messages. People who are good at filtering not only actively listen to other people’s social network status updates, and hallway chatter, but they also know which people and messages to ignore. Someone who is well connected can be bad at filtering qualitatively, whereas someone with only few connections could be listening more intently and selectively. Both Pulsetakers and Mavens are good at filtering.
• Empathizing. Actively listening to people still doesn’t mean that you care about what they are saying. There needs to be some emotional association to someone’s messages to feel interested. For example, a socially challenged system administrator could care more about what developers are saying than a social savvy project manager. Both Pulsetakers and Salesmen seem to excel at empathizing with what other people are saying.
• Understanding. And then there has to be a real understanding of what is being said. You may be enthusiastic about some architectural issue in your project, and I may be able to empathize with you, but if I don’t understand anything about architecture, then I don’t know what you mean, and I cannot respond properly to what you’re telling me.
• Developing. Given what you learn, and what you already know, you can develop new information and then pass it along to others. Right now I am developing this list of capabilities by connecting the dots between the works of Cockburn, Stephenson, and Gladwell, while adding my own thoughts to the cocktail. The capability of people for developing (creating, building) new information seems to be overlooked in the other models.
• Managing. Some people are good at managing (categorizing and evaluating) existing information. They know what is important, and they know to whom they should communicate something and, at least as important, to whom they should not communicate something. Gatekeepers perform quite well in this area.
• Broadcasting. Then there are people who are experts at radiating information, whether intentional or not. They give away all they know to anyone they meet with either positive or negative
consequences. Whether it is about projects, customers, management, or personal relationships, these people can, and will, tell you all about it. Hubs clearly have excellent broadcasting capabilities.
• Influencing. But those who send a lot of information may not necessarily be good at also influencing their colleagues. The silent but brilliant software architect, who rarely says a word, may be the best person in the organization, when he talks, to really make a difference. Such people transmit messages to fewer people, but (because of their status or power) influencers have a much higher success rate of convincing others. It seems that Mavens are particularly gifted with this capability.
• Conversing. Finally, influencers are not necessarily communicators. I am told that some of my blog posts have influenced people, but I have not directly exchanged ideas with many of my readers. This means that I am incapable of steering their actions, and there is no understanding of what they do with the information that I gave them. It seems that both Connectors and Salesmen score well (better than me) in this department.

Q: Ways of formation of groups
A: • Concocted groups are groups that are created by an external force, in a planned manner.
• Founded groups are groups that are also planned, but the planning is internal to the group.
• Self-organized groups are groups in which the initiative is also internal to the group, but formation takes place in an unplanned or emergent fashion.
• Circumstantial groups are groups that are formed due to circumstances beyond their own control, external to the group, but still in an emergent manner.

Q: Scale up or scale out
A: From fractals we can learn that scale invariant structures are efficient and require only a few rules. Another finding is that scaling out (growing many small parts) works better than scaling up (growing one big system).

Q: Eight laws of software evolution
A: 1. Continuing Change: A system must be continually adapted or else it becomes progressively less capable of satisfying its users.
2. Increasing Complexity: As a system evolves its complexity increases unless work is done to reduce it.
3. Self-Regulation: The system evolution process is self-regulating with product and process measures closely following a normal distribution.
4. Conservation of Organizational Stability: The average activity rate (maintenance) in an evolving system is invariant over its lifetime.
5. Conservation of Familiarity: As a system evolves all people involved with it must maintain mastery of its content and behavior to achieve satisfactory evolution.
6. Continuing Growth: The functional content of a system must be continually increased to maintain user satisfaction over its lifetime.
7. Declining Quality: The quality of a system will decline unless it is rigorously maintained and adapted to operational environment changes.
8. Feedback System: Evolution processes constitute complex feedback systems and must be treated as such to achieve significant improvement over any reasonable base.

Q: Attractors in complex systems
A: • A fixed point attractor keeps a system in one specific state. An organizational hierarchy could be a good example of a fixed point attractor. Almost all organizations end up in that structure, and then they stay there forever.
• A limit cycle is an attractor where a system repeatedly goes through the same sequence of states. One example is the cycle of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning, a wellknown group development model
• A chaotic or “strange” attractor is a trajectory that refuses to end up in any of the other two kinds of attractors. An example of a strange attractor could be a chaotic startup business desperately running from opportunity to opportunity, never settling in a stable situation until the environment finally allows it to do so

Q: Steps of SLIP (Simple Linear Improvement Process)
A: 1. We analyze our current situation and determine what the most important problem is. (For example, we’re getting fat).
2. We define a goal that can help to get us out of the problematic situation. (We want to weigh 10 pounds less.)
3. We define a metric that can tell us whether we succeeded. (We retrieve our old diet scale from the attic.)
4. We identify an improvement that can take us in the direction of the desired goal. (We decide to run and eat healthier.)
5. We realize an implementation, possibly in a small controlled experiment. (We buy running shoes and a cook book.)
6. Then there is the execution of our day-to-day operations that can result in actual measurements (run daily, eat healthy food).
7. Then there is an analysis of the measurements to verify improvement. (Oh dear, only one pound in three weeks?)
8. Finally, the analysis enables learning, about the problem, the solution, and the metrics. (Never trust an old diet scale.)

Q: Tips for Continuous Change
A: • Use regular retrospectives to discuss the current situation and how to improve on it. These retrospectives can be done at multiple organizational levels, not just at the team level. You can see to it they not only deal with adaptation, but also with exploration, and anticipation. That way, you can ensure that people’s double-loop learning efforts look both backward and forward.
• Maintain an improvement backlog for different teams, and at various levels in the organization, and make it visible for everyone. This helps people to keep track of ideas that have yet to be implemented. As with any other normal backlog, old unimplemented ideas may be replaced by newer ones at any time. You may find it necessary to reserve some capacity in people’s schedules each month for your continuous improvement efforts; otherwise, the ideas on the backlog may get discussed but never implemented.
• Use an explicit multistep improvement cycle. You can use the eight steps in the SLIP model or any other cycle that you find valuable. As with any normal task board, like in Scrum and Kanban, the items from the improvement backlog must pass through the different steps in the workflow, which helps people to not forget any important steps
• Set up a transition team (sometimes called an Enterprise Transition Community, or ETC) with the task of promoting and supporting change across an organization. The team should have senior people and representatives from all parts of the organization that are to be transitioned. The goal of this team of “change champions” is not to impose change on people but to guide them in their transition
• Learn about the Kanban method as a great framework for your continuous improvement efforts. Kanban is a change management approach that uses work-in-progress limits as a control mechanism to introduce change, and a visualization of value streams as a way to confront teams with the need for change.
• Suggest to the people in your organization that they initiate their own improvement communities around topics that transcend multiple projects, such as testing, architecture, or user interface design. As a manager it is best not to install such communities yourself because teams are supposed to self-organize their own communities based on their own needs. Though, of course, you can assist them if needed.

Q: The Management 3.0 model
A: • Energize People
• Empower Teams
• Align Constraints
• Develop Competence
• Grow Structure
• Improve Everything