A KALEIDOSCOPE OF NOISE
Remember playing with kaleidoscopes as a kid? Turn the end, the colors and parts would shuffle and change, leaving it up to your imagination to decide what you saw.
‘I kind of see a turtle now.’ Twist. ‘That is a crazy snowflake.’ Twist. ‘I have no idea what that is, so I am going to pretend it is a dragon.’
I thought my kaleidoscope days were over. Yet here we are and we get to see things like this:
Various tools used for ‘software delivery improvements’ - found via google image search
These tools are supposed to give companies insight into what is happening in their organization. With these guaranteed epiphanies, leaders will then magically know where to focus on for improvement.
One problem (of many) with these radars / kaleidoscopes is that they create noise. Depending on what the viewer ‘wants to see’, they will see it. ‘I told you we needed to do better planning.’ ‘See, I told you we have tech debt.’ Twist, see something else. Now you get a platform team!
If that noise - the ambiguity of the interpretation of the information - was the only problem, we could consider them marginally harmless.
But these Kaleidoscopes of Noise - and there are no shortage of them - have an immense cost. Teams, which are already swamped with too much work, are asked to spend hours filling out forms to feed this data. Time is then spent analyzing the input. Dollars are spent on software. Delay keeps on happening. All to tell most people what is deeply evident already.
The astute reader will notice I used the plural of kaleidoscope. Why is that? Well, most companies need multiple tools and assessments to tell them what to do. Because every area with purchasing power wants their own story. More kaleidoscopes, more noise. More dollars wasted, more time lost, and more teams saying ‘just let us do our work.’
Kaleidoscopes of Noise Feed Improvement Theater
One role of management and leadership is to understand how the work works - what is making it difficult for people to get their work done. If you need a tool to tell you that…if you honestly don’t know and instead of just asking or, I don’t know, working with your teams, then perhaps you should reconsider just what it is that you do.
Talk to your teams, understand the work. If you have to spend money on a tool, feel free to send a check my way and I will mail you some spiral art from a kindergarten class. You can pass it around and tell your story, and it will save your teams a bunch of pain.