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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Lead your organizations, solve problems, and sustain your company's growth with effective practices for complex, uncertain, and unpredictable environments In Move to the Edge, Declare it Center, CEO, entrepreneur, and strategist Everett Harper delivers a powerful and pragmatic take on solving complex problems by, and making decisions through, uncertainty. You'll learn to discover insights quickly by experimenting, iterating, then building infrastructure to sustain your innovations in your teams and organizations. The author demonstrates a set of practices, processes, and infrastructure that addresses complex problems alongside a set of methods to systematize, scale, and share best practices throughout an organization. In the book, the author offers a new framework for leadership that's perfectly suited to an increasingly volatile, uncertain, and unpredictable world. You'll also get: * Effective ways to make decisions in situations without complete information * Strategies for sustaining your team through highly uncertain times * Techniques for managing personal anxiety--a key leadership skill for the next decade Case studies of World Central Kitchen, COVID public health policymakers, and California wildfire responders illustrate the framework, while pragmatic playbooks about salary transparency, remote work, and diversity and inclusion will help leaders apply the framework in their own organizations. The author shares personal stories and winning strategies that help leaders maintain high performance, avoid burnout, and enable companies to thrive. Move to the Edge, Declare it Center is perfect for business leaders facing complex problems that require immediate decisions in the face of uncertain outcomes. It's also a must-read for anyone interested in modern leadership and looking for a way to help them make solid decisions with incomplete information.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Preface
July 7, 2016: Stand Up, Speak Up
Notes
Introduction
Two Kinds of Problems: Complicated and Complex
Case Study: Introducing Salary Transparency
Defeating the Defaults: Making Decisions Under Uncertainty
May 27, 2020: Still a Target, Still a Leader
Proposal: Adopt a New Mindset for Making Decisions
Notes
Part 1: WHAT IS MOVE TO THE EDGE, DECLARE IT CENTER?
Chapter 1: A FRAMEWORK TO MAKE DECISIONS UNDER COMPLEXITY AND UNCERTAINTY
What Is Move to the Edge?
What Is Declare It Center?
Notes
Chapter 2: EXTERIOR PRACTICES: THE METHODS OF MOVE TO THE EDGE
Forming Hypotheses
Hypothesis Testing
Iteration and Fast Feedback
Project Scoping
Who Is in the Room Where It Happens? Bringing in Diverse Voices
Case Study: How We Made Salaries Transparent
Case Study: Jane Jacobs: What Kind of Problem Is a City?
Case Study: World Central Kitchen
Case Study: Public Health Networks and the Early Days of COVID
Notes
Chapter 3: EXTERIOR PRACTICES: THE PROCESS OF DECLARE IT CENTER
Building a Remote‐First Company Before the Pandemic
Retrospectives (Retros)
Truss Values
Case Study: How We Made Salaries Transparent (Declare It Center)
Case Study: Healthcare.gov
Case Study: Beyond the Scope: Responding to the California Wildfires
Declare It Center to Sustain Your Work
Case Study: World Central Kitchen
Notes
Chapter 4: INTERIOR PRACTICES: GET COMFORTABLE WITH BEING UNCOMFORTABLE
Practice: Meditate/Mindful Training
Practice: Learn from Your Body
Practice: Find Your Purpose
Practice: Imagine Your Outcome
Practice: Practice, Practice, Practice
Notes
Intermission: THE NEW NORMAL IS COMPLEX. TRAIN FOR IT
Part 2: PUTTING MOVE TO THE EDGE, DECLARE IT CENTER INTO PRACTICE
Chapter 5: WHERE DO WE START?
Case Study: 2020: West Paw Recruiting for DEI
DEI, Recruiting, and Hiring at Truss
Notes
Chapter 6: PUTTING PRACTICES INTO ACTION: SUSTAINING A REMOTE‐FIRST COMPANY
Exterior Practices
Interior Practices
Notes
Appendix: Further Resources
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Appendix: Further Resources
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
FIGURE I.1 Complicated vs. complex systems: Elements only.
FIGURE I.2 Complicated vs. complex systems: Impact of adding one new element...
FIGURE I.3 Type 1 versus Type 2 decisions.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2.1 Planned route of the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
FIGURE 2.2 Washington Square Park, from the 9
th
floor of NYU's Kimmel Center...
FIGURE 2.3 Jane Jacobs.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 The Truss values
FIGURE 3.2 Dickerson's Hierarchy of Reliability, based on Maslow's Hierarchy...
List of Tables
Chapter 2
TABLE 2.1 Move to the Edge Questions and Practices
Chapter 5
TABLE 5.1 Truss Hiring Dashboard
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MOVE TO THE EDGE, DECLARE IT CENTER
Practices and Processes for Creatively Solving Complex Problems
EVERETT HARPER
Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 646‐8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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ISBN 9781119849889 (Hardcover)
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ISBN 9781119849896 (ePub)
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY
To Jacqueline Harper – I'm here because you keep stepping into the unknown with curiosity, enthusiasm and purpose. You embody the spirit of Move to the Edge, Declare It Center, and I'm grateful to have you as a model.
Acknowledgments
To Steve Broback and Jason Preston, you invited me on stage to present the earliest glimmer of this work in 2017 at the Dent the Future Conference, and I appreciate your generosity and curiosity. Cris Beasely for making the connection. Shout‐out to Dave Whorton, Maria Hilton, and the Tugboat Conference for helping me get pragmatic in 2021.
To the many people who read early drafts of this book and provided great feedback: Ben Hecht, Roberta Katz, Morgan Webb, Daria Walls Torres, Ken Lynch, Erin Worsham, Shannon Arvizu, Molly Tapias, Cheryl Contee, Jenifer Fuqua, Kurt Foeller, Sarah Israel, Ed Batista, Matt Hammer, Melinda Byerly, Kristin Smith, Neil Cohen, and especially Muema Loembe.
To the connectors – my imaginal cells sharing their insights, contacts, and enthusiasm: Adam Grant, Mitaly Chakraborty, Margaret Greenberg, Jareau Wade, Leslie Mallman, Lili Root, Monica Guzman, Nicole Jarbo, Judy Wade, Tim Brown, Cris Beasely, Carlee Gomes, Laura Delizonna, Prof. Damon Phillips, Ellen Leanse, Deb Cohan, Leigh Morgan, Damon Brown, and Ellen McGirt. Flowers for the irrepressible Shaherose Charania – without you, none of this would be possible. Special shout‐out to Monica Byrne – you've been inspiring me for 30 years, from side‐eye to the Anti‐Resume.
To the leaders who agreed to share their experiences for this book: Jana, Danielle, Nate Mook, Jen Pahlka, Abdul Smith. You brought this book to life.
To the readers of late drafts, so much appreciation for your sharp eyes, and occasionally sharp tongues, in order to make this book better: Caroline Lambert, Andre Natta, Stewart Ugelow, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Kelly Werner, and especially Jen Tress for your consistent insight on writing. Special shout‐out to Anthony Grant, for your insightful imagery that gives readers memorable visual guideposts to follow.
To the Trussels – past and present employees of Truss – whose insight, creativity, and desire to make a positive impact in the world propels so many of the methods and processes in this book. I hope I've represented you well.
To my fellow Dukie, Laura Yorke, for your enthusiasm and laser‐sharp viewpoints. You don't suffer fools, and I feel fortunate to make the cut.
To Christina Harbridge, mentor and friend. Am I your favorite yet?
To Mark Ferlatte and Jennifer Leech. How did we do this Truss thing, anyway? Writing this book was an amazing review of all that we've done together, and I'm deeply thankful for your integrity, talent, trust, taste in bourbon, and especially your commitment to values. It's hard to believe those values we wrote together as a tiny startup still hold a company of 130 people together.
To Mei Mei Fox – we met over foie gras cotton candy, bonded over favorite yoga teachers, and have witnessed each other's triumphs and losses. You've been a guide for life, and now for this book. Namaste, girlll.
To Michele Turner, your divine inkwell guided my words when I needed them most.
To Julie Mikuta, for your fierce dedication to justice, and for being an amazing partner in sustaining a vision for a coparenting family. Next book?
To Damiana, I can't wait for you to blow this book out of the water – you are capable of that and more. Amo muito, querida.
To Abby, I couldn't have gotten more fortunate to write a book while being trapped during a pandemic in a house with the best “hype man,” teenage whisperer, English teacher editor, and unequivocal supporter. Your spirit and intelligence echo in these pages.
About the Author
Everett is the CEO and co‐founder of Truss, a human‐centered software development company, named as an Inc 5000 fastest‐growing private company in 2020 and 2021. He has led a purpose‐driven, impactful, innovative company that's been remote‐first since 2011, salary‐transparent since 2017, and a diverse workforce that far exceeds standards for technology companies.
He is a rare combination: a Black entrepreneur, with biomedical and electrical engineering degrees from Duke, an MBA and M.Ed. from Stanford, Silicon Valley startup pedigree, and management consulting at Bain. He has leveraged those experiences into a long track record for solving complex problems with social impact for millions of people, from helping fix Healthcare.gov, community development finance at Self‐Help, to fighting global poverty as a board member of CARE.
Everett has a history of firsts: first in his family to college and the first to win a soccer NCAA National Championship for Duke University. He was inducted into the North Carolina Soccer Hall of Fame in 2019.
Everett's distinctive voice and unique history make him a sought‐after speaker on DEI, technology startups, leadership, remote/hybrid work, and social entrepreneurship. He has been featured at conferences such as Dent, Tugboat, TechStars, and Velocity, and on podcasts like the Commonwealth Club and AfroTech. He has written for Forbes, Thrive Global, and TechCrunch. Move to the Edge, Declare It Center is his first book.
Everett grew up a small‐town kid in New York's Hudson Valley. He currently lives in Oakland, California, making limoncello when life hands him lemons.
Preface
July 7, 2016: Stand Up, Speak Up
I was reading a post by Ellen McGirt,1 senior editor at Fortune magazine, called, “Why Employers Need to Talk about Shootings of Black People,”2 after 24 hours of drifting in waves of despair about the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Her article highlighted the need for employers to go beyond the idea of inclusion to the more resonant emotion of compassion. She argued that when two Black men are killed by police, one at a traffic stop in front of his four‐year‐old daughter, employers must recognize that their employees, like much of the rest of the country, are likely to be deeply affected. I nodded my head with her clear, fierce, call to employers to go beyond their comfort zone.
And then I realized: “I'm the employer.”
I'm the CEO of Truss, a highly diverse, remote‐first software development company. My cofounders and I worked hard to make our company inclusive, using “radical candor”3 to address issues that many companies avoid. But news of these murders required more of me. First, as a Black man, I felt unmoored and vulnerable. There is no sign on my car nor a logo on my jacket that reads, “Don't shoot, I'm a CEO.” At the same time, part of my job as a CEO is to set a foundation so our employees can continue to do great work. My silence would be turning away from that responsibility. I needed to write a speech that acknowledged that while I'm a leader … I'm also a target.
This is what I wrote that afternoon to the Trussels, our employees.
Many of my friends are “calling in Black today.” Much respect. For those who can't or who choose not to, it's a hard, hard day to grapple with two police murders of Black men while still maintaining our professional demeanor and standards of excellence. (Note: We do that every day. Today is harder.)
If you have a work colleague who is Black, or who is connected deeply to these shootings, please read Ellen's article. We're all “whole people,” and understanding how trauma affects work can make this a better company for everyone.
We can't have the benefits of a diverse and vibrant company without acknowledging when it gets hard. Today is one of those days for me, and “as an employer,” it feels awkward, challenging – and necessary – to address it. Personally, I'm exhausted, so I'm not up for engaging in conversation. But I can create a tone and a space where Trussels can engage without fear of reprisal, toxicity, or indifference.
Let it be so. However you choose to engage, at minimum read Ellen's article, take a moment to reflect, and take care of each other.
This was one a moment when I moved to my edge, when I had to step into the unknown, feeling uncertain, and decide how to address a complex issue. I suspect you have encountered this moment too, like the other leaders you will read about in this book. What you will learn is how to stand up, speak up, and move forward anyway. You will learn how to practice, so when the moment comes, you are centered and ready to provide the leadership your team, company and our communities need.
Notes
1.
Ellen McGirt's Race Ahead newsletter for
Forbes
is a consistent, prolific (nearly daily) resource for the intersection of business, race, and culture filtered with her keen journalist's eye.
2.
Ellen McGirt, Why Employers Need to Talk about the Police Shootings of Black People, Fortune, July 7, 2016.
3.
Kim Scott,
Radical Candor
(St. Martin's Press, 2019).
Introduction
Once in a generation, there is an event that fractures our experience. The summer of 2020 offered three: protests against racial injustice, massive forest fires in the western United States, and a worldwide pandemic. We can't unsee the knee on George Floyd's neck, supernatural orange‐smoke skies, or the faces of intubated elders dying of COVID alone.
Many of us had to respond to these unprecedented events and make decisions without guidelines or playbooks. Should we ask people to keep working while they're at risk of exposure to COVID? How do we support our teammates during the workday, while they are simultaneously acting as elementary school teachers to their children? Let's be honest – how many of us froze when we didn't know the answer to those questions? I know I did.
We're all susceptible to these responses. Some are rooted in neurochemistry – the well‐known flight‐or‐fight response. But others are rooted in our inherited leadership and management models, based on nineteenth‐century factories, where systems were well understood and problems had a singular “right answer.” We've been rewarded since kindergarten for raising our hand first with the right answer, preparing us to be “decisive” adult leaders.
But twenty‐first‐century problems like racial injustice, climate change, and pandemics are complex. The key property of complex systems is that they are not well understood, there are many unknowns, and problems often do not have a singular right answer. As a result, there is the risk of causing unintended harm. In short, the nineteenth‐century management model is a mismatch for today's leaders navigating complex systems. Many of us know it.
In the early stages of the COVID pandemic, as we realized that the impact was not measured in weeks, but months, I compared strategies with highly experienced, successful leaders. Out of the public spotlight, they were anxious and flummoxed, and they finally admitted, with grief and exhaustion, “I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I don't have the right answer.” The fissures that opened this decade are a vivid wake‐up call that the “new normal” is complex, and we need new mindsets, processes, and practices to match.
Move to the Edge, Declare It Center is a framework to help leaders of organizations and teams navigate through complex problems when they don't know the “right” answer and there's no predetermined plan, playbook, or procedure. Move to the Edge is a set of practices, processes, and infrastructure to address complex problems, and Declare It Center is a set of methods to systematize, scale, share, and sustain the best approaches throughout an organization.
This book emerges from two distinct sources. First, from my experience as CEO and co‐founder of my company, Truss. Since 2011, we have developed human‐centered software to help our clients navigate complex, global, consequential problems, from helping to fix Healthcare.gov to modernizing supply chain and delivery logistics systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. We built a company that's been remote‐first for over a decade, exceeds our industry in diversity and inclusion, and is anchored by a values‐driven culture that helped us stay connected through the pandemic.
The second source is a lifetime of being on the edge, navigating the pursuit of excellence from the distinct vantage point of being an outsider. While I have a history of firsts – first in my family to college, first NCAA National Champion in any sport for Duke University – as a Black man in the United States, those firsts do not protect me from being a target of racial violence and discrimination. Every “routine” traffic stop has the potential for a deadly outcome, and despite being the keynote speaker at the TechStars startup conference, I was singled out by an armed security guard at the entrance, “Do you belong here?”
For me and other outsiders, navigating uncertainty is first a survival skill, then an expertise, and finally a gift. But it comes at a cost – the pressure and weight can deplete one's energy and lead to burnout. To avoid this, I've centered on different Interior Practices to prepare me for making high‐stakes decisions under stress. In uncertain times with complex problems, leaders need Interior Practices as a companion for their Exterior (organizational) Practices. Move to the Edge, Declare It Center is a framework that integrates both, and I will share these practices in depth throughout this book.
We're living in a new normal. We have urgent, complex challenges to address, and twentieth‐century tools don't work for twenty‐first‐century problems. Leaders need to approach today's complex systems with a different mindset – led by curiosity and experimentation – while building systems to scale, share, and sustain their best solutions. Move to the Edge, Declare It Center is a framework of exterior and interior practices that will enable you to make better decisions under uncertainty and complexity.
Two Kinds of Problems: Complicated and Complex
One of the key contributions to our understanding of complex systems comes from the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit research institute, using direct observation and mathematical modeling to explain important phenomena. In particular, categorizing problems as complex versus complicated helps to explain why some of our approaches to problem solving can make things worse.
Complicated Problems
Complicated problems consist of elements whose behaviors and interactions are more well‐understood, often linear, and therefore predictable. For example, let's say you want to build a passenger jet. If you have a plan, hire expert designers, gather builders, and have enough money, you'll probably succeed in building a jet. Even though building a jet is neither simple nor cheap, the relationships between all the parts and labor are well understood. When there is a complicated problem to solve, such as how to reduce the cost of making a jet, the best approach is to optimize those predictable relationships. Sourcing the same rotor from a cheaper supplier, standardizing quality measurements, or negotiating for lower labor wages are logical approaches to solving the complicated problem of reducing costs. Great operational leaders focus on building with efficient, measurable, repeatable execution.
This is an advanced version of a model that emerged out of Fredrick Taylor's scientific management in the late nineteenth century.1 Taylor did “time and motion” studies of workers in factories, creating scientific models that included workers as part of the equation. The promise was that one could develop a scientific equation with a right answer, enabling managers and owners to operate factories in predictable, measurable ways. Eventually known as Taylorism, this approach to measuring production ushered in the assembly‐line system used to manufacture goods in the early twentieth century. Over the next hundred years, it influenced all sorts of work, from retail to software production. As this became more widespread, military leaders, business schools, and management consultants developed operational and leadership models of productivity to accompany Taylor's approach. The command‐control, optimize and execute, hierarchical organizational models derived from the understanding of problems as complicated. There was a right answer, and the most admired leaders had it.
Taylorism produced some obvious fallacies, especially with the rise of professions where people were paid primarily to think, as opposed to assemble. The shift to knowledge work made using complicated methods like time‐and‐motion equations to judge productivity less useful. For example, it's hard to imagine that the effectiveness of the famous 1959 “Think Small” Volkswagen Beetle advertising campaign2 could have been calculated with a linear productivity equation that measured words per copywriter. Other fields, from management consulting, to design, computer science, and software development, defied previously valid assessments of productivity, quality, or value, based on Taylor's time‐and‐motion models.
1959 “Think Small” Volkswagen Beetle advertising campaign
Source: Bill Bernbach’s iconic ‘Think Small’ Volkswagen Beetle ad. Martin Schilder Groep/Flickr, CC BY‐NC‐SA
Early in my career, I was advised to come early to the office and stay late, not because it would produce better work but because I would be regarded as a highly productive, committed, hard worker. I watched colleagues walk the halls, wearing their “I'm working hard” face, coincidentally timed for their manager to see them as they arrived at the office. Today, part of the debate about working from home versus returning to the office is framed as, “How do I know my employees are working?” This leads to misplaced choices like measuring how long employees are at their computers or in virtual meetings, instead of measuring the outcomes of their work. This is a manifestation of the complicated model of productivity, where there is a linear relationship between time in office and “This is good” work. In contrast, what is now being considered as “the future of work” is that global, hybrid, knowledge work doesn't assume a building – it enables us to think in new ways about defining work with purpose and impact.
Complex Problems
Complex problems consist of elements that are distinct from complicated problems. Samuel Arbesman, a complexity scientist, declares, “Complex is a large number of moving parts interacting in multifaceted ways.”3 The interactions are less well understood, and the relationships are often nonlinear. Because the elements are interacting in multifaceted ways, you can't necessarily predict what the results of those interactions are going to be.
Peter Ho is chairman of the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore. His expertise on complexity informed his country's response to the threat of SARS in 2003, and he wrote:
The natural world is complex. In comparison, an engineering system – be it an airplane or a telecommunications satellite – is merely complicated.4
A complex system does not necessarily behave in a repeatable and predetermined manner. As a result, not only may a change to one part of a complex system yield unexpected results, but these results may be hidden. Think of the impact on your commute time of an accident just before a merge into a tunnel. Not only is the main route clogged, but so are the side routes and your secret cut‐throughs. Further, impatient drivers might start to take more risks, driving on the shoulders or swerving to jump lanes and causing new accidents. Many of these effects are out of your view, but they have significant impact on whether you arrive on time to your first meeting. Whether it is the complex queuing systems you rely on to get to work on time or the global supply chain, unexpected changes are difficult to plan for because of the sheer number of elements interacting in unpredictable ways.
Twentieth‐century problems were, by and large, understood as complicated. I believe that our most urgent twenty‐first‐century problems are complex (Figure I.1). The problem is when a leader tries to address a complex problem with an approach designed for a complicated problem (Figure I.2).
FIGURE I.1 Complicated vs. complex systems: Elements only.
Source: Everett Harper and Josh Franklin, 2021.
FIGURE I.2 Complicated vs. complex systems: Impact of adding one new element on relationships.
Source: Everett Harper and Josh Franklin, 2021.
The Mismatch
When we apply complicated problem solving to complex problems, there's bound to be a mismatch. For example, problem solving in a complicated system is often about optimization, where the goal is to fine‐tune a process to reduce wasted time, materials, errors, or friction, while achieving the same outcome. For example, if I want to ensure I get exercise before going to work, I set my alarm, prep my water bottles, and lay out my workout clothes before going to bed. These are steps to optimize my system and reduce the likelihood that I will hit the snooze button.5
Returning to the example of building a plane, once a builder understands the relationships between the elements, from parts, to suppliers, to builders, then the focus is appropriately on building systems to optimize different factors in construction. The focus on becoming efficient saves millions of dollars, and so very sophisticated systems manage these relationships. The key is the valid, tested knowledge of the interactions between each of the elements in the system.
In contrast, complexity affects many industries, but I will focus on an industry where I am most familiar: software development. At one time, software was considered a linear process with well‐understood inputs and outputs. As a result, it could be managed using the same Taylor‐derived principles. The Waterfall method, named after the Gantt chart of successive blue bars of tasks stretched over a linear calendar, was the best practice from the days of mainframes. It gave managers the comfort of prediction, and a stick to enforce compliance when the Waterfall schedule went off‐kilter.6 The response to missed deadlines was to double down on the easiest variable to control – add more hours or add more workers.
There are two significant assumptions in this methodology that do not account for complexity.7 The first assumption is that the relationship between those elements is correct. The second assumption is that there aren't any other factors affecting the system. Add a factor – you just hired three new engineers who are still learning, your code becomes noncompliant due to a new regulation, or your customer needs a new feature to keep up with a competitor's latest release – and it throws the system completely off.8 The project becomes horribly late, way over budget, or is delivered to a customer who rejects it. As engineering leader Leslie Miley told me, “Systems can either be complicated or complex, with the latter exhibiting nondeterministic [unpredictable] behavior. If your system is exhibiting the latter, Perhaps it's time to rethink.”
In software development, one of the most influential responses to the unknown and unexpected of complex systems was iterative development, commonly referred to as “Agile.” Agile refers to the Agile Manifesto, developed over three days in 2001 by 17 industry thinkers and practitioners.9 Among many declarations, two of the key principles are “Individuals and interactions, over processes and tools” and “Responding to change, over following a plan,” which is further elaborated as “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.”
Over the next 20 years, this framework has been adopted, adapted, codified, and, most importantly, shown to deliver value, especially in complex systems.10 Putting people‐first while welcoming the unexpected is a powerful prescription in uncertain times with complex problems. It is no accident that these processes emerged at the same time that computing power was rapidly increasing in complexity, both in terms of scale and impact. Lean Startup extended the same type of thinking into the innovation and entrepreneur communities, bringing an explicit perspective of learning like a scientist into the creation of software, business models, and companies.11
Even organizations that embodied formal hierarchy – often called command‐control – experienced the shift in leadership models and frameworks. For example, in Team of Teams, General Stanley McCrystal documents how the old centralized strategic model was repeatedly failing in Iraq.12 The Iraqis were more agile and consistently stymied the progress of his forces. Rather than adding more forces and more weapons, he shifted his model to allow different military units to create experiments, to engage enemy forces in their own way and evolve their local knowledge. He invested in communication systems to accelerate rapid feedback, and to spread successful experiments to other troops. It was this shift that enabled his forces to make significant progress. The principles of agility, communication, iteration, experiments, and rapid feedback are core practices to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and unknowns.
In sum, we've inherited models of management, leadership, and performance that are based on the assumption that systems are complicated, we can predict how the elements in the system will interact, and there is a “right answer.” Unfortunately, this assumption is not effective in an era of increasing complexity, unpredictable elements, and diverse global stakeholders. The good news is that we can use a new framework to address complex issues and make better decisions, despite lots of unknowns and uncertainties. Let me introduce a story about one complex issue – diversity, inclusion, and equal pay – and our approach to addressing it using the core practices in Move to the Edge, Declare It Center.
Case Study: Introducing Salary Transparency
Imagine your first day at work, and your business card looks like this:
What would you think? Might you wonder, “Does everybody have their salaries displayed on their business card?” Might you look around and ask yourself, “How do I compare with the other directors?” I suspect you are definitely thinking, “Why on earth would a company do this?”
While we don't have our salaries on our business cards, we did make all salaries transparent in 2017. Why? We wanted to solve a complex problem: racial and gender inequality in compensation. In most labor markets, BIPOC13 people and people who identify with she/her pronouns get paid less than White men for the same job. It is an old, persistent problem, but we treated it as an obstacle we needed to overcome in order to build the diverse, inclusive company we wanted. There weren't many companies to emulate, and we couldn't find any that were doing it explicitly for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) purposes. We were on the edge.
Truss was founded with 67 percent “underrepresented minorities.”14 Our founding team of me – a Black male CEO – and a technical leadership team of a White woman COO and White male CTO was absolutely contrary to the Silicon Valley startup narrative in 2011. Despite degrees from Duke, Stanford, University of California (UC)–Santa Cruz and UC–Berkeley, recognized engineering expertise in pioneering technical practices, and brand recognition from a “hot” company, we were the “anti‐pattern.” The desirable startup teams in 2011 were young, White, male engineers from prestige programs. We were definitely outsiders … and that gave us an important insight. From our vantage point, we could see the flaws in the assumed benefit of homogeneous teams, and we could access networks of knowledge and talent that were ignored by the mainstream of Silicon Valley.15 That didn't guarantee success, however – we had to turn our advantage into a sustainable company.
Our Move to the Edge started with several hypotheses:
Building a diverse company is a long series of investments resulting in a network of trust.
Diverse teams outperform nondiverse teams, especially around innovation, decision‐making, and accounting for risks.
Diversity and inclusion initiatives must be central to the core operating model of the company. DEI initiatives that are only marketing or human resource initiatives will fail.
There are skilled, motivated, and high‐integrity people from diverse backgrounds who live outside the San Francisco Bay area.
Those were our beliefs – now we had to test them with data. I started writing articles on using networks to find diverse candidates, in order to attract like‐minded employees. I found research from academics like Dr. Kathy Williams,16 demonstrating that companies with diverse boards and executive teams outperform nondiverse ones on a variety of metrics, including stock price valuation on the public markets.17 We built a network of relationships by attending dozens of events, meetups, and gatherings focused on diversity and inclusion, and learned how we could help one another. I joined a new group called Black Founders and helped start the N.O.D., a social gathering for Black men in tech, finance, and legal fields.
Each of these actions was small, but we followed a principle of improving by marginal gains. We gained insights that validated or invalidated these hypotheses. Over time, we felt more equipped to place bigger bets and make bigger commitments. In 2016, we joined the first startup cohort of Project Include, a data‐driven DEI initiative anchored at the Kapor Center.18 We validated that DEI initiatives weren't successful as just HR or marketing initiatives. We sharpened our perspective, learning that the best results come when the CEO is directly involved, either hands‐on or as an executive sponsor. Cultural change requires the CEO to set, model, and reinforce purpose and accountability.
Finally, there was the well‐documented, cross‐industry data on pay disparities. We surmised that if there is a pay disparity between a Black woman and a White man hired on the same day for the same job, they could perform equally well, earn the same percentage salary increase, yet in five years, have a substantial difference in their compensation. How long do you think that high‐performing Black woman will remain at your company after she finds out that she is being paid less for the same job? We saw that even well‐intentioned companies fell into that trap. If we wanted to attract and retain people from diverse backgrounds at Truss, we believed salary transparency was a concrete initiative to address this complex problem.
But we didn't know the answer, so we started on the journey using what became the framework for Move to the Edge, Declare It Center. I'll return to the specific methods in the Salary Transparency Case Study in Chapter 2. However, it is time to examine the ways we can make poor decisions around complex problems, despite our best intentions.
