One of my previous bosses once told me a metaphor about organizational leadership that stayed with me for a long time. He compared it to gardening. You cannot really build a garden by designing every plant individually and then expecting the result to behave according to your drawing. You prepare the soil, decide what you want to grow, give things enough room and resources, remove things that are getting in the way, occasionally move something somewhere else, and then mostly

I don't interview people to find out whether they are good. That is a strange thing to say about hiring. Usually, when someone applies for a job, you talk to them for a couple of hours, ask some questions, perhaps give them a practical exercise and eventually decide whether they are good and you want to hire them. Most interviewers I have seen start with no expectation and wait for the candidate to impress them. They have to climb a metaphorical ladder. They demonstrate enoug

The year was slowly getting to an end. Shopping malls started to discover Christmas music again, although the weather outside did not feel like winter yet. Michal, one of my reports, asked me to jump on a call with him to tell me he got an offer from another company he intended to accept. He would be a lead QA in a team where some junior testers needed guidance. Photo by Francesco Gallarotti I don't remember the exact words he used anymore, but he was clearly not feeling ver

This article was written with the use of ChatGPT. Not just spellchecked or lightly edited. The entire conversation that eventually became this article happened inside ChatGPT over several hours. However, If you find something in one of my articles that is wrong, misleading or simply poorly argued, I don't get to point at the language model. My name is signed at the bottom of the article. The complete, unabridged transcript is available here. Read it if you're curious and judg

I've lost count of how many workshops started with someone asking for solutions. The request changes slightly. Sometimes it's delivery, sometimes quality, sometimes ownership or communication. The proposed fixes change too. More automation. Better planning. Another review. A different process. After a while I stopped paying much attention to the proposed solutions. They're useful, but they tell you much more about where people currently are than where they need to go. Photo b

How to Build on your Diagnosis and Design Experimental Interventions Organizational systems usually struggle because they introduce practices without being clear about what those practices are supposed to accomplish. Take retrospectives as an example. Two teams can hold exactly the same meeting every two weeks and walk away with completely different outcomes. One team uses the time to examine difficult decisions, challenge assumptions and improve how they work together. The o

How to Understand an Organization Before Trying to Improve It A doctor does not treat high blood pressure because the number itself is important. High blood pressure is an observable symptom, a useful indicator that something inside the body may not be working as intended. Medication may lower the number, and sometimes that intervention is absolutely necessary. But if the underlying causes are poor diet, lack of exercise and chronic stress, improving those conditions does muc

Previously I wrote about a reactive approach to quality that leads to organizations constantly fighting one fire after another. Companies often believe that they need to keep putting out fires and fix the cause later. However, tomorrow becomes today and more fires are popping up. Photo by Jay Heike Over time, something subtle starts happening. More and more organizational energy gets consumed, teams become overloaded with coordination overhead and improvement gets postponed b

You have been there before. Another production incident happened. The customer reached out and this time they were not even angry anymore. Just tired of it all. A little resigned. At least it was nothing catastrophic this time. Still bad enough to trigger the usual meeting. Product managers are frustrated. Engineers are exhausted. Leadership wants confidence restored before the next release cycle. Photo by Jay Heike The discussion quickly converges on familiar solutions. We n