CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
The Goal of this Chapter
My account, even if a little extreme, is hardly unique. We’ve all been there
in one capacity or another: a hard-to-deal-with co-worker, an incompetent
boss, a micro-managing client, seemingly deranged leadership, design by
committee... the list goes on.
There are myriad ways to slice and analyze my story. Some
will empathize with it and express anger over dysfunctional work
environments. Some will point a finger at bad leadership. Some will
focus on the alleged worthlessness of middle management. Some will
attribute the failures to the process — perhaps you should have used Agile
methodologies. And some will suggest that I was, in fact, the true culprit
and should have been fired; after all, I had led the project.
None of these analyses are wrong. In fact, they’re all right. And
there are many more I haven’t mentioned that would apply as well. But
no matter how much we analyze such situations in our postmortems
and vow to avoid them at all costs in the future, we just can’t help but
frequently find ourselves in similar predicaments. While we have amassed
a tremendous number of tactics and patterns that often help us narrowly
avoid dysfunctional situations, we have a poor understanding of the root of
the problem and, as a result, very little control over our destinies.
After years of working my way through more dysfunctional situations
than I’d like to remember, I have firmly settled on a belief (in fact, it is the
only belief I hold sacred anymore): almost every problem we face at work
(and play) begins and ends with one or more people.
While we run off to fix processes, hire experts, solicit feedback
from users, increase the number of code reviews per week, switch our
programming methodologies, churn out more mock-ups, get blue in the
face explaining our strategies to stakeholders, and implement a thousand
other makeshift fixes, the real solution continues to elude us. Creatures of
habit that we are, we simply shut our eyes and swim harder upstream until
we find ourselves spent and jaded, ready to quit our jobs. But as someone