The Simple Reality [LC16]

The organizations we've built to produce technology are remarkably complicated. There is no blank slate: each one stands on decades over decades of professional specialization, technological evolution, societal motion, and competitive pressure.

Our professional love of technique and method is an artifact of this deep specialization. In the trenches of LinkedIn, we fight ideological battles over which role can do which activity. Even now, researchers rattle sabres and shake shields to scare other professions away from that sacred and holy art of "trying to figure things out by speaking with people."

This reification and protection of our functional identities is necessary, inevitable, and ultimately limiting. Of course, we need craft and differentiation. Of course, we must set professional standards and ensure the work will unfold correctly. We must also recognize that the craft only exists to serve a broader effort, and that sometimes our attempt to preserve our functional responsibility does not serve that effort.

It is hard for a group of people to make an effective and reliable service or product offering. In the simplest view of this reality — forget functional roles — we are one person in a larger group of people, trying to accomplish things together that none of us can do on our own.

We lose sight of this simple truth at our peril. It is hard for a group of people to work together and make something good. To say what we deserve to do implies that we understand other people well enough to proclaim what they ought not do. This is an irresponsible distraction, especially applied in the abstract to an entire industry, instead of concrete attention to the specific situations we are working in.

The question of collective effort always starts with "what are we trying to do?" and "how are we going to get there?" After we answer those questions for a specific team, situation, initiative, and organization, we can begin to speak about who ought to do what.

We all need to return to the basic reality — we are people pulling together to grow a system that none of us can manage alone. The real work is to make that happen, better. Functional dogma doesn't help, even as the functional divisions we've developed so far show us the different perspectives and skillsets we may need to employ.

I try to bring this sensibility to bear in the October 16th panel discussion, "Reimagining Research: What does the field need to grow?" Somewhere in my perspective, I hope the paradox is apparent: to reimagine and grow research, we must loosen our grasp on what we hold sacred, and fasten our attention onto how we integrate into and improve the larger context of our work.

It is hard for a group of people to work together and make something good. For most of us — regardless of functional role or level — it's not happening as simply or smoothly as we'd like. This is what we should be discussing. And we'll need to get into concrete specifics about the nature of teams, products, and organizations to do it.

Until next time—

This is Loops and Cycles, a mailing list exploring how we work together and make good things.