In the early modern period clocks worked through an engineering miracle of pendulums and springs. You would wind a clock, to tighten the spring, which provided the tiniest of nudges to keep a pendulum swinging. This regular, periodic swing of the pendulum is what allowed clocks to tell time. People relied on the clocks, which relied on the regular period of the swing of the pendulum. This predictability and the ability to tell time made much of the modern world possible.
As an engineering student, I found the law of conservation of energy to be really amazing. It’s what drives a pendulum clock. At the top of the arc, right as its velocity reaches zero before swinging back down, then pendulum has potential energy but no kinetic energy. At the bottom of the swing, when the pendulum is at its lowest point, it is moving the fastest it can move – it has kinetic energy, but no potential energy. The notion of trading potential energy for kinetic energy sticks with you. Energy is conserved. Potential energy becomes realized energy. Predictably. With certainty.
A Cultural Metaphor
In a conversation with a colleague earlier, it occurred to me – maybe the power of this metaphor influences why so many teams operate as feature factories. I’ve seen individuals, teams, and entire parts of organizations absolve themselves of responsibility for business success. I usually refer to this as the order-giver / order-taker model.
Engineering teams ask “the business” to tell them what they want, and then they build it. The customer gets what they ask for. The team pats themselves on the back for delivering it on time, on budget, at quality. This is where the metaphor of the pendulum comes to play. If the team were asked to swing the pendulum, raising it up and putting potential energy into the system, they expect with certainty that upon release the pendulum will create kinetic energy as it swings through its arc. After all, it is a LAW of physics.
The team is asked to lift the pendulum. The assumption is that it will result in a fast swing. If the team is asked to build something, it must be valuable; it must be worth doing. Building what is asked for will result in value. Engineers are wired to trust this connection in physics class. It may even have been on a final exam, where their conviction that potential value always converts into realized value was put to the test.
The metaphor of conservation of energy in a pendulum undermines our ability to create valuable products.
The Longitude Act
In 1714, the Parliament of Great Britain passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize to anyone who could help ship navigators know their location without landmarks in sight. Different prizes had been offered for a couple hundred years by different monarchs, in pursuit of a solution.
Without a landmark in sight, a sailor can use a sextant to determine how far they are from the equator; the latitude of the ship. They cannot, however, determine their location East-West; the longitude of the ship. Because the earth spins on it’s axis, to look at the stars in the sky and calculate your longitude requires you to know what time it is. At different points in time, the stars are at different locations relative to the horizon. You need a predictable clock to calculate longitude.
Guess what doesn’t work on a ship. A pendulum. It still swings. It no longer swings predictably. It swings uncertainly. Clocks of the time didn’t work on ships, hence the prizes.
In physics I, engineers learned about pendulums on land, not pendulums on ships. Unless we stumbled upon the history of navigation, we were unlikely to consider that Conservation of Energy comes with some caveats, and that pendulums are not, in fact, certain.
When asked to build something (to swing the pendulum) we should not assume that the thing we are building will be valuable.
Hypothesized Value
While there is no explicit discussion about hypothesized value, there is an assumed potential value. This output-oriented way of working is comfortable. The implicit assumption is that the output has potential value and that value will be fully realized, just as the pendulum converts potential energy into kinetic energy.
Two things happen when teams orient to the work this way. Both are bad and one is hidden.
The visible bad thing is the team operating as order-takers absolving themselves of responsibility for the outcome. They are able to wash their hands of it. Deliver on time, meet the spec, and if it doesn’t yield results, that is not their fault. As a result, the work is less enriching for the team because they lack purpose; the team is stacking bricks, not building a house. There are consequences for the organization as well. All of the insights of the talented people on the team go untapped. Great ideas which could have happened don’t happen. As Whittier told us, the saddest words are “it might have been.”
The invisible bad thing is the inability of the organization to do any course correction because the team is not aligned to the outcome, only to the output. I wonder if this feels ok to the team because the latent metaphor of the pendulum makes it ok. It becomes comfortable to presume that whatever they release – however much potential energy they create – must result in realized value, just as releasing the pendulum must resolve into kinetic energy. The team is trapped in the metaphor of a pendulum on land, but the reality is the team is operating on a ship, and pendulums are no more certain than anything else.
This is a comfortable, but unfortunate way to work. It isn’t collaborative. It doesn’t align the efforts of the teams to purpose. From a management point of view, it is treating the people building the product as cogs in a machine. The order givers require nothing from the order takers aside from delivery.
Conclusion
When value is not part of the conversation, the organization may as well be buying lottery tickets. Immediately jumping to planning and execution, without first doing some evaluation. The presumption that the requested deliverables are valuable is no more true for the team than the presumption that a pendulum clock will work on a ship.
