Architecture as balance #5: fruitful frustration vs fruitless moaning

Have you tried the red button / green button exercise?

It’s one of the simplest and quickest team exercises I know: all the team members simply write down three ‘red buttons’ (things which immediately make them angry and which undermine their motivation) and three ‘green buttons’ (things which are guaranteed to excite and motivate them). They then share them with the rest of the team.

(I have to credit the learning company IDG for introducing me to this exercise through a great leadership programme which we now offer under the name Fusion within HSBC.)

The power of the exercise is that it reveals the diversity of motivation and potential sources of conflict within the team: whenever I’ve done the exercise with a team, I’ve always found people saying something like, ‘But I never knew that wound you up!’ or, ‘If I knew that you enjoyed that type of work so much, I’d have let you do all of it!’ The exercise also gives people permission and a vocabulary to remind each other why they’re heading into conflict: ‘You know that’s one of my red buttons.’

I’ve done the exercise many times, and my red buttons and green buttons have occasionally changed. My top red button, however, has remained constant, and I think that it is particularly relevant to architecture teams: fruitless moaning. (For info, my other red buttons for the past several years have been avoidance of accountability and zombie work, while my green buttons are working with people smarter than me, having a big mission to fulfil, and having the chance to explain interesting ideas to interested people.)

What do I mean by fruitless moaning, and why is it one of my red buttons?

We all know what moaning is: complaining about something or someone that has irritated us in some way.

I have no problem with moaning: I think that dis-satisfaction with things that are dis-satisfying is good. It prompts us to make the world better: at its best it injects energy into the system. I also think that technology architects are natural moaners: we are blessed and cursed with the knowledge of how our technology is organised, and all the ways it could be better. We are also blessed and cursed with a tendency to be easily dis-satisfied when things are not as good as they could be, and to work in a field where perfection decays rapidly.

I think that we all also know what fruitless moaning is: complaining about something or someone that has irritated us, with no intention to do anything about it. And we all (including me) do this from time to time. We are social animals, and talking about common sources of dis-satisfaction is an easy form of social interaction: we are united by our gripes.

(And, of course, I should say that there are all sorts of more serious complaints and concerns which don’t count as moaning, especially when they're concerns about people – that's not what I’m talking about here.)

I think that, unfortunately, while dis-satisfaction can inject energy into the system, this form of social moaning, without any inclination to action, sucks energy out of the system. As well as generally depressing the mood, it encourages people to think that this is just the way things are. There is something that irritates us, and we moan about it, but we don’t expect anything to change: it is like the weather.

I also think that this type of moaning is contrary to the way that technology architects should behave: we should be restless and dis-satisfied, but also motivated to fix things: we should be among the people who, after a bout of cathartic moaning, say, ‘Well, what are going to do about it?’

I don’t pretend to have a cure for fruitless moaning, but I do have a few questions I ask myself when I catch myself doing it.

Can I do anything about it?

Is the thing that I am complaining within my direct accountability or sphere of influence? If so, how do I convert my dis-satisfaction into action?

We all have resources at our disposal, even if those resources are no more than our own time and energy. Should we divert some of those resources to fix this problem? If the problem’s not worth us diverting our resources, it is worth our time and energy to complain about it?

Can anybody who can hear me do anything about it?

If the thing I am complaining about isn’t within my direct accountability or sphere of influence, who does it belong to? Can that person hear or read my complaint?

A good test of whether we are indulging in fruitless moaning is whether we are prepared to share our complaints with the people who own whatever we are complaining about. If not, then how do we expect it to get fixed?

Is this an effective bug report?

One of the good things about working in technology is that we find problems and fix them every day, and we know that there are effective and less effective ways of doing this.

Anyone who has been responsible for fixing bugs knows the difference between a useful bug report and a less useful bug report. Bug reports which are less useful will just say something like ‘X didn’t work’ or ‘Y did this’. It’s pretty hard to reproduce those bugs or figure out what you should fix. By contrast, a good bug report tells you what you need to know: ‘I tried to do X, using the application in circumstance Y, with Z data, and expected P behaviour. However, what happened was Q. The same happened when I tried it with R and S, but not with A and B. I’d really like it to do C, for reasons D and E. This is important because it stopped me from doing F and G.’

We can help our moaning bear fruit if we follow a similar approach. If we tell the person responsible for whatever has frustrated us the context, what we expected, what we got, why it matters to us, and what we would like to see, we have given them information that they can do something with. This takes more work, but, if we’re not prepared to do that work we have to ask ourselves whether we are moaning for change or moaning for fun.

I realise that this whole blog post may be perceived as fruitless moaning (and I know that some of my team have heard enough of me moaning about moaning): however, I hope that there are enough useful thoughts in here for it to act as an effective bug report.