Tue Feb 13 2024

Notes on - Choose Boring Culture by Charity Majors

My thoughts and notes on a blog post by Charity Majors on how teams should build/cultivate their culture. Her post is at https://charity.wtf/2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-culture/.

Majors writes about culture and how teams generally should make boring choices around how the team or company culture isn’t organized.

She defines culture broadly as formal culture and informal culture. Formal culture is the structured, professional, institutional parts of the organization. Informal culture is the individual, chaotic, unstructured activities of team members. I like how Majors summarizes this here:

Organizational culture is the cake; informal culture is the frosting. Organizational culture is what leaders are hired to build, informal culture is what bubbles up irrepressibly in the gaps.

I like how this concisely captures what each type of culture is and where each type of culture comes from. I think this is a reasonable way to divide up and understand culture overall. It reflects how I have understood culture to be defined.

Majors next asserts that culture exists only in service of the business. The purpose of your company culture is to make your business succeed. She says culture for culture’s sake is the wrong approach.

She next borrows Dan McKinley’s innovation tokens idea to say that organizations have a limited amount of innovation they can achieve with culture. She recommends learning from others’ culture and practices as much as possible to limit the amount of unnecessary or unhelpful innovation you have to do.

She then says that organizations should focus on being healthy instead of being smart because healthy organizations will naturally accumulate smarts over time. She says healthier orgs have less political conflict, less confusion, higher morale, and higher productivity.

The challenge, though, Majors says is that working on organizational health is too boring. She says in particular it is unglamorous work that is difficult to measure, and you never finish working on it. I think that’s a fair assessment of working on organizational health. I suspect it is often seen as lower priority since it isn’t something you can ship, even though you technically ship your organizational health with everything you do. I believe a healthy organization will produce higher quality outcomes more quickly or more easily than a less healthy organization. Your organizational health will show up in the problems you have during and after shipping something.

She next talks about how work really shouldn’t be exciting. Sure, there may be exciting times when crisis or unexpected challenges occur, but these shouldn’t be the norm. She says things should be boring so you can focus your energy on moving forward instead of simply surviving or maintaining the status quo. She has a nice metaphor summing this up:

When so much of your energy goes to bailing water and staying afloat, you don’t have much left over for rowing the oars. You want energy going to the oars.

I think that’s a good way to capture the situation many teams find themselves in. They are so busy putting out fires and simply trying to hold the business together that they never actually advance the business.

Like how she talks about how work shouldn’t be exciting, she talks about how leaders shouldn’t try to make work fun. Rather, they should provide the structure, predictability, and a stable environment. Majors asserts that if you create an emotionally safe place people will bring the fun. They will be silly, spontaneous, and do fun things. She compares the leader’s work to providing the building, and individual team members provide the furnishings, furniture, decorations, etc. that make the building liveable and enjoyable. I think this is a good caution. I find a top-down approach to encouraging fun usually comes off as out of touch or forced.

Majors says one of the best things leaders can do to foster fun is to participate themselves. I think this is really good advice since it can encourage and support people to do fun things. I do think leaders have to take care to not seize control over the fun having. They should probably remain participants and not take over, despite any inclination to take charge.

She next discusses how teams have the most fun when the fun is couples to great achievements, and fun without the achievements and great work is often not actually fun or done at the expense of someone else. I think she is right that you won’t feel much fun at work if things are going poorly and everyone is stressed out. I’ve had this experience myself when on a team that was under a lot of pressure, but my boss was more concerned with how to make work fun than with how to help the team function better.

She says healthy orgs are more likely to have the conditions for fun to occur. I think that’s accurate. People are me likely to have fun and be silly if they feel more relaxed and comfortable.

At this point in the post, Majors circles back to innovation tokens and discusses things that Honeycomb does to improve org health and things that might be innovative. Overall, she feels they don’t do anything that is particularly innovative. What few innovative things they do are things that will take up a good portion of someone’s work time to do them.

Finally, she talks about Sarah Polley of the movie “Women Talking” discussing how making that movie will forever affect everyone who makes the movie, and she wanted to make sure everyone had a good experience. Sarah recognizes this while also recognizing the movie itself may only affect a very small number of people in the audience. Majors closes the post with a call to make the experience of working together a good experience. I never thought about how the experience does stick with you forever, and that is a good reason to make the experience of work as good as you possibly can. This reminds me of from elsewhere on her blog Majors has Lisa Frank-styled pictures that say something like “Shared joy builds teams. Not shared suffering.”, and that really stuck with me. I’ve been on teams that suffered and struggled throughout the entire development process. I’ve had projects that I dreaded having to work on because the work environment was uncertain, unpleasant, stressful, and extremely frustrating. I think making the experience of working a good one is a really important value to take to heart. Of course, you do have to make the business succeed at the end of the day, but you shouldn’t have to suffer needlessly or endlessly to do so.