Lessons from the Pasture
Aside: I’ve been focusing on re-sharing articles about developer skills, but this ten-year-old post about leadership skills came up—rather serendipitously—in a discussion with the same teacher mentioned below. I’ve attempted to streamline it a little, convinced that my writing has improved in the intervening years.
Rescued cows and bulls graze within a large coastal pasture
The Word Problem
Imagine you're leading a diverse group of people on a nature walk. The pace is supposed to be slow enough for everyone to enjoy the walk, including the elderly and out-of-shape. Easy, right?
Also, it’s supposed to be a silent, contemplative walk. You're on a mostly-silent retreat on a gigantic farm/wildlife preserve. During this walk, as the leader, you're not required to look back and check on the group. There's a person in the very back who will make sure no one wanders off. (It sounds completely weird and contrived, like most word problems. This one is real. Weird, perhaps; but not contrived.)
Still easy? Of course! Just walk slowly. Easy as breathing.
And yet, I was in this situation, and failed. Twice!
Wandering
A loud whistle from someone in the group stopped me. I looked back and the teacher was jogging to the front of the line.
"You are walking much too fast," she took up position to my left and started walking, slowly, and talking to me with her famously friendly, nonjudgmental, matter-of-fact tone: "Always consider the whole group."
"Sorry..." I said, and smiled reassuringly. She stayed long enough to set the right pace, then dropped back to the back of the line.
My brain, of course, immediately did what brains do: In an attempt to justify, it analyzed…
At 6'2", I'm much taller than most of the people in the group. Longer stride... Yes, that was it.
Plus I was hoping to take my friends in the direction I had scouted out earlier that day: A beautiful walk down a straight road lined with very tall Eucalyptus trees, then through a gate onto a public trail that passed right through a functioning pasture. No fences between us and the cows. (And, I observed, no bull.) Then on to another road where a large old tree had recently fallen and blocked the road, and that would be where we'd turn back.
Oh, the experiences we would have as a group, if only we were walking as quickly as I had been when I first explored this path: Seeing the cows close up, without boundaries... Mindfully dodging cow-pies... Turning a corner to see the poetic impermanence of a fallen tree...
"You're going too fast again!" Where did she come from?! Then, more quietly, she told me a few things I thought I already knew.
Stepping In It
Through the rest of the walk out to the middle of the pasture, I walked slowly enough. Then I circled back silently and everyone silently followed. As I passed each of my friends I felt my face flush with embarrassment. I walked slowly and carefully back onto the tree-lined road.
Yet I could often feel myself speeding up! Just a little, and then I would very consciously force myself to slow down for a bit. Then another urge to go faster.
Over and over, this same visceral, primal need to hurry.
That's when I remembered what needed to be done: I had to relax, and observe my thoughts and behaviors within the context of the larger system. A merging of two disciplines: Agile (empirical retrospection) meets Zen (empirical introspection).
In the Iron Cage of Death, of course. (Obscure joke…uh, it’s best explained in person.)
And when I did that, the answer was there, as obvious as the trailrunners on my feet.
It's Not What You Think
Yes, I am taller, but that doesn't stop me from walking slowly. I had walked slowly the three previous days, when someone else led the walk. Granted, there was no one in front of me to slow me down, but I could hear the footsteps behind me...
...and the person behind me seemed to be going much faster! He was going to run right into me! Why was he going so fast?! He must think I'm going too slow! Must hurry!
Reinforcing feedback loops! I'm taller! The guy behind me, in an attempt to keep up, is taking more steps. I would hear those steps, which sounded like someone jogging up to bump into me, and I would go faster.
A simple feedback loop, funneled through the raw, exhausted emotional brain (while the higher brain functions were plotting and planning The Most Awesome Nature Walk Ever, or some such nonsense), was like a physical force pulling me forward. “Duh!”
No Eyes, No Ears, No Drum, No Buffer, No Rope
Many of the following may seem obvious; and that was my biggest lesson of all, that day: Sometimes we forget.
Leadership
A leader has to be aware of the actual abilities of the team; has to observe the team, and take their well-being into consideration. Otherwise, we may drive them all as hard as the fastest of them, rather than allowing the most deliberate teammate to set the pace. (The late Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints!)
The team will understand (i.e., the Complex Adaptive Human System will rebound) if you overtax them once. After that, they'll assume you're either sadistic or clumsy. And then they will start to lose interest in the path, in the goal, and in following you.
People know stuff. Leaders can't assume they know everything about the experience, lives, and talents of their colleagues. As far as I know, my teacher does not have an MBA, yet her feedback was perfectly tailored to my personality and to the situation, and thus was readily absorbed by me as real, deep learning.
There will be gaps between our initial glorious vision, and the actual implementation. And that has to be okay.
Every good leader has bad days. On those days, work hard to sustain clear-headed awareness, and give yourself a gap in time to consider your words and actions, even when you need to act quickly. Let people know you're not quite at 100%. The best leaders earn real trust by conveying honest vulnerability to the team. The alternative, faking invulnerability, will quickly run up against someone's BS-O-Meter, and then trust will erode.
Accountability lies with the leader (even if it wasn't their mistake). Yes, repair the system, re-examine the metrics, educate the team; but apologize and make amends. None of my friends were too overtaxed by the walk, but I did notice that the oldest of us (in his late 80's or early 90's) was limping afterwards. I apologized to him. Graciously, he said that he actually enjoyed the vigorous walk, though he wished he could have kept up. And, thankfully, after a day of rest he was no longer limping. Otherwise I would have offered to pay for a doctor visit. Sure, it's his responsibility to self-select his levels of participation. But if you take on the role of a leader for a team, you accept some responsibility for the care and feeding of that team.
Systems
When faced with an unfamiliar system, even a person experienced in other types of systems and feedback loops may not recognize the emergent behavior unfolding right before their eyes.
When faced with being an integral part of that unfamiliar system, our corporate toolbox will be made useless, we may momentarily lose sight of the common fundamentals, and we may let fight-flight-freeze emotional responses take over.
Pragmatic leadership skills and systems principles are likely the same in all circumstances, but we have to grok that instinctively. Slow down and step back for a broader perspective. Before charging forward, take the time to observe the larger context. Why is this happening? And what caused that? And, before that, what made those conditions possible…?
Occasionally check that you are not misreading the feedback you receive from the system. We must trust the team, but also occasionally confirm that the metrics we rely on have not become cow-plop.
Blame the system, not the people. (This, I believe, comes from the Lean world, and I probably first heard it from Mary Poppendieck.) The guy behind me was not really asking me to go faster. Quite the contrary. He did nothing wrong. Too often managers "shoot the messenger" rather than adjust their own behaviors.
Training and Learning
Everything worth doing, is worth doing. Books on Agile, Cooking, Farming, Kung Fu, Leadership, Sex, Systems Theory, and Zen are often full of useful, practical information; but they are like rice-paper soles when you step in a fresh cow-pie.
We're human. I don't mean "We're human, we make mistakes. It's okay." We're all, inescapably, human systems. We have deep patterns of emotional response, and it takes a lot of training and effort to alter the physical responses that typically follow an emotional response. No matter how much we study something academically, we have to practice observing and adjusting our own personal feedback loops by immersing ourselves in a real environment. We have to make a personal effort: Our mental exercises—and perhaps even our well-crafted simulations—are not sufficient.
Into the Hopper
I didn’t know how to summarize this post, so I'll close with a related quote. The following is a "gatha" (part poem, part personal liturgy) by the late, great Robert Aitken. I stumbled upon this during the same retreat.
At a Zendo meeting for business
I vow with all beings
to drop my plan in the hopper
and let the process evolve.
-- Robert Aitken Roshi, The Dragon Who Never Sleeps
