I had a client once that went all out for Halloween. Just about everyone showed up in costumes and there were prizes for individual or team costumes. At the time I was there, it was commonplace for work to be outsourced to India so my group decided to do a team costume of “IT outsourced to Mars”.
We covered the windows with red filters to give the whole area a Mars look and sealed off the department with cardboard walls and dedicated airlocks for people to come in through. There was music and sound effects and to complete the 1950’s SciFi look, someone had even brought in a box of dry ice which steamed all over.
It was a fabulous group costume and we won first prize that year.
At the end of the day, one of my coworkers and I were wiped. We had no focus and I couldn’t even concentrate enough to my check email. We just naturally assumed that we were exhausted after a long day. Except that wasn’t the problem.
We decided to start tearing down the walls so we could put everything away. We packed everything up and carried it out to our cars. As we got outside, our energy picked up and we started to feel great again. Clearly, we’d just got our second wind. Except that wasn’t what was happening.
It was only as we started heading back into the building that we realized what we’d done. We’d sealed off the area and effectively blocked all air flow. Then we’d dropped a box of dry ice in the middle and for hours, we’d been breathing in high concentrations of CO2.
If you’re not aware, high levels of CO2 will impair brain function and we’d been breathing it for hours at this point. This was the reason we couldn’t focus on anything.
Oops.
Once we were aware of the problem, it wasn’t that hard to fix. The real issue was that it had crept up on us so slowly that we hadn’t realized it was even happening. It wasn’t until we stepped outside our environment, into the fresh air, and then looked back at our original situation that we realized we had a problem.
We see the same thing, although not nearly as dangerous, with so many things in our environment.
We let the build get slower and slower and don’t really notice how bad it is until we see a build that’s fast.
We let the architecture become more and more complicated until we get to a point that we can’t add a feature we want.
We accumulate more and more process steps in what we’re doing until someone questions why we’re getting nothing done.
The core problem is the inability of people to address or even sometimes be aware of problems that appear gradually. The solution is often called Perceptual Positions, stepping outside the view we normally hold to see the problem from a different perspective.
This can be the value that an outsider can bring to our environment. Things that we’ve just slowly become habituated to, will be jarring to a new person. I’ve often been that outsider who asks “Is it always like this?” and causes people to question the environment that they’ve just got used to.
Trying new languages or new approaches can be valuable in making us question how we’re currently doing things.
Well facilitated retrospectives are supposed to help identify these kinds of problems, although often these are subtle enough that we still miss them.
Realizing we even have a problem can be hard. Consider what can we do to help us see those problems that we’ve just become habituated to.