Sometime back I had written a post “Lessons learnt from Jenga“. The latest revelation came to me again through Jenga. Somehow I get fascinated to this simple game! Every time I visit my nephew I play Jenga with him. It was only this time that I found a variation of Jenga in a toy shop, called Uno Stacko. If you have not played Uno, then you have missed some fun, particularly when you are in a group during events or functions. Anyway this game is a combination of rules applied from Uno and Jenga. This makes it even more interesting and challenging.

After playing several rounds, in a particular game, we came to a “can’t remove anymore” point where the tower started to sway and even a blow would bring it down. Neither I nor my nephew wanted to pull out pieces anymore, it was quite obvious the entire tower was shaky and clearly the foundation was very weak and supported by only individual pieces.

An idea stuck to me at that moment, what would it take to do a reverse Jenga? At this point how easy or difficult would it be to construct back the tower to its initial state? I relaxed the rule and used both my hands in doing this, so that I can hold the tower with one hand and it doesn’t collapse. Slowly I started taking the pieces from the top and started inserting them into the gaps. Very soon I realized that it was much more difficult to insert the blocks than to remove them. Because of a poor foundation, the weight of the tower had fallen on its individual pieces that were at the bottom and it was very rigid to insert any piece near them.

I had to force and lift the pieces carefully, so that a piece can fit in. But beyond a point I could not hold the tower any more, inserting a piece at the foundation was harder than removing it. Ultimately the tower collapsed. My friends, here is where I realized again, how important the foundations are, if you miss learning them in the first place, it is very difficult to put in those pieces later because, by then you would become rigid, your practices are rigid. Less flexibility provides less scope for putting in those important pieces which are the basis to support for the future.

But there is nothing as impossible. What is more important to realize is that there is always scope for unlearning and re-learning. Creating a stronger foundation is always possible if you are ready to let go of whatever you have learnt (wrong) and build the foundation again by relearning it the right way, which adds more value. Traditions and old practices may not apply for every generation. You can sustain and keep growing only if you are able to let go of old practices that are not applicable and learn and apply what is necessary for the current needs. So my friend, be open to unlearn and relearn as and when necessary.

This post is part of the foundation stone series of posts.

“There was a farmer who grew superior quality and award-winning CORN. Each year he entered his CORN in the state fair where it won honors and prizes.

Once a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learnt something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors’.

“How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why sir “said the farmer, “didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior, sub-standard and poor quality corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.”

The farmer gave a superb insight into the connectedness of life. His corn cannot improve unless his neighbor’s corn also improves. So it is in the other dimensions! Those who choose to be at harmony must help their neighbors and colleagues to be at peace. Those who choose to live well must help others live well.

Success does not happen in isolation. It is often a participative and collective process.”

This story is a good example to demonstrate that you would be more successful if your peers are successful. The reverse is true as well. If you are in an environment where growth is not cumulative you wouldn’t gain much. When you compete with peers (not physically or personally) the pressure slowly and equally falls on each other that you will automatically try to match each other in terms of mastering skills. You are forced to learn beyond what you already know. Combined with the attitude to share what is learnt, the team together can grow successfully than struggling to learn everything individually. Experiences cannot be learnt from a book but can always be shared. When someone shares an experience you do not need to go through it. The “What to do?” and “What not to do?” is already available as a lesson. It is a way of fast tracking your learning curve. Your team could have a Wiki site that can be used not only for project related documentation but perhaps a section that captures the lessons learnt and tricky situations that were solved and so on. You basically invite people to participate and share their experiences and learn from each other. Participative and Collective Success is continuous and a better way of growth in comparison with doing things individually and trying to be successful.

Thanks Preethi Vaidyanathan for sharing with me the above story.

I like Paulo Coelho’s books mainly due to the inspiration the book provides through his simple yet powerful way of expressing things. If you haven’t read his first book The Alchemist I would highly recommend it. His latest book Like the Flowing River is an intimate collection of his reflections and short stories. One of the stories from the book teaches five things to learn from a pencil. Even though I have heard the same before through a mail forward in the form of presentation slide, I loved the way Paulo Coelho had put it in the form of a short story. Below I have copied on how he has explained the five qualities of a pencil that we can hang on to.

“A pencil has five qualities which, if you manage to hang on to them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world.

First quality: you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will.

Second quality: now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he’s much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person.

Third quality: the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice.

Fourth quality: what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.

Finally, the pencil’s fifth quality: it always leaves a mark. In just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action.”

If there is someone whom you cannot hide from, it is none other than yourself. Amazingly you don’t realize that whenever you are true to others, you are essentially true to yourself. But tell a lie, do a mistake knowingly that you think others will not know and if your conscience fights against you because you did wrong, you realize you can hide a mistake from someone but really cannot hide it from yourself.

“Feeling guilty” can be made to work for the right purposes. In fact this has really helped me a lot to correct myself and stick on to things I have committed to. Because I know if I don’t keep it up, it will slowly eat my mind, unless there is something genuine stopping me to complete the work. Instead of suffering that bite, I would rather struggle, work hard and somehow complete what I committed to finish.

Though, be aware of a couple of points that can work against you in this process and put you in a trap. The first one is the anti-theory. The anti-theory is when you constantly allow your mind to bite, you become numb and insensitive. This is very dangerous because when you become numb and insensitive, it doesn’t matter to you when you don’t do anything what you promised or committed to. That’s when you dig your own grave. The second one is, in a progressive effort to complete what you have committed to; you might sideline or give less importance to the dependencies of the task you are taking upon. There is folk tale that explains this. There was a crow which got an opportunity to taste from a trash, a sweet made of rice and brown sugar. It liked it so much that it wanted more. So the crow asked it’s wife to prepare some more for him. His wife told him, that it needs some ingredients to make it. The crow got all the ingredients his wife had asked for. Then the crow’s wife started preparing it putting all the ingredients in a pot under fire. The crow was so impatient that it asked its wife repeatedly whether it was ready. Finally when the crow’s wife said it was ready, the crow was so impatient, that it put his beak into the boiling sweet. Because the sweet was so hot, the crow burnt its tongue and could not really sense the taste. It got so furious that it took the pot and dropped it. The pot broke and the sweet got scattered around the ground going waste. The crow’s wife advised her husband to not to be so hasty. The crow realized it by tasting few drops of the sweet that remained in a piece of the pot that had become cold, but all the efforts that it took to get the ingredients and the effort that his wife had put had already gone waste.

Even though the moral of the above story is “haste is waste”, a point to take from this is that we often have tasks that depend on so many things that takes its own time to be done right. If we miss this we might say that we completed it, but the final outcome may not be what is expected and it might be a double work for someone who was expecting it from us to be right the first time. If one keeps these two points in mind and has that guilty feeling to make sure that he/she completes what is committed to on time then the person is already taken a step to be self disciplined and gains trust among people associated with him/her.

Trust is a small word but means a lot. Just try searching “define: trust” in Google and look at the results. Faith, hope, confidence, reliability, honesty, belief are few words that have close association with definition of the word trust. There is no predefined set of steps that can build trust. It is built over time as a result of your actions. Trust is one thing that others earn on you for your actions. The more others earn, it becomes easier for one to carry out his/her thoughts, ideas and propositions. Trust is also an investment. In a project team, the team leader should put trust in the team and everyone within the team should trust each other. Without an investment there are no returns, hence the first step towards building trust is to have trust in the team, then that trust returns back up the level. Here is an interesting article “Building Trust” on the Slow Leadership blog.

IT organizations build many processes during the software development lifecycle to enforce responsibility, accountability to bring in quality deliverable. More than processes the key to achieving quality deliverables is to be self disciplined. If each and every member in the team understands his/her roles and responsibilities and be self disciplined in what they are supposed to do then there is no need for enforcement of work. Ultimately it is the quality of the work that is delivered that matters and if each one is self disciplined in executing the work then automatically the quality of the work improves significantly. This is what agile tries to preach. Here is a good excerpt on self discipline from the book “Agile Project Management” by Jim Highsmith.

Self-discipline enables freedom and empowerment. When individuals and teams want more autonomy, they must exercise greater self-discipline. One of the acute dangers of process-centric development and project management is that they remove any incentive for self-discipline. When managers impose discipline through detailed processes - ‘follow this process or else’ - they stifle initiative and self-discipline. These same managers then turn around and complain, “Why doesn’t anyone around here take any initiative or accept any responsibility?” Imposed-disciplined teams gets things accomplished. Self-disciplined teams accomplish near-miraculous things.

Self-disciplined individuals:

• Accept accountability for results
• Confront reality through rigorous thinking
• Engage in intense interaction and debate
• Work willingly within a self-organizing framework
• Respect colleagues

Dialogue, discussion and participatory decision making are all part of building self-discipline. Self-discipline is also built on competence, persistence and the willingness to assume accountability for results.  Competence is more than skill and ability; it’s attitude and experience. Get the right people involved, and self discipline comes more easily. Get the wrong people, and imposed discipline creeps in, destroying trust, respect, and the egalitarian atmosphere. One reason would-be agile teams don’t succeed is that they fail to realize the self-discipline required. There is no binary switch to go from no discipline to self-discipline; it’s a journey that some individuals get right away, while others need to take a longer trip.

Well one doesn’t need any more explanation on the need for a self-disciplined team for accomplishing near-miraculous things. Are you self disciplined?

This post is part of the Foundation Stone series.

“Quality in computer software is a controversial field. For some, software quality is a largely aesthetic and practical issue, dealing with the question of how efficiently and elegantly a computer program performs a task and source code looks (see Programming style). For others, quality is defined as strict conformance to requirements and absence of bugs. In both cases, there are sets of practices that are either required, or highly useful in this pursuit.”

That’s an introduction to software quality on Wikipedia. While I was agreed upon that description, I had some realization and thought around that word recently. This happened after my visit to a friend’s place in the United States last week. My friend wanted to meet a relative of hers and asked me to join her. We went to her relative’s home and after some introductions they offered us to show around their house. The first impression I got was this house must be new. Apparently my friend had the same question (this was her first visit too) and it came out of her mouth as a question. I was wrong and they were living in that house for some time now. I realized the saying “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” looking at that house and how it was maintained. Sparkling clean with each and every object placed properly and positioned properly. The credit goes to the mistress of the house and from further discussions we understood it is her passion to keep things in order every day. Her in-law quoted that she is so particular about things in proper place and positioned properly and was explaining with a tooth brush holder which had to be positioned parallel to the walls and not tilted sideways. The closet looked like a cloth shop.

The visit had an effect on me and made a lasting impression. I started feeling that the essence of quality can only be realized with some attitude. It is an attitude of perseverance, an attitude of trying to be a perfectionist, an attitude of being passionate about the work being done, an attitude of being adamant about doing right things the right way. When these characteristics show up in work, that is the evidence of quality. A common proverb in India says, you just need to crush a rice to see if the entire pot of rice has boiled or not. A quality work shows up on its own. Quality is also not about having a check once in a while but it is something that needs to be practiced on a day to day basis. When each member in the team has these quality attitudes, then the team is a quality team. When each team in the organization has these quality attitudes then it is a quality organization. Think about it, do you have these characteristics in you?

My other Foundation Stones

We all know that we cannot eat a water melon in one mouthful but to break them into pieces, remove the seeds and skin and then share and eat the fruit. Similarly the work we do might look complex, big and not solvable from the onset. I was watching a Discovery channel program on Siafu ants (pinching ants) which is a common ant type in Africa. These ants would eat everything in sight that moved. They eat mice, scorpions, spiders, anything that comes on their way and the local people say even elephants sometimes. They would kill and eat dogs and cats if they were trapped in the house also. The warrior ants have big claws that can tear off the outer skin of the victim and the rest of the ants swarm in and tear the soft inner flesh. These march in thousands and thousands and are nomads that shift the colony once in two weeks. Here is the best part, these ants are totally blind. They rely on touch, smell and chemical signals from the abdomen of the leading ants. The swarms can travel at up to 20 metres per hour, stripping all animal life in their path.

Think about the collaboration, team work and best of all the strategy of attacking in pieces but in huge numbers. The victim is outnumbered and is soon captivated. The whole episode was mind boggling just like watching a thriller movie. I could not take my eyes off the whole hour. The commercials did give me time to think about the lesson learnt through these ants and I thought this is an analogy I can share with you. Working as a team with good communication and collaboration and applying the divide and conquer rule can help in tackling huge problems so easy that you would want more.

Note - This post is a part of foundation stone series of posts