Is this true?
"Every meeting seems to be full of young engineers scrambling to amass the most compelling facts, trying to create something else they can watch customers use, then build on that. The big loser in this model may be the managers in charge of scheduling things, since it is all happening too fast"
Quentin Hardy on "What Cloud Computing Means to Your Job"
And Hardy -- quoting a senior executive -- relates this lament: “Top management can’t say ‘You must do this.’ It’s hard to give direction.”
Loosely federated teams and feedback
So, this gets us to loosely federated teams, flatter hierarchy, and a critical need to harness feedback. That is, to harness feedback these questions need answers:
- What do you need to know?
- Who knows it?
- How to get it?
- What do you do with unsolicited feedback?
- What if it's not what you want to hear?
And, to the matter of it's 'happening too fast to schedule': How do you get feedback in time, since the timely phasing of feedback is critical? After all, the difference between song and noise is often only a matter of coherent reinforcement... that is all in harmony, phased for the best possible result. Screw up the timing, and the song sounds lousy
The answer is to buffer between the time you collect the information and the time you use it, such that the buffer provides the elasticity required to insert the feedback at just the right moment. Thus, the time-length of the feedback loop needs to be long enough to accommodate the buffer, but not too long as to make the feedback too old to apply.
Tricky timing? That's why they pay you the big bucks!
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