For too long we’ve accepted one failed metaphor or another to help define developing software professionally. All models are fallible but the one I believe breaks least often is: software development is a contact team sport. One shared clear goal, smaller milestones to progress to that goal, filled with opportunities for success and failure to learn from and adapt and when on the pitch, it doesn’t matter what your ‘position’ is, you have one responsibility: make your team win.
John Cutler recently asked “What is a team?” in his post TBM 423: Why Defining Teams Is So Hard. What I took from his piece aligns a lot with my experience: organisations are messy.
We have one very strong source of inspiration for what real teams are, from sport. There are a number of different ‘teams’ in sport. There are examples of individual sports where the ‘team’ exists but is less apparent in direct competition, such as tennis or golf. Formula 1 is an individual sport but which cannot reach the extreme heights of innovation and excellence unless there’s an acceptance that success is impossible without the team around them. Then there’s the sports where the team is in competition together, in real time e.g. football and rugby.
It is my belief that ‘teams’ which have a shared goal, made up of more than 2 people, operate closer to football and rugby, than F1, golf or tennis. If a team doesn’t see themselves in this way now, making this subtle change in perspective will be transformative.
As a Manchester City fan, the announcement that Pep Guardiola is leaving is a hard one to process but it does instigate a moment to reflect. Pep’s Barcelona team is generally accepted to be the best football team created in the modern era. His strong beliefs, derived from his inspiration Johan Cruyff’s Total Football, applied to a squad of exceptional players, with one standout legend in Lionel Messi. This team dominated football matches from start to finish. I still don’t believe I’ve seen a better single performance from a football team than their 3-0 victory over Manchester United in the Champions League final.
It wasn’t until he became Manchester City manager that I started to delve deeper into his methods. Over the 10 years of his tenure as manager, I’ve watched countless press conferences, documentaries and interviews, attended more games home and away than my bank balance would like to admit and watched even more on TV. One thing about Guardiola stood out more for me than his tactics or beliefs.
The Pep Guardiola Effect
It’s easy to see why Pep’s teams do so well. Without going into too much detail, Pep’s teams have a number of very specific quality attributes: the team moves up and down the pitch with the ball; when the ball is lost the team have to get it back immediately; the individual skill level of every player is incredible to enable them to maintain the ball under intense pressure; there’s always a free player to pass to. It’s simple when written down, but only Pep has really been able to implement it consistently, season after season, at 3 major clubs. I asked myself why and I think I found it: responsibility.
The Pep Guardiola effect is evident most in the interviews and press conferences he does when City have lost or even more so, when they’ve won but not played well. He doesn’t hold his players accountable, he takes responsibility and makes the players responsible.
Accountability is often displayed in questions focussed on the past: why did this happen, why didn’t you do this?
Responsibility is best displayed in questions focussed on the future: what can I do differently, how can we be better?
Pep helps them be responsible for themselves, to be their best but more importantly, be responsible to their team, the fans and the club. Fear can drive you in short bursts, but responsibility is the internal fire that powers us. Pep is able to build incredible levels of responsibility into the players in his teams. That responsibility blurs the once static understanding of positions: goalkeepers just stop the ball, defenders stop attacks, midfielders collect the ball, wingers get the ball to the strikers, strikers score. This is now and forever more no longer true. In a Pep team, the goalkeeper has to play football as well as midfielder, strikers have to be able to retrieve the ball in an attacking position as well as any defender in their own penalty area. This responsibility, a responsibility to work for the team with a single shared goal, to win every game. This is what creates the virtuous feedback loop for excellence. That feedback loop or continuous learning is a relentless pursuit of the perfection of implementation of the beliefs. Some of the most successful players at Manchester City joined the club and were pretty terrible in their first season. But they stayed. They believed in themselves. They improved. Until Erling Haaland it’s arguable that Pep’s City had never signed a complete superstar. Every other player who turned out to be world class, became world class at City. But how can Pep build that level of responsibility into people?
The Pep Guardiola Approach
Pep thinks in systems. The pitch is a constraint and there are many others. He doesn’t accept all of those constraints as immovable, but he accepts them in the moment. That acceptance gives Pep a canvas to push those constraints to their absolute limits. There is one constraint he embraces more than any other: that his team is made of human beings. Humans have feelings, they have lives, they have limitations. We are all flawed. Pep is flawed. Pep knows this and he does one thing I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else do close to as well as him, other than Jurgen Klopp: he cares about those players as humans. Not as an extended family, there are clear boundaries of responsibility in place. But he cares about all of them as individuals. He signs players who he believes have a desire to reach the very top of their potential. He gets them there not through fear but by giving a damn about the success of each of them. This can’t be faked. Humans have excellent instincts to detect fakeness. Maybe not initially, but when it really matters. It is impossible for Pep to turn huge potential into world class, season after season, unless he is authentic. And you can see it in his behaviour.
We’ve all been told how psychological safety is important for excellence. Excellence is an emergent property of the ability to adapt following failure. Pep is able to build such a high level of trust in him from his team, that despite intense pressure, individuals feel the responsibility to take the circumstances, not the moments, the circumstances and lift themselves and each other to improve, over and over and over again.
People have written about this. Countless white papers of research, conference talks and many a book. One in particular Radical Candour.
“Care personally for your colleagues while also challenging them directly.’”
Matt Rutherford
The feeling of being cared for can only come from someone else’s action. Saying you care for someone only survives if you behave like it. Not perfectly, that’s not possible, but proportionally more often than not. It’s in the moments of highest stress when that care has to come to the fore. No one messes up on purpose. Football is a complex game, with a huge surface area for mistakes. Software development is no different. But excellence can only come from learning from those mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, the people who could scorn you, who could hold you accountable, have opportunities to demonstrate their level of care by accepting their responsibility in the failure or offering words of encouragement and reassurance.
And this is why that sustained level of care is necessary. Pep has said himself on a number of occasions that he overstepped challenging directly, during or after a game. You can watch some of the changing room exchanges online. As an outsider they’re uncomfortable to watch. But in that group, the players know it’s not personal, it’s just frustration. And because that frustration doesn’t boil over into accountability, even in this most intense of environments, players can feel safe that tomorrow, when the frustration is gone, responsibility kicks in again.
Almost everyone I’ve heard talk about this book falls into the ‘fake care’ problem. They fail to understand that the success of challenging directly is directly proportional to the amount of care the person receiving the feedback feels they have from the person providing it. These people will only be involved in creating and achieving genuine excellence, through luck.
Excellence in the world of AI
As building software becomes even more commoditised, everyone gets the lift up. Pep changed football, now every club, from junior to senior, try to emulate what Pep achieved, not because they solved that problem themselves, but because they’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If everyone tries to play the same way you have two options for success: do it better than everyone else or be better than everyone else.
The organisations and teams of any reasonable scale will succeed in the era of AI by playing Pep’s football. Blur roles, build individual excellence, one shared problem to solve but solve it together. But that’s not enough, you need to be better. Being better is a tomorrow problem. Tomorrow can only be better if people take responsibility for it.
This isn’t about reading a book and looking for a recipe or process to follow. You’ve already failed if you do. Now as humans more than ever we have to stand out. That means looking inside ourselves and finding the humanity. That’s going to be the differentiator. You don’t have to completely overhaul an org overnight, you don’t need to do an all-hands. You start tomorrow by changing you. Take the next situation you’re perceived to be a leader for and demonstrate care, demonstrate responsibility. If it’s an incident review, look forward and find a path together. If it’s slipping schedule, look forward and find a path together. If it’s a feature that’s not living up to expectations, look forward and find a path together. Not in a slide deck or slack message but around a desk or in an online call, with the problem in front of you. Start together, end together. Drag each other over the finish line.
Dragons for Elevenses 