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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +layout: post |
| 3 | +title: "Greenhouse Noise" |
| 4 | +date: 2024-10-05 13:54:18 +0200 |
| 5 | +categories: organization product-management |
| 6 | +--- |
| 7 | + |
| 8 | +Like much of Europe, July in Norway means 60% of the office is on vacation. I prefer to work during this period, not only for the focus but because it means an opportunity to experience a change in the organization; there are different people, a different office culture, different support needs and different focuses. It's the same organization, just in a slightly altered parallel universe; and it happens almost overnight. |
| 9 | + |
| 10 | +This year, the contrast between these two slightly different worlds gave me an opportunity to reflect on organizational noise. Noise is something we all experience. Meetings, priorities, interruptions, changes in process, etc. In a growing company, noise is natural and expected (and sometimes exciting). But what is it? Where does it come from? Is it always a bad? When is it bad? How much of it is bad? In particular, **how much of it self-inflicted**? |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +<div align="center" style="text-align: center; margin-bottom: 10px;"> |
| 13 | + <img src="/assets/flagellants.jpg" width="350px" style="padding:10px;" alt="A SaaS company hard at work."/> |
| 14 | + <div style="color: #4D4D4F; font-size: 0.7em;"> 15th Century <s>flagellants</s> knowledge workers</div> |
| 15 | +</div> |
| 16 | + |
| 17 | +As a business, we deliver value in exchange for money. As an organization, we seek to deliver that value as efficiently as possible, while balancing various competing priorities: budget, market changes, tech debt, growth, profitability, competition, executing on vision, etc. Some of these are external inputs, and some of them are internally driven. |
| 18 | + |
| 19 | +For example, customer feedback is an external input regarding how we can improve the current value we provide. By contrast, market changes are an external input that may require a shift in prioritization in order to _continue_ providing value. The organization must balance these priorities and it must then execute on them, often at the same time. |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +When humans self-aggregate into an organization, they can respond to these inputs efficiently (e.g. the optimal strategy is taken at all times, and the organization instantly adjusts to changes in input) or inefficiently (the wrong strategy is used, and the organization is slow to react). However, I think _efficiency_ is quite different from _noise_. An efficient organization can be very noisy (e.g. a startup), and an inefficient one can be totally mundane (e.g. government). Noise instead appears to be some measure of the number of priorities, how the organization is structured to react to them, how successfully it reacts to them, and the frictional cost of reacting to them. Noise is also not evenly distributed -- it depends on where in the structure you sit. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +The July 1st demarcation of summer vacation is an interesting time to reflect on this -- because while the external inputs don't change (same customers, same problems, same market), parts of the _organizational structure_ change almost overnight. The pigeonhole principle would suggest that the poor sods remaining need to make up the difference in workload or be thoroughly swamped. So it seems like a paradox to be greeted with _less_ noise! |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +It makes one wonder: if `fewer people = less work = less noise`, and yet the house isn't on fire, then how much of our previous work was noise _amplifying_? That is, during the process of value creation, how much of the noise that others experience is due to actions taken purely internally? How much do we lose as heat via 'organizational friction' in response to some external stimulus? I've given this term a name: **Greenhouse Noise**. |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +<div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; gap: 20px; margin-bottom: 30px"> |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +<div style="text-align: center; max-width: 100%; height: auto;"> |
| 30 | + <img src="/assets/low_noise2.jpg" width="300px" style="padding:10px;" alt="A SaaS company hard at work."/> |
| 31 | + <div style="color: #4D4D4F; font-size: 0.7em;"> Value creation with low Greenhouse Effect</div> |
| 32 | +</div> |
| 33 | + |
| 34 | +<div style="text-align: center; mmax-width: 100%; height: auto;"> |
| 35 | + <img src="/assets/high_noise2.jpg" width="300px" style="padding:10px;" alt="A SaaS company hard at work."/> |
| 36 | + <div style="color: #4D4D4F; font-size: 0.7em;"> Value creation with high Greenhouse Effect</div> |
| 37 | +</div> |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +</div> |
| 40 | + |
| 41 | + |
| 42 | +Earlier in this post I contrasted noise vs efficiency -- it can be easy to see "high noise" as "inefficient", but I think that's wrong. By analogy, consider soldiers in the field; a team of special forces might efficiently adapt to a chaotic battlefield, but those fresh out of bootcamp might not. In fact, their inability to efficiently respond might _introduce_ additional chaos. This is how I think of the greenhouse effect -- it's the additional noise which arises **as a consequence of** the greenhouse effect which creates inefficiencies. |
| 43 | + |
| 44 | +In Value's struggle to reach the customer, how many things does it bump into along the way? |
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