Decentralized Company Communication
- Eliot Muir
- Tyler Brown
- Aryn Wiebe
Decision making is decentralized by instead allowing the company to find its own equilibrium through natural conversation.
More detail
Conversation is how information is distributed throughout the company.
I have only figured out how to run the company in this way recently. It took a lot of rethinking of my own core beliefs on management.
Prannay manages a lot of customer facing aspects of the company. Prannay discusses our organizational growth and how the use of natural conversations within the company has helped to find our equilibrium and achieve our Thematic Goal.
Open conversations within and between teams has been crucial to understanding the Bottlenecks - old page being able to Clear the windscreen and prioritize solutions.
One thing you will notice is that we are not all the same. We don’t need to be. Our customers are pretty diverse - so it’s fine to have different people with different communication styles.
Aryn was in sales engineering and has lately taken on more of documentation role.
I don’t love to assign Labels/Brands for People but sometimes they can be helpful.
Jigar Mehta is new and was working on automating this the process today. But he talks about an unconventional recruitment process he went through with me (Eliot):
Final conclusions from Jigar on the interview process:
Regaah was in customer success and support before moving into more of a sales engineering role.
Bringing attention to the importance of building Trust. Notice that Regaah is using language which is what our customers are used to. It’s important to talk a manner that your customers understand even if our internal culture is different from many of them.
We are commercial for profit company and growth is important - it helps lift the boat for everyone in the company too.
Monique has been working on helping staff with the 100+ problems which destroy flow that most of us have which interfere with our flow.
To some extent I wonder if all staff could perform like A performers with just a little bit of help with getting their flow organized. That is one area our values diverge from many companies.
Tyler talks about the necessity of focusing on bottlenecks. Things often naturally work that people work in pairs, but this isn’t a forced pattern. We are big on the use of simple language. See Short focused documents are better.
We try and limit Entropyand we are big on Remove features in a design to reduce complexity
You can see how Tyler's Setup enables him to focus and be very effective.
We use a lot Conversation. There is back and forth https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2103017731 . There are different communication styles that people have. We try and avoid gaps in communication.
Sharing screens is useful. We usually keep conversations to 2-3 people.
https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2103017570 is a practise we often use in the company.
Dale is a Financial Analyst, who recognizes and values communication internally within the company or externally with customers or vendors we work with.
He’s pretty buff from the gym as well as being very smart. I’m grateful that working at iNTERFACEWARE makes it possible for him to have a life and a career.
He deals a lot with our suppliers and vendors. We need to adaptable to the way our customers communicate.
John is a software developer who is currently working on LDAP integration for Iguana X.
Paul does a good job of explaining the benefits of having some structure to the teams in terms of having people who can summarize what is being seen in one area. For instance like Richard summarizing what is been seen by the Customer Success team.
At the same time explaining some of the value of top down communication in providing direction and bottom up in providing feedback as to what is actually happening.
One thing I think is important is to remember is just because it the company communicates in this way it does not mean we all drink the same cultural Kool-Aid. It is not about blind obedience to one belief system, but rather it is just adopting enough beliefs around communication to be able to communicate is this way together as a company.
It it perfect? Hell no. Are we in good place relatively? Yes - looks like we are in a place to find a local maximum. See https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2796355591.
Does it mean it’s all Kumbaya? No it still makes sense to consider if the system can improved removing people who do not serve the needs of the company. See https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2777907272.
See https://interfaceware.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EC/pages/2103017615.