Three Simple Rules to Solve Unsolvable Organizational Problems

There are some problems every company faces, no matter the size or industry. Issues like incorrectly assigned responsibilities and poor or overwhelming communication can slow teams down. In this article, we’ll explore three simple rules that can help you tackle these common challenges and get your organization on track.

In This Article

• Single Responsibility


• Communication


• Dependency Elimination

Single Responsibility

Every developer who knows about design patterns has heard of SOLID principles - five simple rules to follow when writing good code. It's an extremely popular subject, so popular that my article about

With great responsibilities comes great meetings

Communication

A company can have everything figured out when it comes to roles, workloads, and required tasks, yet still fail miserably at delivering their products. The main reason for this is often a lack of or poor communication. Effective communication is critical for any company, regardless of its size.

There are many important aspects of communication at different levels. To keep this brief, we'll focus on two critical concepts:

1. Pulling vs pushing information


2. Avoiding single-person communication bottlenecks

Pulling vs Pushing Information

Information must be available. Without appropriate information, a team cannot work effectively, resulting in major time losses. However, how information is received matters significantly. This includes not only the medium (Slack, email, or in-person communication) but also whether the recipient requested the information or had it pushed to them.

There's no absolute right or wrong way to handle information flow - whether it should be pushed to someone or whether they should seek it themselves. When recipients aren't aware of information they need to know, the information holder must proactively share it. However, if people know how to access the information they need, there's no reason to push it to them.

This sounds simple, but it rarely works this way in practice. Most of us receive numerous irrelevant emails daily. Many of us are automatically assigned to email lists and Teams groups that don't concern us.

Meanwhile, product issues arise due to information gaps, and we blame others for not sharing essential information with us. We wonder why we weren't invited to meetings which were highly relevant for our work.

Though challenging, this problem has viable solutions. The most important step is communicating what information is available. Every company and team should have a central location where people can discover where to find specific information. This might include contact lists, collections of links, or an overview of available Slack channels.

Once people know where to find information, the approach should shift to an information subscription model. Everyone can subscribe to the information they deem necessary, and then as soon as there is new information on that topic, they will get notified about it.

There's one small but critical detail here which must be mentioned though - you must push that source of information to all employees, making sure they know how to find and use it. If they don't know that they will stand without any information at all.

Avoiding Single-Person Communication Bottlenecks

Large companies have many roles, and each role comes with specific responsibilities. Product Owners (POs), for example, are responsible for their products. While it's important that POs know everything about their products and stay informed about developments, this doesn't mean all product-related communication needs to flow through them.

POs interact with many stakeholders. In large organizations, they might communicate with function owners, system verification engineers, designers, and others. As developers, we should communicate directly with these stakeholders rather than routing everything through the PO.

If all information flowed through the PO, it would create a significant bottleneck. Just like with scaling hardware resources in production, communication should scale horizontally, not vertically - meaning it's better to have many direct conversations between team members than to funnel everything through a single person.

Dependency Elimination

A few years ago, I was convinced communication was the key to success for large companies. However, it turned out to be only half the key - the other half being dependency elimination.

I could continue discussing why communication is important, but the truth is, communication fails. Books about communication will tell you it's a shared responsibility between sender and receiver, with various disturbances in transmission. While this theory is true, communication will ultimately fail, often massively.

One reason for this failure, beyond miscommunication, is poor retention of information and inadequate follow-up actions. The learning pyramid, a visual model showing retention rates across different learning methods, illustrates this well.