Culture as a Replacement for Systems
When you want consistency you enact systems. Systems are made up by triggers that transform input into the desired output through a defined recipe (check out my friend's book!). The downside is that systems can be rigid, while the operating environment is ever changing. Systems can get clumsy or inefficient when you’re not careful about right-sizing your processes to the problems you’re trying to solve. There is no silver bullet, yet many knowledge intensive organizations have a knee-jerk reactie to schedule more meetings when systems break down.
Meetings are a wonderful social mechanism. They are particularly useful when all participants needs of have a discussion, exchange ideas or solve problems. They become less useful when there is little interaction between the people present or when the information that is dispersed is very factual or without ambiguity. There are additional benefits to having meetings, like fostering social connection, creating buy-in and improving execution speed through centralized, synchronous communication. These are seldom the reason why meetings are set though.
My formal education is in software engineering, a discipline that shifted to a more iterative project management methodologies (agile), over 20 years ago. Instead of a sequential, phased waterfall approach it promotes short, cyclical development, enabled by self-organizing teams. It is easy to see why many larger businesses failed to create effective agile teams. They started to bolt on meetings as a way to provide more structure and hopefully improve the effectiveness of their agile teams. A typical, two-week cycle ("sprint") in many agile team now includes a meetings for "refinement", "commitment", "demo" and "retrospective". So much for self-organizing.
Why are most organization unable to implement "true agile" (as defined by the Agile Manifesto) in their product teams? Most probably because they do not foster a culture for effective collaboration, this includes:
Taking a broad perspective. Instead of just focussing on the task at hand, individual team members make an effort understand the "why", allowing them to question and improve their work. This requires a clear ondertanding of the goals and objectives of the project/business. They keep an eye on the work that is performed by a team as a whole.
Communicate constantly and proactively. When team members are able to communicate timely there is no necessity to create a system to force communication. Timely does not mean instantly. Individuals are mindful of each other’s availability to unblock work streams. Instead of dwelling on issues alone, they involve team members to find resolutions. Instead of resorting to face-to-face meetings, they are able to communicate effectively across different mediums. They share concerns and reservation with the wider team.
A need for constant improvement. Small, daily improvements have a long term and lasting effect on the quality of the project and team morale. This requires that individual team members have a sense of quality, introspection, and the urge to become better. Improvements can pertain to multiple aspects of the project, such as a deliverable, collaboration, tooling and process. Ideally team members contribute improvements to all these aspects of a project.
A high level of agency. Team members have a lot of ways to positively affect the outcome of a project. This start by having a clear understanding of what tasks they are responsible for. They take ownership of a task and involve the right people to complete it at the right level of quality. Instead of waiting for things to happen, they take initiative to have the upper hand.
Josh Schultz perfectively captured the other side of this coin on X: "Systems help unremarkable individuals achieve remarkable results... consistently". This does not mean that high performing teams can do without systems, but they are less reliant on systems to achieve great results.