From: "Peter Kaminski" kaminski@istori.com Subject: Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners To: Meta Project
(the following is an example of something that I'd usually post to a chat or forum system -- a less urgent-feeling discussion space -- rather than in your more urgent-feeling inbox. but we're not quite there yet, so here you go. :-)
Since we're talking about culture, in the context of organizational scaling, I wanted to offer a model that helped me understand some key dynamics that really surprised me.
Simon Wardley calls this "Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners". He adapted it, and thankfully gave it a better, less militaristic-sounding terminology, from Robert X. Cringely's "Commandos, Infantry, Police" model.
Cringely used his model in the 1990s to describe human dynamics he observed in Silicon Valley startups that became big.
Read these two blog posts to get the idea of the model:
https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html
https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/
I absolutely observed these dynamics in Silicon Valley startups, and if you don't know why it's happening, it can cause big problems and misunderstandings, because the way each of the three groups of people work is different.
The really shocking thing for me was how early the phases happen. At 2 to 15 people, everybody would be a pioneer. But as early as 15-40 people, many of the second wave of hires would be settlers!
Before actually living it, I would have guessed that a 40-person company would be mostly pioneers, but nope; you have to figure out how to manage both pioneers and settlers, AND the interactions between pioneers and settlers, even when you've got just a couple of handfuls of people.
A note: Cringely and Wardley (and me) have been writing about business environments, and I can tell some parts of the models herein will fit our new landscape, and some will need to be adapted. We'll probably need new models, too. But even still, I'm confident that these old models will help us navigate new space, and will hopefully inspire us to continue to adapt and build new models.
That's the main gist of this post, but while reading for the above, I came across some addendum material.
Wardley maps feel like a foreign language to me. I can tell they're important, because I recognize snippets of important things I've come to know other ways. I don't know if I'll ever learn the language, but I think some of us should -- I think they're important.
In the Plex, we (perhaps especially me) have been experimenting a fair bit with organizing based on cell-based structures; and I know from experience and training that organizing product development using Scrum (a kind of Agile) is using cell-based structures, and gets turbocharged because of it. The Meta Project will have to be cell-based.
Some expanded references to the terminology Wardley is using:
Henrik Kniberg has a great model for just a tiny bit of scaling, the jump from one cell, to a set of coordinating cells. We will need to continue scaling far beyond, but this is a start. Don't take it as gospel on how to do it, but rather, one successful story of how somebody did it. It's a PDF, "Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds" https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
"Two pizza" was a great rule, and it works well for certain disciplines like product development, but perhaps a main reason it works is not size, but FOCUS. Amazon turned to "single threaded leader" models: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/when-jeff-bezoss-two-pizza-teams-fell-short-he-turned-to-brilliant-model-amazon-uses-today.html
(Single-threadedness is perhaps a lot like Scrum's "self sufficient team" https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-to-create-self-sufficient-scrum-teams )
"Designing for constant evolution. Pioneer, Settler and Town Planner" (Simon Wardley) https://medium.com/hackernoon/designing-for-constant-evolution-41b216741974
"Traditional vs Next Generation Company behaviours" (Simon Wardley) https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1326490346575065088/photo/1 https://swardley.medium.com/how-organisations-are-changing-cf80f3e2300
"Bits or pieces?: Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners" (Simon Wardley, earlier post on same topic) https://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-town-planners.html
"Wardley's Doctrine" https://doctrine.wardleymaps.com/ https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/File:Phases_of_doctrine.png
The Manifesto has become long in the tooth, and there are both pros and cons I can talk more about, but since being first published in 2001, it has worked well as a set of organizing principles and a boundary object between the old way and new way. We should talk more about it, and how we might do something similar.