I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope do so at risk of offending other stakeholders. They may tolerate you and even give some limited help, but they're not going to shout your name from the rooftops just because you want to be a boy scout.

Not saying you can't buck the system and get away with it, one of my favorite books was about one of my heroes, John Boyd, but if you want to be a hero, you need to go into it with a clear-eyed assessment of what you're up against and so you can tailor your objectives appropriately.

The military's size, scope, and mission are unique. You need top-down control, because otherwise most folks won't decide to run up a hill into a machine gun on their own. That mission focus (do stuff with force), cascades into the supporting services.

And the Air Force is not the DoD. While, technically, the individual branches of the US military fall under the DoD, they all have very different organizational cultures, and the DoD has staff and culture of its own.

I won't tell you what falls within the scope of this discussion or not, but I can tell you why they don't add a lot of value to it either.

It's already quite hard to somewhat objectively discuss whether a business company is dysfunctional, in part, or not at all, and what are the reasons for that.

It's almost entirely useless to attempt to have that discussion about government. Because politics. Because people root for their home team. Because people are inclined to dismiss the other team's ideas even when they're real good. If I told you the US Government is dysfunctional, someone would counter that I'm not American and I should see my own government. If we move past that and we got into the details of why things are not working properly, invariably Americans will start quoting bits of the constitution, bill of rights and foundling fathers at each other (and from there on it just becomes religion to me).

Discussing whether the function of Military organisation is working properly is even more difficult. In addition to the above problems, there's also hazing and indoctrination, which are incredibly strong psychological forces (without those, like said, people won't run into their deaths without question). And it pretty much divides the crowd in two slices, those "outside" that have no idea how it really works, and those that have been "inside" who are unable to disconnect the indoctrination bits from forming an objective judgement about how well the organisation functions and how that comes to be.

Certainly, discussing businesses has similar problems, but this just amps up the personal emotion factor to eleven. Also one of the reasons why the businesses were kept anonymous in the featured article.

There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.

One thing I would consider doing, if I ever start my own company or rise high enough up in someone else's company to implement this, is to give every single employee some sort of discretionary budget to spend on things that make the workplace better. The more experienced and trusted you are, the bigger of a budget you get. I think this would go a long way in fighting the learned helplessness dynamic.

20% is not specifically for "improving the organisation" of course. It's most famous on the outside for the new products it led to, like Gmail. But actually most 20% projects were small internal things intended to smooth the rough edges off a particular tool or process, or to improve the company in some way. If the particular bee in your bonnet was a type of bug that cropped up frequently in other people's software, making a linter to spot it and driving adoption through the organisation would be a good 20% project, for instance.

However, this is not to say that in regular administration there isn't still a lot of de facto trust in the hierarchy. I think unbounded hierarchy is generally one of those memes that people grow up taking for granted as something that just works with any layer count. In some ways, it's a self-reinforcing thing - if you climbed ranks for 10 years, you don't want to see the system change and your "sunk cost" go away.

[edit: clarified sentence]

That book made it into four different reading lists from various branches of the military (USMC, USAF, Army, and a chair of the House Armed Svcs Committee). That's encouraging in that at least they're aware that his ideas/approaches were productive.

With that in mind, "lean" as a principle is organized around the idea that it is better have people request functionality (pull) than for you to imagine what people want and then try to sell it (push). Many "lean" organizations happen to be very good at continuous improvement, but you can be "lean" without any capability for improvement.

"Kaizen" is the Japanese word for continuous improvement. It was introduced to western eyes primarily from the "Toyota Way", which is a lean manufacturing system that concentrates on continuous improvement. It is important to understand, though, that while workers have a responsibility for identifying problems, it is the managers who are responsible for working with the workers to implement improvements in the Toyota way. So there are clear demarcations of responsibility, unlike many of the IT processes that borrow the word "kaizen".

Even "continuous improvement" can be a loaded term with respect to responsibilities. The first time I ran across the term was dealing with CMM (the Capability Maturity Model). Once you are up to level 4 or 5 you are using metrics to improve your process in order to obtain continuous improvement. In every organization I've seen that attempted to achieve CMM level 4 or above, the primary driver was management (and often workers were not even consulted about improvements or why they were necessary -- they were only told to do things a certain way). I'm not saying it was successful, but it was very common ;-)

I guess my point is that if you are lucky enough to be working on a team that does continuous improvement well, be aware that what you call "Lean" or "Kaizen" is unlikely to be what other people call it. You can not communicate what it is you want to communicate using those words alone. If you have been reading literature using these words and believe that if you simple follow a "Lean" system and embrace "Kaizen" that you will transform your organization into one that does continuous improvement well, I'm sorry to burst your bubble. If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, all the difficult problems are people problems and those problems almost always require unique solutions. It can be quite tricky no matter what you are doing.

System of the organization comprises the relationship between systems within it, how those systems change and vary, the methods of knowledge learning and transfer, and the psychology and behavior of the people within it. And importantly, it's how all those pieces interact with each other that makes the most difference.

It's a system. There are some common elements. Above that base level, there is much truth in what you say, but the most important thing you can learn is a mental model for organizations in the most general way possible.

1) Heat up milk 2) Find something with the consistency of yogurt to put into the milk 3) Wait

Having a living thing there that knows what the final product should be and can stand as an example is largely how we transfer culture.

Regarding people problems, my one note is that we are all more alike than we seem, and you eventually start to see the same classes of problems everywhere. This is why an understanding of psychology and behavior is so critical.

So instead of asking "are you Kaizen?" you would ask about practices performed that imply Kaizen, including the spirit of the law and not the letter.

I've had some success, but they're always very deep interviews, which can either be drastically good or quite startling to the other party depending on what direction it goes. So your note to do it 'tactfuflly' is very prudent.

* have your antennae out for anything that seems weird (weak signals, indeed) in your conversations about the work

* check references (as an interviewee). That's a fancy way of saying, look to see if anyone you know knows someone who works there, who can give you the straight scoop.

Lets take for Leadership decides to incur technical debt to allow a faster entry into market, Development Team Lead decides this is unacceptable, and does not take on the Technical Debt, but instead does things 'The Right Way'. This leads to competitors entering the market first, snagging customers and mindshare, which eventually leads to the company going under.

Was the Development Team 'Right'? Even if lets say he was 'Right', is it his decision to make, should he intentionally sabotage or ignore direction from his superiors ?

Most true WTF processes tend to come from decisions made that are out of the control of the parties that they directly impact.

That's a bit of a loaded question.

You assume there is a right and a wrong that can be determined before knowing the outcome (a.k.a. deontology).

It's easy to see this is not at all clear-cut if you consider the other possible outcomes. What if it turns out that DevTeam's decision was what saved the company (and maybe even their competitors are now buckling under Tech.Debt).

Would that have made them right? Maybe yes. But in other's eyes maybe not because they still disobeyed their "superiors". But maybe the company would have fallen if they had listened.

Can you categorically say, beforehand, that one decision is right and the other is wrong?

You could, but others might disagree (and rightfully so, IMHO).

Say you claim it's always right to do what management tells you, and it's wrong to decide to go against that. And you can argue this because a large business needs that kind of structural dependability, otherwise it would fall apart in chaos and specialisation is a good thing, so management specialises in determining long-term vision that a Dev.Team leader is not as knowledgeable about. Sounds like a pretty tight justification, no?

Well, except when you're Dev-team and your livelihood (maybe family) depends on this job and following management's will crush the company, you decide to disobey management, and it turns out that indeed the tech.debt would have crushed the company instead of the entry-to-market delay. Then Dev-team gets to claim they were right. Even if management says "you saved the company this time but in general you ought to always listen to us even if you think it's a bad idea", except that (obviously) protecting their livelihood ranks a lot higher on Dev-team's ladder of oughts than following orders to facilitate a smooth tightly-run company.

Typically people resolve the issues that directly cause them pain pretty quickly if it is in their control. Further "control" requires understanding how the levers a party influences impact the obstacles that cause the pain.

WTF level issues typically occur when the above conditions aren't met, usually that means the 'pain' doesn't impact the party that has the control to end the pain. next most common is the party that has the control doesn't understand how its levers affect its obstacles.

just fixing what they can is not going to resolve WTF level issues...

If management is planning to do things quickly and badly, the dev lead should know that and plan accordingly, trying to do it in the best possible way.

If he's kept in the dark, of course he might blunder. But that's not his fault, assuming a company that encourages initiative and fix it yourself attitudes.

Best leadership leads by empowering people, not by enslaving them.

To be honest, how often does this actually happen? I'd doubt it happens often enough to worry about it. Most startups aren't doing anything that special, and so this whole, "We have to move at twice the speed of light or we're all dead!" attitude doesn't belong anywhere.

burn rate/runway is a critical survival factor to startups