Encouraging Creative Conflict: Form, Storm, Top Gun

If you have any designs on management, it’ll help your cause to learn some of the more iconic bits of that problem domain’s lore.  Software people would be more impressive at cocktail hour by being able to speak intelligently about object oriented vs structured vs functional programming or about relational vs document databases.  Management people would be more impressive at their own cocktail hours being able to bandy about Drucker, lean principles, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  And if you hang out at enough of these cocktail hours, you will be unable to avoid Tuckman’s stages of group development.

The short version of these stages is the catchy rhyme, “form, storm, norm, perform.”  The groups starts off being polite and feeling one another out, but they’re more or less too deferential to make serious progress.  After a bit, egos and tempers flare, people jockey for influence and rivalries emerge — the group ‘storms.’  Only once the team has duked it out and subsequently hugged it out can they move on to ‘norming,’ wherein they gruffly put up with one another’s peccadilloes in pursuit of a common goal.  And, finally, in the end, they all live happily ever after, humming along as a well-oiled machine.

Of course, this not only applies to feel-good stories of organizational politics, but also to about 90% of action movies in the history of the planet.  Whether it’s erstwhile enemies Maverick and Iceman agreeing to wingman each other at the end of Top Gun or the romance plot between Han, Leia and Luke eventually sorting itself out, we all get warm fuzzies when the former stormers become performers.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)  Everyone likes a good tale of “form, storm, norm, perform.”

We like it so much, in fact, that I commonly hear variants of the idea that teams should be encouraged to ‘storm.’  It’s something like, “we want a team full of people that engage in fierce, angry debate to surface the best ideas, then, when 5:00 rolls around, they let it all go and happily go out to dinner.”  I’ve heard this described as “harnessing creative conflict,” or some such, and it echoes the management (Hollywood) narrative that through challenging one another and letting emotions run high, a catharsis of sorts occurs and all participants come out more creative and more closely bonded for their ordeal.  It’s an appealing notion, and it’s also the epitome of the “extrovert ideal.”

The extrovert ideal was a term coined (I think) in Susan Cain’s, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking.”  It refers to the notion that society has deemed extroversion the ‘correct’ choice between introversion and extroversion.  “Storm to perform” is very much an extrovert thing.  But I’ll return to that later.

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Getting That New Tool Past The Gate Keeper

Editorial Note: this post was originally written for the SmartBear blog.  You can read the original here, at their site.  Check out the rest of the content while you’re there.

Let me tell you a tale, and stop me if it sounds familiar.  Well, I suppose the medium of blogging will prevent you from actually stopping me, but you get the idea.

You’re part of a software development group, and you’re surrounded by techies like yourself – people that get excited about new ideas, approaches, tools, frameworks, and languages.  But then there’s the guy on your team with the seniority.  Let’s call him Crusty.

Crusty is not your boss. He’s probably the team’s architect or even just a senior developer who is somehow, implicitly, more senior than the other developers.  Most significantly, he’s who management looks to for advice about whether to adopt things – the very things about which you and your teammates tend to get excited.

His answer is usually “no.”

Management loves a guy like Crusty because he’s reassuring to them.  If you’re a dev team manager, the developers are constantly clamoring for new things, and you begin to wonder, “Is all of this really necessary?”  A good manager trusts her people to make recommendations, so she’ll tend to go along with it and hope that the spending is not wasteful.  But if there is a go-to guy on her team saying, “nah, we don’t need that,” she’s going to be grateful.  She has someone to reign in the spending, and she’s provided with the (potentially false) sense of security that, when something is actually needed, this guy will speak up.

This leaves you facing a conundrum if you’re part of such a group and want to propose a tool for adoption.  I talked previously about how to sell management on a tool, but Crusty effectively acts as a gatekeeper between you and making your case to management.  If you approach your manager directly, she might say something like, “Run it by Crusty first and get his buy-in.”

So, how do you get past this gatekeeper?  You need to understand his motivation and act accordingly.

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