3 books that shape my organizational thinking

As a software architect, project lead, and tech startup co-founder, I’ve encountered many challenges that are disguised as technical choices or issues.

And while tech is often a factor, the organizational issues beneath these challenges are just as critical or even more critical to address.

Here are three inspiring books that have shaped my thinking on how to navigate interpersonal and organizational challenges in a tech environment.

5 Dysfunctions of a team

Working with people is not always easy and goes wrong in many ways. But it is crucial to make it work to get to result. And it feels great when it does :)

Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” explores the common challenges that teams face and provides practical strategies for overcoming them.

The title may be misleading because the so-called ‘dysfunctions’ actually refer to abilities or skills that a team needs to learn :)

• The first dysfunction is a lack of trust among team members. Without trust, team members are unwilling to be vulnerable and communicate openly, which makes it difficult to resolve conflicts and achieve common goals.
• The second dysfunction is fear of conflict. Teams that avoid healthy conflict are unable to address important issues, and this can lead to a lack of commitment and accountability.
• The third dysfunction is a lack of commitment to team goals. When team members do not buy into a shared vision, they are less likely to put in the effort required to achieve success.
• The fourth dysfunction is a lack of accountability. Without accountability, team members are less likely to take ownership of their roles and responsibilities, and this can lead to missed deadlines and poor performance.
• The fifth and final dysfunction is a focus on individual results rather than team results. When team members prioritize their individual goals over the goals of the team, it can create tension and undermine collaboration.

What makes this book powerful is that it reads like a work of fiction (it’s written as a business fable) yet still manages to effectively convey essential elements of teamwork. It’s the perfect material to read or listen to while commuting!

If you want to have a quick intro to the concepts, you can start with this YouTube video

Team Topologies

My nickname is “Toon Tekening”. “Toon Drawing” in English, but that sounds less catchy ;). So a book that helps us to create (relevant) drawings always gets some extra points. But this book would even get to the list anyhow!

As your development teams grow, smooth communication, coming to alignment, taking decisions, and rallying around a common goal becomes much harder. So you need to think about how to shape your delivery organization in small groups that can work effectively among themselves while staying aligned with the overall value.

Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais gives you a very powerful framework to think about the team organization, composition, and expected behaviors in a software development organization.

Based on Conway’s Law, the book explains how to design teams that align with the structure of the system being developed.

The authors introduce four types of teams: Stream-aligned, Enabling, Complicated-subsystem, and Platform teams, each with their strengths and limitations.

The book also covers how to create a team-first culture that supports high-performance teams. This includes team charters, measuring team health, and promoting collaboration and psychological safety.

Finally, the book covers how to scale teams within a large organization and create an effective leadership structure.

The value of this book cannot be overestimated, as it links 2 crucial dimensions of shaping your software delivery organization: the system design and the organizational design. One cannot go without the other!

More info on the Team Topologies website.

The Phoenix Project

The third book is the DevOps classic by Gene Kim. It is a business novel that takes you along on the journey of Bill, the IT manager who takes on a project to transform the failing IT department into the effective delivery organization the company needs.

During his tenure, he addresses technical debt, identifies and resolves bottlenecks, and implements new systems and processes. Doing so, he faces a series of challenges, including resistance from other business units, unforeseen obstacles, and time constraints, but he perseveres and (as in any feel-good novel) ultimately succeeds in getting things on track.

The underlying principles are the core of DevOps: organize for fast flow, get early and frequent feedback, and allow for continuous experimentation and learning.

The reason why The Phoenix Project is in this list is that it is very powerful in explaining the “why” of DevOps, removing the purely technical focus of many of the tooling and practices (CI/CD, Infrastructure as code, pairing, mobbing) and showing the business impacts of doing so. As such, it gives a mental model for IT and business teams to better understand each other.

My Key Learnings from These 3 Books on Organising Software Development Teams

By reading these books, I now have a frame of reference to:

• Get the base team dynamics right (the 5 dysfunctions)
• Organize around small, autonomous teams and align the (target) systems architecture with this organisational model (Team Topologies)
• Organise each team to become a learning machine with fast flow, leveraging early and frequent feedback (The Phoenix Project)

If you want to discuss some of the points, do drop me an e-mail with your question!