There’s a Clean-based approach to team alignment which uses metaphor. It begins with each person addressing the question: “When you’re working at your best, that’s like… what?”

When I’m working at my best day-to-day, I’m like a clockwork octopus on a unicycle. I love to do lots of different things at once, while showing off a bit. Some of my tentacles will be busy connecting online, while others stay focussed on the practical tasks in the office.

That doesn’t mean I can’t be focussed. When I’m with an individual client or working with a group, the whole octopus has its attention on the work in hand. The different tentacles are able to keep track of different aspects of the work and ensure all the bases are covered.

An octopus’s tentacles have the interesting property of being able to work independently - each contains its own emergent ‘brain’. It’s like a distributed network of computers, where the intelligence is in the whole, not at one central point. And that’s something I aspire to in my work.

When you’re working at your best, that’s like what for you? I do hope it’s something different - I’ve yet to meet another clockwork octopus on a unicycle

Tags: metaphor, team alignment, work

This entry was posted on Tuesday 2 September 2008 and is filed under Blog.

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