People First, Always

How to be a facilitative leader, and run effective, innovative teams.

- Michael K Levine

The concept of cooperation amongst humans is not new. We have had to learn how to best coordinate and work together for millennia, and have succeeded—we have pulled off phenomenal large-scale endeavours, succeeded in designing and building complex physical structures such as the Great Pyramids, the Acropolis, or the viaducts of Rome, undertaken the massive command and control operations involved in warfare, the list goes on. But, it is one thing to commandeer armies and build structures, it is another thing to engage in purely intellectual collaboration that nevertheless demonstrably works—or does not. That is the kind of challenge many leaders face today in terms of large-scale software development and implementation.

Creating pure ideas and turning them into code to invisibly run thousands or millions of interlocking instructions is an altogether different kind of human endeavour that has only been on our radar, let alone feasible, within the last fifty years. It understandably requires a different approach to leadership; another kind of discipline for leaders. In part, it is the intangibility of the objective that poses a challenge—get a hundred or more people to assemble complex ideas into an invisible machine that enables transactions, controls operations, and makes decisions. But that is where we are. And the key is how we lead these efforts.