Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Or, in plain English, "Mountains are in labor, a ridiculous mouse will be born" (Horace).

Many organisations consume tons of resources and logistics just to put in place something that is so insignificant and useless that it really makes the sanity questionable. Generally this kind of projects start from a good idea, something that requires some kind enterprise engineering at some levels.

People identify issues and possible solutions. They look around for examples of similar issues and how others succeeded in overcoming the obstacles. Examples of such a good idea are: common ways of working (especially after mergers) common development infrastructure, re-architecting products and so on.

Usually what happens is that, once the management acknowledges the initial issue, a committee that will handle the problem is put in place. The committee is formed by generally capable individuals but each one with its own baggage of interests and stakes in the project. They start thinking the idea, usually from conflicting stances and some progress emerges. Sooner or later, in these groups, some stakes become more important than others or some change resistance interests appear. IKEA syndrome is booming. Some projects have so many technical debt so that for them change would be suicidal. Others discover in terror that their functionality is already implemented by others, But the charter is there and managers committed to implement it. So the backstabbing and parallel communication begins, people forget the scope and the charter is liberally interpreted. The relations of trust between the committee's members are shaken and nobody works towards the initial goal. So, instead of giving birth to a magnificent mountain a mouse is born.

What to do in this case?

Generally, business as usual. Travel, meetings, paperwork, slideware, buzzwords. Everything is like a movie set, looks impressive from distance. On a closer scrutiny... well there is nothing or in best case very little worthy. The little mouse was created. Everyone involved is still in a newly painted silo. Many "change agents" are created so they can tell, as in "Emperor's New Clothes", that something really great is to be seen, no wonder that the organisation struggled so hard to produce it...

How to deal with this? There are several ways.

One is that this cannot be solved from inside but rather from the outside. I would personally bring some consultants from outside that are unbiased and can judge the decisions with no emotions or attachments. They should really listen and be mediators. They have to ponder all the aspects and write down pragmatic, sometime cruel decisions. They should be smart and technology wise so they can see migration paths and human enough to be able to compensate the emotional burdens.

The second view is that there might be a chance of solving it internally. This really involves a coordination game. There should be no hidden cards, no hidden agenda and in fact it involves a lot of sincerity, openness and altruism. These are hard to find in organization as changes really hit the amygdala or the base Maslow's pyramid. People will fear changes, they'll sabotage it even unconsciously. To prevent petty results and huge efforts people should reach agreements based on clear and open communication. They have to assume some suffering and discomfort. There should be some safety net professionally and materially that give them courage to go on.

Coming back to the output of the huge labor, rodents could grow big (think of a capybara) but this requires no natural enemies, at least not internally. Scoping correctly the goals and reducing the internal sabotage is the key for a viable and valuable output. Also keeping the internal theatre as low as possible also helps. If there is no internal struggle then the mouse can evolve, can grow - maybe in the end it will really be magnificent. Otherwise it will be always the petty effort of majestic mountains...

Wizards vs. Goblins

In a parallel universe the world is ruled by bit magic. The bit-magic flies around everywhere, it is used by peons to supervise their crops, by dwarves to control their mining rigs. There is for sure no place where the bit-magic cannot be found.

However the bit-magic is hard to capture, only some gifted characters can do it. They can catch the bit-magic and weave it in forms that are usable by peons, dwarves or other races.

The wizards live in high ivory towers, they are old and wise. They have endless scrolls written in elves languages that describe fantastic bit-magic weaving. Their magic is elegant, the shapes are pure, almost mathematically described, everything is formalized in higher level language that describe the meta-magic and the concrete magical creations are generating by casting the streams of meta magic into bit-magic generating crystals. The wizards communicate through owls that fly between the towers, carrying asynchronous messages in a decoupled temporally and spatially network. The wizards meet once every one thousand years and they discuss the completeness of the meta-magic and the crystalline structure optimizations for producing higher quality bit-magic. Those meetings are often a month long and they fight often because the elves languages they use are not always the same and they interpret words differently or disagree on the hierarchies. All the beautiful tools created by the wizards are updated once a millennium hence they have the aura of antiquities and people put high value on them although sometimes they are useless or utterly outdated.

The goblins on the other hand have simple ways of weaving the bit-magic. They write them down in the simplest form so that they all can read it. They go to the peasants and for small amounts of money they cast the bit-magic. Not always the best magic, but always workable. Everyone can use the products of their spell albeit they are sometimes cumbersome. When they see problems that they cannot solve immediately, they gather in their underworld caves and refine the spell so that they can always deliver a better version next day. Again goblin's aesthetics is not comparable with the intricate embroideries that the wizards put into their bit-magic spell but seems to be more reliable. Goblins seem to get along pretty well with each-other as they care about the global well-being of the goblin nation and they understand that every bit of magic they sell is for their collective well-being.

On this imaginary world whom would be the long time winner? The almost eternal wizards or the myriad of goblin generations? Whom would ultimately produce the best bit-magic?

The answer for this is simple - the survival will be dictated by the market. The ones that will be able to adapt to what market asks will be the preferred supplier. The ones who make less assumptions about their clients and are able to deliver to heterogeneous clients.

Similarly, in nowadays software markets, in our world, we can see companies that act like respected wizards or entrepreneurial goblins. Think of any need you have and you will see a creation made by an wizard-like corporation and countless of other that serve the same need but evolve faster (e.g SAP vs. Salesforce, Odoo; WebEx vs. Skype, Viber, Signal; AIX vs. Linux, FreeBSD). The second approach generally gives more generations of software in the same time frame so they adapt to the market quickly, they evolve smoothly. Moreover this also brings a delivery discipline. Even for desktop applications we can see a continuous delivery stream, for example Google's Chrome updates. This devops like culture that is focused on short and fast release cycles and is oriented towards value streams seems to get mainstream and thrive on every market. The only pain point is the attention to the details and the craftsmanship the wizards have in their products and that also be carried in this novel approach

The Indian Neighbour

I live in a block of flats on a dead end street near some student dorms.

The area is extremely crowded and one can barely find parking space. Therefore we always race to occupy any free parking spot as soon as we spot it otherwise the students will occupy it.

Basically there are 4 parking spots for every 15 flats in the area. But as cars multiplied they are always scarce.

Although there are some people with two cars they manage somehow to juggle with the cars and still be reasonable.

However we have an Indian neighbour. Initially he had just one small car. Perfect one for the crowded area. He was sometimes visited by his in-laws for a week so a second car was parked near the block. His in-laws live about 300 meters away - so walking would not have been a problem.

Then a few of months ago he bought a second car. A huge old sedan that barely can be manoeuvred  in the tight space we have. The sedan is now occupying a place as he doesn't drive it for weeks.

We were not happy but as there were also other neighbours with two cars we accepted the situation.
But the situation has got worse. The neighbour just bought his 3rd car - a station-wagon. And again he doesn't drive it at all but keeps it parked near the next block - making also our neighbours happy.

It is not about the nationality of the neighbour. It is about the lack of coordination in the Romanian society and the lack of mechanisms of regulating excesses. The neighbour could have been Japanese, German or Romanian. The problem is the same. Adapt to the resources you have. Do not use shared/public propriety in an exclusive way.

There is no easy way for us to regulate this as the town hall is an opaque institution and there is no law that can be applied in this case. The parking is not given by God to the righteous ones but rather it is a resource that should be prioritised for those that really need a place nearby - people with young children, elder people, etc. If one is in any of the fore-mentioned categories this is not a right for a second (or even a 3rd or 4th car - if we count the in-laws) on all the 4 places our block has.

I do not understand why the town hasn't yet responded to our petition of marking the places. I am not expecting that they will rent them (as it's normal in other cities) but at least make the waste visible - this is the first step for creating a control mechanism.