Radical Availability

20 March 2020

One of the concepts I’ve been advocating for over the last year is that of “Radical Availability” in the workplace.

Now, understanding precisely what I mean by this depends at least partially on understanding the nature of the workplaces in which I’ve been working. So here are some of the properties of such workplaces:

  • Working on projects that require creating detailed, shared conceptual models (aka, figuring out how does this business/software/process work?)
  • Working on teams that have more than three active members (shoo, seagulls!)

In these situations, it is critically important to have open and active communication channels. Why? Because while everyone is working on a different part of the project, those components have to come together in concordance in order to fully make sense. As the conceptual model evolves, each team member needs to be able to learn about required changes and the context behind them in order to stay productive. The longer a team member is working off of an old understanding, the more correction will be required… sometimes to the point of discarding that team member’s work entirely.

Enter “Radical Availability”. The core premise? To be visibly available to any team member, at any time during the agreed work day.

“Being available” is fairly easy to understand - if a coworker reaches out to you for any reason, a radically available individual will give them meaningful engagement immediately. Easy to understand, but a difficult skill to master.

“Being visibly available” is a bit trickier. Why is that pesky word “visible” there? What relevance could this have? Well, being “radically available” without your team actually understanding and trusting your availability loses most of its benefit. This means, it is not merely enough to be available, you have to show clear signals of your availability, and actively reinforce the idea that reaching out will be rewarded. It is very easy to set up invisible barriers, and a big part of being available is to actively dismantle barriers around yourself.

Those of us accustomed to working alone have likely been wincing throughout this column so far. For many of us, “getting work done” means having long stretches of quiet, uninterrupted time, so that we can focus on execution. This is especially prevalent for people who measure their productivity based on strict, unyielding metrics: word count, lines of code written, emails sent, tasks marked “complete”.

These metrics are the trees. Your project is the forest. Remember, the kind of projects in discussion depend on an evolving, shared model with a number of team members working on the same project. If team members have different understandings of the model, and those discrepancies are not corrected, substantial percentages of those metrics will be false… tasks that could have been avoided if the differences were resolved earlier in the process. Awkwardly, because of the nature of these metrics, poor communication will make the amount of work (by these metrics) skyrocket… reinforcing the idea that doing those things faster is highly valuable.

The “size” of the project cannot be held constant in the way that makes these metrics relevant. Indeed, there is only one measure that is relevant for this kind of project - does the product solve the problem for the intended audience? Naturally, this is the metric that is most challenging to quantify. C’est la vie.

Transitioning

Let us put on hold the metrics discussion then, and postulate that making team communication the top priority is the correct choice. Transitioning from limited availability to radical availability is challenging! What can we do to make this more possible?

Well then, what are the things that tend to get in the way of availability?

  • Locking time into uninterruptible meetings
  • Isolating yourself from the team (in any dimension)
  • Working on non-team-work, or with non-team-parties

Many people consider each of these elements unassailable and unavoidable. I submit that this is not so. You have control over how your work-life is designed, and can bend a culture toward alternative solutions, so long as the work gets done.

Given our goal of availability, we want to increase the “surface-area” on which your team can work with you. This has to mean keeping the amount of time away from the team in uninterruptible meetings down… preferably below 20% of hours worked. Keep isolated work time below 10% (while regularly signaling to your team that you are accessible). Furthermore, we want to reduce non-team-work to 5% or less 1.

The question is… how? Well, here are some quick ideas about how to refactor your work-day.

Convert Meetings into Regular Work

Meetings tend to serve two purposes - demonstrate a product (or project) to interested parties, or working on a task with an external party. Take advantage of this, and try to batch these “demo” together. This cuts down on repetition, and if ritualized, can create good project discipline even as it cuts down on the total time spent in meetings.

The latter type of meeting, working on a task, is something that can be tonally changed. Bring the task work out of the meeting room, and into a place that signals availability to your team. That is to say, make it look identical to your normal state of availability. This is easier to comprehend on teams that pair (for more on pairing, see my other piece).

This has a number of positive benefits if handled well. Firstly, if team members need your consultation while you’re working with the external party, you use the opportunity to help build the relationship between the team member and the external party. In some situations, the external party themselves may be able to answer your team member’s question! Secondly, it makes the quality of your team’s collaboration more visible to your external partner, which can build trust. Thirdly, it will better hold the work-product that you and the external partner create to the standards of your team as a whole. What am I talking about? Well, sometimes work that is done apart from the team is held to different standards than the team’s would expect. By doing work in a way that the team can observe and interact with you, it is easier for the team to enforce their working norms, and practice communicating the value of those norms to the external party.

Summarily, consolidate demonstration meetings as much as possible, and convert closed-door working meetings into open-door collaboration sessions.

Convert Isolated Work into Integrated Work

For some, converting isolated work into integrated work may be the most challenging refactor to undertake. The core idea? Take an existing skill - being able to focus and work efficiently, and from that base, develop a new skill - the ability to work productively while allowing for interruption.

This is a pretty substantial undertaking and worthy of much discussion, but here are a few ideas that may get you started on this journey:

  • Be able to work in tiny slices, with many jump-off points. The idea is that if you discipline yourself into adding value in small pieces, you give yourself a tremendous amount of agility and ability to pivot. This is useful beyond “Radical Availability”, in that it allows you to change the subject of focus as soon as it feels necessary. By tiny slices, we’re talking about slices that takes minutes (or less) of work.
  • Have clearly enumerated work plans. This is another discipline that creates better general visibility as to the work you are undertaking (other people can see your plans!) while having a clear track to continue on when your focus returns. Tiny slices combined with enumerated work plans makes it much easier to resume a task… or hand it off to another team member.2
  • Create space where your team is comfortable checking in with each other, and getting briefed on how other tasks are going. That means talking about the work in a social “how are things going” way, rather than a “did you get that thing done yet?” guilty way. Passionate people love to share about their success, failures, and frustrations. Give people opportunities to express that and they will be more comfortable coming forward for help when they need it.
  • Demonstrate availability by making yourself visible. That might mean being physically present in a work space. It could mean making a joke in on a shared chat channel every 15 minutes or so. But you need to make it clear that the avenues of communication are meaningfully open, and welcoming.

Convert Obscure Commitments to Clear Plans

As we get further in our careers, we may have a lot going on. Perhaps you’ve moved around your company a few times, and sometimes you’ll need to consult on behalf of an old team. Or maybe you’re angling to switch to a new role in your company and you’re splitting your time between your current role and learning the ropes of the new one.

You’ve probably seen or felt the other side of such arrangements as well. When you need support from a team member, but it is unclear where they are or what they are doing. This feeling can lead to other feelings, including questioning the person’s commitment to the team, their work ethic, or even considering them somewhat of a turncoat.

These are not positive feelings, but no one is at fault. In fact, they illustrate a key problem for teamwork: people need the availability of teammates to be predictable. That’s not to say we should demand total schedule dominance, but rather that every team an individual is working with needs the information that lets them set their expectations correctly. Not only that, but it needs to be easy to update expectations… any friction in this process will flare up with repetition.

For example, an hour-to-hour public personal schedule might provide all of the information to your team-mates in-theory. In practice? That’s an intense information dump, and the effort required to engage with your intense schedule will become a wall: only the highly motivated will attempt to scale it. Naturally, that makes it a rare event, and that is antithetical to our goal of radical availability.

Which serves to highlight one of the benefits of pushing the boundaries of availability: lowering the cost of collaboration as far as humanly possible.

So how should we refactor to square this circle?

I suggest substantially increasing the “block size” of a personal schedule, and ensuring that everyone’s personal schedule is visible on a team calendar. By block size, what I mean is the unit of allocation: instead of quarter-hours, half-hours, or hours, move to half-days and days.

This is a start, but we can go farther to make it easier. A clear schedule is good, but if it remains irregular then people will get frustrated over time. What do I mean by irregular? A schedule that changes frequently, or a schedule that lacks predictability. For example, a predictable schedule may have a few rules informing it, such as “Monday through Wednesday I will work with the team, Thursday and Friday I will work on finances”. That’s easier for people to remember, and as long as that holds generally true, occasional exceptions will not frustrate people.

Similarly, if the schedule changes substantially every day, the value of making it shared and visible decreases. Why would it do that? Is it not better to have up-to-date information? Well yes… and no. The purpose of the visible schedule, in the context of team collaboration, is not to be highly precise and accurate. The purpose is to provide clear expectations about when you will (and will not) be available to the team. These expectations are used when the team plans their collaboration: for example, they might try to keep important team discussions on days when you will be around. Without the schedule being stable enough to make short-term plans, it starts to becoming nothing more than a reminder that you are not available when they need you. This feeling can persist even when the majority of the time you are present with the team! The intuitive sense of accessibility has been compromised, and the only thing that can coax it back is being predictable and present. This builds trust.

Final Thoughts

Even if you choose not to adopt the “radical availability” approach, there is a lot to be gained from simply being more aware of how much effort your teammates have to expend to work with you. It is astonishing how much time and energy is wasted in organizations because of basic coordination… email chains that last for days (or weeks), the meeting calendar dance, meetings that feel empty, phone tag, and the ever-present “waiting for the thing someone else was supposed to do”. Take steps to pay down that communication debt3, and set targets for yourself on simply being more accessible. It will reduce the amount of stress you have from all the overhead, and you will teach your collaborators that you are a resource they can rely on to really get things done.4

  1. It is worth highlighting that this does not exclude truly working on a different project or a different team. A clear declaration of spending, for example, a day working on a different project is not the problem being discussed - what we’re concerned about is unclearly marked, unexpected time such that your teams accessibility to you is compromised. ↩

  2. If your enumerated work plan is easy to rearrange and re-order… even better! Flexibility is useful. That said, don’t let trying to make the perfect plan stop you from getting rolling. Starter plans can be changed an clarified. ↩

  3. In order to really “pay down that collaboration debt” and free up your time when you’ve adopted radical availability, you’ll want to make sure that you’re growing your team-members so they don’t need you for everything. For more about making yourself less of a bottleneck, see my piece on De-bossing yourself ↩

  4. Not covered here is the distinction between being available for collaboration and prioritizing work. When adopting a radical availability stance, you’ll need to make clear the difference between “being able to help for a few minutes” and “changing work priorities”. This is easier when you’ve committed to transparent and meaningful project planning. ↩