RSS - Rogue Surgeon Sydrome

The surgeon model as advocated by Fred Brooks is the second most efficient method of developing software. The analogy is with the surgeon who is the focus of the whole show during an operation - the one that all the other members of staff are there to support. In many small technology companies, essentially, you have one surgeon/founder/guru who writes all the code himself, or certainly writes all the difficult stuff himself. Quite often the surgeon was the one who came up with the idea for the software or the business in the first place, it's his drive, his creativity and willingness to do something different from the herd that is the reason that there is business at all. If the surgeon is good this can be a very effective way of getting software written. For a while.

There's a problem though. The surgeon model doesn't scale. At some point a successful piece of software is going to need a lot of boring, non-charismatic things done to it, like multiple language support and multiple platform support. At some point the organisation is going to grow and start to hire people who aren't doing it for love, but for money. Somewhere around 10-15 people organisations can no longer be run charismatically (because everybody just loves being in the founder's gang) and have to start being run bureaucratically (because people do the job they are paid to do). Accounts staff, sales staff and business development aren't the kind of people that the surgeon/founder - as someone I know delicately put it - wants to go to lunch and eat noodles with. To avoid these problems many new media and technology companies get stuck at around 10-15 employees, vaguely hoping that they'll be bought out by some Silicon Valley conglomerate. With no other growth/exit strategy they stagnate. It can be unpleasant to watch and even more unpleasant to experience.

This is a very tricky situation to be in and there aren't many good solutions. Quite often the "Surgeon" in this model is a founder of the company. The kind of person who founds a company isn't the kind of person who wants to follow rules. That's how they got where they are, by not following rules. Sometimes for other employees this can be very inspiring. Sometimes it can be very tedious. People who have had to work with Steve Jobs have called this the "Hero shit-head roller coaster". At one company that I used to work for, the "Surgeon"/founder would resort to chanting "Ooh! Aren't we grown up!" whenever the issue of pensions was raised at board meetings. This was infuriating for the other board members who had grown up, had wives and children and would really quite like to not have to survive on Pot Noodles for the last 20 years of their lives.

You can bring in "professional" developers and "professional" project managers - these are people who rely on process rather than charisma to get the job done. But very often they don't sit well with the people who are already there, gathered around the surgeon. When I suggested to one company that I talked to that they deal with this problem by hiring in outside project managers they said "Yeah, we tried that - he got eaten alive." You can bring in professional management and then fire the founder. Apple did this and that didn't work out so well either. What companies really need to do is restructure in a way that allows the company to scale and remain creative. The surgeon/founder should be given a role where he can carry on doing what he's good at - doing new things, breaking the rules, in business speak R&D.

Agile processes can help ease the passage through this difficult period. Pair programming allows the surgeon/founder/guru to spread his knowledge of the software around the development team. Test driven development and refactoring reduce the demands on the surgeon/founder and leave him free to do what he's best at - thinking good thoughts, breaking the rules and coming up with new product innovations. But Agile can't be the whole answer. You're probably not supposed to say this, when you work for an Agile training and consultancy company. Things will only really move forward when the founder and others on the mangement team admit to themselves and each other what they actually want from their careers and make sure that this is something that their position in the company can really provide. Maybe this is an Agile process because Agile is all about having those awkward conversations sooner rather than later.

This isn't just a problem in software development. I've been talking it over with Dave Dawes who works with social enterprises in the Health sector and he recognises it as a common problem. In many fields, amidst all the hullabaloo about the need to support entrepreneurship, the need to support successful organisations that are ready for the second wave sometimes gets lost.

No cappuccino required: how to develop functional peer to peer networks for rural creative businesses

One of the key challenges facing those charged with supporting the development and sustainability of rural creative businesses is how to achieve the benefits of the urban creative business clusters in the rural setting? Urban creative clustering provides a range of formal and informal benefits that include access to new business opportunities, the provision of support services, access to networks and collaboration opportunities.

A key quality of these clusters is prolific peer to peer activity. So much important interaction takes place in the pub or coffee shop. The ease at which a marketing and sales transactions can take place at a moments notice over a cappuccino in Hoxton is something that is difficult to reproduce in the rural setting. This is reflected by the fact that a common characteristic of many rural creative businesses is that the individuals involved were once located in urban environments and continue to work with, and invest time in sustaining the relationships they built up during their urban pasts (including periods of study).

One of the benefits provided by these urban peer to peer transactions is the way that the small or micro creative business can enjoy a bolt-on effect in which they can get business development outcomes with no investment made other than half an hour and the cost of the coffee. The cost of achieving the same outcome to the rural creative business can be much higher. It includes investing in constant networking activity just to keep up the level of visibility that often comes for free for businesses within urban clusters. The added time commitment and travel expenses that must be invested for such activity alone should not be under estimated, particularly given the speculative and potentially high risk nature of such activity. In the rural setting these additional costs become prohibitive.

To reduce this increased cost and risk it is essential that rural creative business development and support agencies consider the nature and characteristics of successful and sustained peer to peer interactions, regardless of whether they take place in the rural or urban environment:

1. They are peer to peer collaborations (e.g they do not involve a hired in expert that imparts wisdom and knowledge)
   
2. They are outcome orientated (e.g "lets meet for coffee to discuss a pitch I have been asked to respond to that you may want to come in on")
3. They have a co-dependence nature to them in which one party needs that bolt-on capacity, skills, knowledge or contacts provided by the other party
4. There is a clear business imperative and benefit to both parties underpinning the interaction
   

Therefore if those involved in supporting and developing rural creative business want to go some way towards making up for the lack of peer to peer access common to the urban cluster and reduce the risk factor when considering new models for developing these networks they should treat these 4 characteristics as requirements. If such activity can not achieve collaborative peer to peer relationships that are genuinely co-dependant, outcome orientated and address genuine business need for both parties then they are probably a waste of time and money. There will be a range of different ways that this challenge can be addressed but cappuccino is not required.