Libertarian Enterprise Governance

Be Good

There is freedom and peace and pride in being truly good at something.

Not to seem good.

Not to check off the boxes of good.

But to actually be good.

Everyone should have the freedom to be actually good.

Establishing governance philosophy in an enterprise is a tricky combination of “how much do we trust our people?” and “okay, but how much do we actually trust our people?” The fact is, people are going to screw up. Some of them might deliberately try to screw something up, but mostly they’ll just make mistakes. If the organization can’t handle mistakes, that’s a problem with the adaptability and flexibility of the organization, not with its people. This means that people’s potential mistakes are not a reason to default to not trusting them.

What People Want

Most people really just want to be good – even great – at their jobs. They need to know the goal, and the boundaries around how to get there, such as:

• What is definitely wrong?
• What is definitely right?
• Where do I get to choose?
• What are the consequences if I do any of those badly?

The more room you give someone to choose, to determine the right path to a goal, the more they’ll surprise you with the things they see that you…don’t. That’s one of the most powerful elements of team work – different people see different solutions to problems, and in an organization that feels psychologically safe enough to propose those solutions, that combination can lead to greatness.

The more room you give someone to choose their own path, they more they’ll surprise you with what they see that you don’t.

There are people out there who are either incompetent or who seek to deliberately harm, and the more room you give this kind of person to choose, the more clearly you can see exactly who they are – and the more obvious it becomes that they are damaging.

In almost all cases, team members should be given enough information to make decisions for themselves. As fellow adults, we should accept their decision about how to best do their job – because chances are good that they actually know best how to execute the enterprise’s goals.

Governance IS and is NOT…

Governance should start with “what will make it easy for our people to keep the enterprise safe?” The answer to this question should be the clearest, barest minimum to ensure that safety.

Some companies do this via one policy – something like, “act in the company’s best interest.”

…and some companies (try to) make rules for everything anyone could possibly do, and the rules are something like, “run a specific, awful-to-use bug checker on every source file every Tuesday at 9:17AM.”

Other companies provide more of a framework for good judgment, or guidelines, like, “sensitive customer information should be secured.”

It’s a little bit Goldilocks and the Three Bears, “too vague,” “too specific,” and “just right.” As in most other things, there’s a balance – and that balance will vary from organization to organization. Figuring this out is more art than science, and it requires adaptability and the willingness to accept mistakes – both from the people in the organization and from the people trying to set up governance. 

Libertarian Governance: because you can only care about so much

Libertarianism: an extreme laissez-faire political philosophy advocating only minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens.

We recommend as a general plan with governance Libertarian Governance: give people lots of freedom, and only apply governance/control to very specific, very limited things. Ideally, governance should only be in areas where a team could do damage to other people or teams. The best IT examples are areas of Data Security (to protect the customers of the business) and resource (e.g. CPU) constraint (to protect all systems competing for those resources).

How to Implement Libertarian Governance, in 5 Not-So-Easy Steps

Why?

Explain why people should do a thing. Clearly. Publicly. Repeatedly. Tell people why it matters. This should never be “because I said so.” If you can’t explain why something that requires resources needs to be done, don’t ask people to do it. This is a vital part of governance and also leadership.

Clarity is Success

Be clear in your expectations. Tell people, honestly and directly, what you expect them to do, and in what time frame. Also explain the consequences of not doing it, and again be honest about those consequences – even if the truth is something like, “eh. We’ll spot check when we remember.” 

Course Correct

Embrace course-correction. People may not live up to the expectations that are set. If they don’t, it needs to be addressed and not ignored – again, clearly, honestly, and directly. Embrace these conversations, they’re a way to give some awesome permission and they help people grow and improve. These conversations can also highlight issues in the governance philosophy – things that are too specific, or have been thus far explained badly.

Make it Easy

Automate governance when you can. When it can’t be automated, use the tools that your people will embrace. Ask them what tools they’d want to use to solve the problem. This makes it easy on you, and on them. It also makes both the governance philosophy and the people setting it popular with the people who really just wanted to do a good job as easily as possible anyway.

For example, developers love OpenShift and Jenkins Pipelines for self-service and increased speed-to-market, and they love SonarQube (post about this coming soon!) for making the process of fixing bugs and writing unit tests enjoyable.

Swag

This could also be called something like “reward compliance,” but that sounds a little bit Borg. For the people who do it right, give them a highly visible, coveted reward. Every nerd we know loves laptop stickers, but there’s always an acknowledged badge of honor, in every culture.

Be Good

People want to be truly good at what they do for 40-ish hours a week, and they (and you!) don’t want to waste a bunch of time and head space worrying about governance. General guidelines focused on eliminating people’s ability to hurt each other or their customers give people both the right amount of rules and also enough freedom to still execute as they see fit.