It was low productivity as in we didn’t really accomplish anything. Teams couldn’t figure out what to build because it was forbidden for managers to direct them.
Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work, but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to getting anything done across teams.
This wasn’t a case where “productivity” was an abstract metric that wasn’t measuring the right thing. It was just gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was allowed to be empowered to direct things.
Oof, certainly sounds like a miserable train wreck.
These are the sort of ideas that, at best, seem like they should be explored with an isolated R&D approach, or simply left to academics.
And, if they are executed realtime with a companies mainline workforce and somehow succeed, it should be clearly stated and understood that it was—like much "success"—by no small amount of sheer luck (or happenstance via uncontrolled factors, if you prefer), force of will, and patience by the team as a whole, rather than the usual narrative which is the inspired actions of single prescient individual (who will then go on to write a book and give TED Talks about an approach that absolutely cannot be applied anywhere else and does not scale.)
It can be hard or impossible to measure certain things, and just as hard to pick the right measures. But, there are also cases where you can say all reasonable measures are worse in one instance than another. Less new ideas, less happiness, less stuff going out the door, less bug fixes. Especially possible when it’s a time window comparison. This sounds like one of those cases.
Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work, but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to getting anything done across teams.
This wasn’t a case where “productivity” was an abstract metric that wasn’t measuring the right thing. It was just gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was allowed to be empowered to direct things.