micro celebrations

How to improve the organisation through small, manageable positive acknowledgments.

I would like to share with you a small tool that I like to use when I'm working with teams and organisations. I have used it a few times already, and it always leads to positive change in the long run. I like to call this tool "micro celebrations."

"micro celebrations " are a way to introduce change or improve an organisation through positive, direct, and global feedback or acknowledgement of desired behaviour or action in a nonobtrusive way.

Wait, is this something that Staff+ should do?

IC in the organisation is a person who should seek a way to improve what's not working. We are not responsible for the marketing department or procurement; our interest is in the engineering part of the organisation. We are looking holistically at the process of creating, building, delivering and then observing our products, and our responsibility is to find a way to improve them. We can do this through many means: better tech stack, better observability, and a better understanding of our end users and how they use our system. One of the most important parts of the product, our cogs, is engineering culture, engineering maturity, and how skillful our teams are. We should be looking at a way to mentor, upskill, and improve this part of the organisation as much as possible. So yes, introducing change or improving the organisation is part of our responsibilities. Will this be our main responsibility or something we do "on a side"? It depends on our context.

Leading a change or improvement is in the DNA of IC. And to be honest, it’s a part of everyone’s job from Junior, through mid to technical fellow. Improvement/change does not need to come from the top, it might be started from the bottom and bubble up.

Why celebrations?

Some changes/improvements we want to introduce are so massive that we can't expect the organisation to follow just by saying it aloud. We need to slowly build the speed of change/improvement by working on small, measurable, easy, achievable actions that, once they are built on each other, will let us build momentum when change happens by itself.

These small steps, actions or behaviours, are things that we should celebrate and promote as desired state. This celebration has a few outcomes:

• it presents a working example of improvement/change so others can learn from it

• it shows that there are others who are doing similar things, or I'm not alone

• it builds "peer pressure" and "social proof", causing that others will follow

• it builds the morale of the person/team that we acknowledge

So what is this celebration? Are there any examples?

It's an acknowledgement, an action on our side that promotes positive behaviour by thanking the person/team directly for the thing they did and how they did it, and also a way to share this inside our organisation as an example to follow.

Like with kids, we enforce good actions through rooting, smiles, celebration, hugs, etc. (you did your first step!!! WOW!!!). These micro celebrations are exactly the same thing:

• That description of PR is perfect; it provides context and reason for a change. Good work, Tom!

• Those 5 WHYs are really well done; it was a good idea to add them to the document, Matt! It provides a better context of why we are doing it.

• It's nice to see that code cleanup you did, Anna, on the side of your PR; it makes our code cleaner; thanks!

These celebrations are not about big things. People tend to remember to write "congratulations" on a good project but forget to congratulate others on small desired behaviours. These celebrations are here to surface them and, as described in Why, build social pressure and also upskill others.

Moreover, celebration is direct, and it explains what we celebrate and why - just saying good job is not good enough, tell why and put that into bigger context.

How can we acknowledge this behaviour so it will be visible?

That's a good question, I used three means to know:

• email, in one organisation, I was sending emails to everyone in the engineering organisation every week with information about what's going on, and in them, I was including this celebration naming people and also linking to examples

• teams/slack channel, where I was doing the same as with email, but on a communication tool that was used

• through team/org meetings like townhall etc

Also, I used direct communication to thank the team/person who did a good job.

Leonardo DiCaprio

So, a way to share this depends heavily on your organisation and your communication channel. It will work differently in remote-only teams vs office/hybrid teams. In the office, you can spread the celebration in the kitchen, through chatting or even through posters. There are limitless possibilities; you just need to find one that will work for you - by finding I mean trying and seeing if it works :)

So should I use them everywhere and always?

No! It is a tool, and a tool has a purpose. It is one that is used to promote positive change when it is not yet implemented. For instance, improving PR descriptions might have a lot of small celebrations in the beginning, but once everyone is doing this, let's move on with celebrations into something else. If we congratulate our 18-year-old kid that he did a step, we will not listen to us, and these celebrations will lose their power.

Hence, we should use it as a means of improvement, and once improvement is in place, we should stop. We might, however, from time to time remind people what it means to have a good PR description or anything else that previously we were celebrating.

Ok, so why does this work?

This came to me quite late as a retrospective. I've been using this tool a few times already and knew it was working, but I haven't connected the dots since recently. Did you hear of the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard? I read it a long time ago and forgot about it till recently when I was reading different books by the same authors. It introduces the concept of Elephant, Driver and Path. In short, to make a change, we need to Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path. Without this, change or improvement will be hard and might not happen.

When we Direct the Rider, we learn how others do the things that we want to improve. We take the ingredients of that, add our context, and split the big change into small, more achievable steps (for instance, for improving engineering culture, we can promote behaviour that does something actively), and we pass that as a direction for our rider.

Once we know where we are going, we need to keep our Elephant Motivated. This usually means finding a way to stay pumped by sharing who is improving and why so people can feel the impact.

Lastly, we Shape the Path by creating an environment in which these positive actions can happen and that engages others through peer pressure, social proof, mentoring, etc.

If you look at how micro celebrations work, they are perfectly suited for directing the rider, motivating the elephant, and shaping the path. This is probably why they work so well.

Summary

micro celebrations is a tool that, if used wisely, can help produce an improvement or a change when we think it's hard and not possible. Improvement and change will not happen fast; it will take time, and once we are moving in the right direction, introducing another small improvement will be faster, and then another faster and faster. Through small steps, repetition, and positive feedback and acknowledgement, we can mature our engineering culture without dropping a sweat.