Thanks for posting this. I’ll add it to my collection of “thinking tools.”
These techniques feel like they have the same spirit as some of de Bono’s work, for example, his idea of PO:
PO implies, ’That may be the best way of looking at things or putting the information together. That may even turn out to be the only way. But let us look around for other ways.
The two main functions of PO are first to protect an arrangement of information from judgement and to indicate that it is being used provocatively and second to challenge a particular arrangement of information such as an idea, a concept or a way of putting things.
Some of them also remind me of Gerald Weinberg’s books, but unfortunately I can’t find my notes on them.
I’ve seen this happen too, along with same end result.
It appears that a common failure mode here is that the middle management layer fails to translate the values into system updates. No one updates performance reviews, no one updates quarterly/half goals, etc. So things just continue as they were before.
Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of leadership to fix this. Whether it’s by direct intervention or a huddle with middle management, they must do something.
(My experience as an individual contributor that attempted to change how performance reviews are done to better align with a value like “engineering excellence” tells me it’s impossible to affect this kind of change as an IC. Unless you’re friends with the CEO, which I wasn’t).