A Software Scenius

Creating a scene for the emergence of collective genius

Last year I was asked to write an article for a non-technical audience at The Business Improvement Network in the UK. I wrote about Brian Eno’s ‘Scenius’, which I see as a useful frame for thinking about the way that the emergence of collective intelligence depends upon the environmental conditions and people’s interactions. I’m republishing the article here today, with a few small changes to bring it up to date.

Brian Eno’s ‘Scenius’

Brian Eno, the unconventional musician and pioneer producer involved with Roxy Music, Talking Heads, U2 and his own ambient works, recognises the role one’s cultural surroundings play in providing a substrate for the emergence of genius. He asserts that the geniuses of art history such as Picasso, Rembrandt, and Shostakovich all lived in and drew from very active flourishing cultural scenes. He suggests that genius doesn't emerge within an individual unless they are fed by a nourishing scene. So Eno combines Scene and Genius to give us the idea of a ‘Scenius’, the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene, or the communal form of the concept of genius.

Brian Eno

Evidence of the fertile nature of a Scenius is everywhere in the arts, science, and business. From the Agoras, Stoas, Academies, and Symposiums within the intellectual scene of Ancient Greek Culture from which emerged the insights of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle - through to the cultural vibe of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the many musical scenes that birthed genius in Delta Blues, New Orleans Jazz, Nashville Country, Memphis Soul, Detroit Motown, Merseybeat, Jamaican Reggae, Berlin Electronic Music Scene, Seattle Grunge, Britpop, and East/West Coast Rap. In business, we see the technical innovation surrounding the Silicon Valley scene and the rivalries between Ferrari and Lamborghini that emerged from the Motor Valley scene in Northern Italy. The Scenius catalyses the emergence of genius through the energy, the competition, the support networks, and the inspiration and excitement of the prevailing culture.

The mischaracterisation of software engineers

Hollywood often depicts the software engineer as the loner genius misfit archetype. The hyper-rational, socially inadequate, sunlight-deprived obsessive whose superior coding skills and frenetic typing speed give them an air of dominant guardianship over their complex computer systems and the mere mortals that depend upon them. In our incessant transformation from the analogue world to the digital promised land the Software Engineer has ultimate control. But as with all depictions in the movies, this is a gross mischaracterisation. From my experience of working with software engineers across many different teams, I’ve found few that conform to the hacker stereotype in films, and as people, they can be the most humble, thoughtful, self-aware and ethical souls you could ever meet.

Modern software development is a team sport. Collaboration is normalised with philosophies such as Agile, and the loner engineer as the gatekeeper of a single system is an anti-pattern, to use an engineering term, which would signify a risk to the business due to creating an intolerably low ‘bus factor’ - another engineering term relating to the number of people who could be hit by a bus before we are left without anyone who knows how the system works. The genius software engineer certainly wows us with their technical wizardry as they work their digital sorcery, but this only comes through years of experience in a fertile culture of learning, and they must also have an accompanying social genius in their armoury as such a large part of their value is in mentoring, partnering, collaborating, and articulating their work to others.

The value of a fertile environment

I’ve worked in software engineering environments that have been fairly fertile, convivial scenes with a high degree of trust, autonomy and dependability between people, where we feel safe to innovate and learn from mistakes as we seek continual improvement. I’ve also worked in environments that feel sterile, where engineer apathy prevails, where people can’t take risks without fearing blame, and where they don’t feel they can take ownership of issues. The resulting software from an infertile culture is overly complex, delivered late, costly to maintain, and fails to engender a sense of pride in its creators.

Psychologist Kurt Lewin gives us a formula which appeals to the algorithmic interests of engineers:

B = f(P,E)

Where Behaviour is a function of the Person and their Environment. The psychology of the person and the sociology of their environment. Lewin’s formula has appeared in a number of our Human-Centric Engineering, but it bears repeating as it is so often overlooked. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, father of the Total Quality movement reinforces this thinking by stating: 

“The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 to 95 per cent of performance.” - Deming

With our tendency to focus on individual performance, I would argue that most of us overlook the hidden influence of the prevailing cultural environment.

The emergent ‘tacit knowing’ of culture

Culture is hard to grasp, and defies easy measurement, because it is a ‘tacit knowing’, to borrow from Michael Polanyi, we intuitively know if we are immersed in a good culture by how we feel in our participation with others. Culture is intersubjective. Genius engineers recognise that they are part of the system and that software is crafted and delivered not through servers but through relationships with others. In my management and consulting roles, I know I can’t impose culture, but I do try wherever possible to remind engineers that we co-create our relationships through our behaviours and therefore co-create the system. We can model good (or bad) behaviours and that becomes contagious. We can collectively foster the conditions for the emergence of our own micro-Scenius which in turn will re-enforce our collective genius, promoting our sense of engagement with our work. We are the system and we have more individual influence than we realise.

Employee engagement

Source: State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report by Gallup

According to the State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report by Gallup, employee engagement has reached dizzying heights of 23%. In the UK it is down one per cent from 2023 a depressing 10% within a European average of 13%. Only one in ten people in the UK engaged in their work is an indictment of a sterile culture, a non-Scenius. The cost of disengaged workers is huge. Gallup claims that actively disengaged employees and low engagement cost the global economy $8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP.

It’s worth noting that the Gallup reports are criticised by some observers, notably as Gallup offers consulting services related to employee engagement, some critics suggest there may be a potential conflict of interest in how the data is presented and interpreted.

Source: State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report by Gallup

A fertile engineering culture with engaged engineers brings hard benefits. As a hiring manager, it is much less costly to add to our collective genius when we can talk honestly with candidates about working in a strong culture. Attrition rates are lower as people can grow within the culture, retaining knowledge and generating a higher bus factor. A high degree of trust means that engineers can fearlessly expose reality, calling out risks and failures rather than letting them fester, producing better quality software that is more cost-effective to maintain in the long run.

We don’t create good cultures by injecting lovely-sounding company values into our corporate literature, we create human-centric cultures by tending to human needs - people have a fundamental need to be seen, heard, and understood, as well as the need for belonging and contribution. Company executives have the same fundamental needs as the software developers stoking the digital furnaces in the engine room. I believe that executives sincerely want their people to be part of a thriving culture, but we all get trapped in the thinking and the language of the industrial age - inputs, outputs, productivity, efficiency, and other ‘work jargon’, all caught up in the cult of measurement - when we might benefit more from the language of the horticultural era, the language of planting seeds in a fertile ecosystem, knowing that the hard benefits of innovation, operational efficiency, and engineer productivity will ensue with sufficient nourishment and care. Culture defies easy measurement of industrial machine-like thinking, only qualitative surveys in the style of the methodology of the Gallup polls will yield insights, but we have to be careful about the conclusions drawn, I’ve seen the results of culture-based surveys weaponised against the employees when executives didn’t like the results.

We have our own qualitative survey-based approach to understanding engineering culture at Human-Centric Engineering - see our Engineering Culture Index. We use this to gain developer insight into their subjective experience of work. If we are asked to delve deeper we will follow up the survey with in depth interviews with the participants to produce an anonymised report which is then shared with everyone in a workshop format. We find that this approach helps to drive the right conversations to highlight actionable ways to improve people’s experiences of their engineering culture, to help create a Scenius for software engineering.

Culture is homeless because it is emergent

Culture is currently ‘homeless’ in organisations, no one knows who is responsible for it. Who do you sell to if you are an external provider of services to help foster the conditions for a strong culture? Do you use the language of the industrialist or the horticulturist? Often, ‘culture’ gets kicked into HR as a people or resourcing problem. I would argue that it is actually our combined responsibility to nurture and foster a cultural Scenius through our own behaviours, principles and the quality of the relationships we create. This can only be done by acknowledging our humanity, the good parts and the bad parts, and having an evolving conversation about a shared ideal for thriving company cultures which bring out the best in our humanity.

We spend much of our waking lives in work, we have an ethical obligation to one another to not make it miserable and to encourage a Scenius in which we all can thrive.