managing in/with/around/by chaos:a mozilla story

John Lilly, CEOMozilla

Business today is: complex, messy, multi-lingual, continuous (24x7), rapidly changing...

but also: incredibly leveraged, world-impacting, full of learning, empowering, fun...

the main question I consider:

how do we operate most effectively today?

Here’s where I start:

“Nobody knows anything.”William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell?

(also the screenwriter for The Princess Bride)

Outline for Today

• Mozilla Background

• How We Work

• How We Communicate

• How We Argue

• How We Compete

• Wrap-up

Mozilla Background

Mozilla’s mission is to promote choice and

innovation on the Internet.

Mozilla is...

A global open source software project with thousands of contributors

Approaching 200 Million users

The maker of the Firefox Web browser

Mozilla Background

• Mozilla Foundation started in July 2003, as a spinoff from AOL

• An open source project started as way to compete with Microsoft’s overwhelming resource advantage

• Firefox launched in November 2004 10 Million downloads in first month

• Mozilla Corporation started in July 2005 as a wholly owned subsidiary

• Revenue from search relationships in the $50M+ range

• Now a collection of companies worldwide supporting the Mozilla Mission

10

853

10

5

5

> 170 people6 offices

~20 total locations6 organizationsWorldwide Employees

Mozilla Organizational Complexity is High

• 170+ people servicing 180M+ users

• Doubled in size each year for last 3 years

• 6 different legal organizations (MoFo, MoCo, MozEU, MZ DK, MozJP, MozChina)

• Products in more than 50 languages

That’s great...but why should you care??

one reason: 100 people can take on Microsoft...

Worldwide Firefox Market Share (as of march 2008)

Mozilla takes participatory production to extremes...

How We Work

Mozilla is a Chaordic System

• Chaord: any self-organizing, adaptive, nonlinear, complex community or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos.

• Term coined by Dee Hock, creator of Visa

• Chaordic systems exhibit high degrees of chaos, but generally organized into a higher level type of order

• They tend to be robust, failure-tolerant, and creative

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg

The Internet: A Chaordic System

The Blogosphere: Another Chaordic System

source: benfry.com

Emergent Examples

Mozilla as Chaord

• Decision making happens at the edges of the organization

• And many times, completely outside the “official” organization

• But we’re structured in the way that we communicate & handle disputes

• The result is a very flexible, highly decentralized organization that’s difficult to compete against

• (Alternative model: Starfish & Spider)

• Thinking like this helps me think about how to get things done...

How We Communicate

Communication

• In a chaordic organization, communication is key to insight & collaboration

• People need to be able to make decisions together based on a common view (understanding?) of underlying data

• The tools need to be useful for whoever is involved in any collaboration, regardless of who they report to, who they’re paid by, or where they live

• People will find ways to communicate, no matter what

• The key is figuring out how to make the broadest possible use of the communications that do occur, whether or not they’re “sanctioned”

Wikis

• Open, editable (tracked) documents everywhere practical (internal & external)

Blogs

• Real time communications with employees, contributors, customers, press, fans

• We use official blogs, personal blogs, community blogs, internal blogs

• Each has different reach, different meaning to audiences (but they sometimes get misinterpreted)

OPBs (Other People’s Blogs)

• Sometimes the best conversations happen on blogs you have nothing to do with

• Empowering others means that you don’t have to do everything

• Means you need to track the whole web more or less all the time (Technorati or Google Blog Search)

Open Newsgroups & IRC

• As much of our real-time discussion as possible is out in the open

• Not just read-only, but also interactive

• Sometimes leads to complicated discussions because not everyone has context & history

Videos, video-conferencing, and lots of phone calls

• Standing phone conferences

• Regular staff meetings videoed and minutes written

• Air Mozilla video blog

But nothing beats face-to-face

• Lots of trips to meet people where they live

• Frequent all-hands meetings (approx 4 times a year)

• Annual gatherings that include contributors who don’t work for Mozilla (Firefox Summit)

• These interactions provide the human relationship foundation for much of our work

And tons of others...

• Google docs & spreadsheets

• IM is used constantly

• Lots of Tweets!

• Skype, iChat AV

• E-mail (of course)

• Bugzilla (our #1 collaboration technique)

Open doesn’t mean democracy!(more on that next...)

How We Argue

Decision-making is messy

• In an open organization, decision making can be incredibly messy

• Conflict can be constructive or destructive(best authority on constructive conflict: Andy Grove)

• Actively managing the way that decisions happen is crucial

• An example: open source coding & design

Embracing the chaos...

“I love tabs!”

“Everyone uses tags,not bookmarks.”

“My mom doesn’tunderstand tabs.”

“OpenID is the future!”

“What’s with thedirty house?”

“Nobody uses the ‘Go’ button.”

“There should bea preference setting.” “Add support for

BitTorrent.”

“Fitts’ says biggerbuttons are better.”

“Add support forOgg Vorbis.”

“That’s great!”

“That’s awful”

“The profile managershould be redesigned.”

“Closebuttons are better atthe end of the tabstrip.”

“The URL bar shouldbe removed.”

ChaosAnyone can propose a change

ChaosAnyone can comment on a proposal for a change

ChaosAnyone can submit a change to the code

Chaos

camps are formed quickly

Chaos

easier to comment than to do

how do we make it work?

Ordereducate

Orderidentify and elevate smart contributors

OrderKey: Not everyone can approve a change

Provide a path of least resistanceto channel the input to where you want it

Create a clear path for contributors

Create small teams with responsibilityto specific areas of interest

Elevate discussions with dataand research whenever possible

Always bias towards openness in decision-making...

...but remember that it is not a democracy!

The Gorilla in the Room

The Situation 5 Years Ago

IE6: 95%+

The Situation Today (300% more circular icons!)

72%

7%

20%

1%?

choice & innovation FTW!

How can Mozilla compete?

• Under-capitalized

• Under-resourced

• Under-branded (?)

Mozilla must be Mozilla

communitycontinue to allow leadership & decision-making from 1000s of contributors

missionwe’re just here to make the web betterno other agendabut must be broader than just the browser

participation & customizationstrength of Firefox is that even end users can participate & customize

Wrap-up

Things I’ve Learned from Mozilla

• Ignore the chain of command (mostly)

• Get agreement in basic operating principles and values

• Over-rotate towards communication so that everyone has the same data

• Encourage transparency of decision making

• But avoid democracy/consensus expectation setting

• Lead, but don’t command

• Take unexpected efficiencies where you find them

More things to read...

Dee Hock on chaordic systems: http://web.archive.org/web/20010405020550/http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm

Inc. Magazine profile on Mitchell & our management stylehttp://www.inc.com/magazine/20070201/features-firefox.html

Great for thinking about distributed organizations

Great for thinking about leading with soft & hard power

My recent thinking:organizationsare miscellaneous

questions, comments, discussion

Thank you

lilly@mozilla.com

thanks & apologies to:Mike Beltzner

Paul KimChris Beard