THE LEAFLET

July 25 2024

breathless history, slack is not bloat, simple stories

WRITE A BREATHLESS HISTORY

If you’ve built a team or organization from scratch and your team has grown quickly, you will know a lot of history that your newest teammates don’t. Important constraints and tradeoffs, several of your hardest bitten bullets, will be obvious to you and invisible or confusing to your people. You see a landscape embroidered with Chesterton fences - they see an unkempt field riddled with stumbling blocks. 

It may be worth an hour of your time to write a breathless history of your organization and share it with your people. In this document, you’re explaining in your own voice how and why the whole thing started and how and why we got to where we are today. No matter how long your thing has been around, you’re going to have to distill a bunch. Zero in on the critical decisions - they have the most explanatory power.

It might feel beside the point, but you can address the very corporate form of your entity. Are you a 501c3; a B Corp; a google group and nothing more? Why? What did that offer you at the time you chose it or fell into it? What does it mean for the constraints you have now?

-Eric

Read the rest here.

SLACK IS NOT BLOAT

In An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management, Will Larson recommends slack. Not the messaging app - extra capacity. 

Per Larson, rather than aiming for just enough people power to get the job done, we should be looking for more than enough. 

It’s striking to me that Larson is recommending this from the development world, where the premise is rapid, mind-bending, org-chart breaking growth and where speed and efficiency matter as much as anything. 

There’s a realism in Larson’s take - he’s pricing in the maintenance and the resolution of technical and organizational debt, not pretending they aren’t there. He knows some amount of your people’s time will be dedicated to servicing that debt, whether you, romantic leader, besotted with the planning fallacy, want to think so or not. 

With this in mind, he uses “slack” as an indicator of success rather than the signature of bloat. You’re in a good place, arguably the best available place, when your team can a) run its core processes or systems b) address debts from old systems and (this is where the slack comes in) c) cook up new processes or systems. 

You only get to c) if you have enough accomplished people and “enough” usually means at least one more than you need to take care of a) and b) alone. Prospectively, getting your c) person could look like over-hiring. You’re deliberately blowing past the 1:1 ratio of people to widgets. 

That’s slack and Larson says that’s good.

-Eric

Read the rest here.

A SIMPLE STORY MIGHT BE SMARTER

In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt recommends that a leader “replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects.”

Grad student me saw complexity as a virtuous signal - someone who could name all the nuances was smart. All things considered, a smart strategy beats the other strategies, I thought. And then, dangerously, I hugged a false equivalency real tight: a complex strategy (or a strategy that sounds complex, at least) beats other strategies. (Because complex probably means smart, right?)

Many painful losses and dead ends later, I see more wisdom in Rumelt’s take. Strategy can be seen as focus; it can be seen as a massing of resources; it can be seen as leverage. Seeing every pixel in the screen at the same time, the thousands of constituent complexities, is of no use if you can’t name the picture they form and act on what you see. 

If your strategy is hard to explain to someone without a graduate degree in your narrow discipline, you might have a bad strategy. 

-Eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi on terminal illness:

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

Dramatist Samuel Beckett on cures:

You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.

Writer Will Larson on delegating risk:

You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it's best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn't likely to go well, I think it's best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you're almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric