johnmaconline

What role do consequences serve? Do they serve any?

What if the implementation of the playground eliminates any consequence of falling?
What if the implementation of the economic system eliminates any consequence of repression?
What if the implementation of the financial system eliminates any consequence of doing stupid things?
What if the implementation of the legal system eliminates any consequence of the transgression of the law?
What if the implementation of the social system eliminates any consequence of poor choices?
What if the implementation of the social system eliminates any consequence of inequality?

The balance between what should and shouldn’t have consequences and what those consequences should be is where the rubber meets the road. 

It matters quite a lot who’s in the room.

How you speak. How you see yourself. What your role is. What the others’ roles are. What do they care about. What terminology you use. Which story you tell.

If you’re talking to the engineering team, tell them how the stuff they’re making matters to the company and the customers.
If you’re talking to the financial team, tell them how the money they’re saving matters to the company and the investors.
If you’re talking to the marketing and sales team, tell them how gaining customers matters to the company and their own bank accounts.
If you’re talking to the admin team, tell them how their day-to-day effort matters to the workers and the leadership.
If you’re talking to the investors, tell them how their investment matters to the world and the inevitable success that follows.

All the same message wrapped up in a myriad of stories.

Always know who’s in the room.

Do they becken you or do they torture you?

It might be a physical piece of paper or the just-opened “Document1” file in Word. Maybe it’s the “untitled” project in GarageBand or the squarish vehicle that’s been sitting under a tarp in your backyard for 20 years. It could be the empty space or the old, worn-out couch in the corner of your basement. It may be the “Live Video” button on the “Create post” screen. It might be the scraggy patch of grass and weeds between the patio and the garage.

Whatever your blank page and whether it’s beckoning or torturing you, it’s time to start. Add one line, or one beat. Remove the cover. Charge up the drill and uncover the saw. Grab your shovel and tiller.

We don’t leave blank pages around for nothing.

Principles.

Everyone says they have them. Some like to shout about why theirs are the right ones, while others argue with only themselves.

But watch what they do.

I’ve spent a career making things for other people to use. The biggest takeaway I have is that people generally do the easy thing. Because we can’t always do the hard thing. Sometimes we need to just do the easy thing. Even if it goes against our principles.

So, if you’re a maker, a builder, or a creator of useful things, make the right thing to do the easy thing to do.

Adding manpower to a late (software) project makes it later.

As people get promoted into increasingly higher positions within an organization, they start to lose their minds. Like they’ve never been the person in the trenches and have never experienced or understood the issues at that ground level. For example, throwing more people at the problem.

If two are good, eight are better. The Costco principle. 

But if you’re doing the work, you know two things:

1. If you’re already late, adding more responsibilities to your plate, such as bringing people up to speed, communicating with more people, and herding more cats, slows you down. 
2. You can’t make a baby in one month with nine women. Some things take the time they take based on physics, biology, God, or whatever. 

Every team project has an academically correct amount of people performing the correct roles and tasks. Each person working at capacity and contributing exactly what is needed from them. 

No team project in history has ever experienced this.

However, good leadership can approach it. Good leaders can assess the state of the crew, fix priorities, and help grease the skids. Good leaders are in tune with the work to be done and the team itself. Then, they can figure out if and where to add manpower.

Thwarting Brooke’s Law takes awareness, communication between leadership and the team, and the willingness to admit that maybe it’s gonna take what it’s gonna take. 

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

“Murphy’s Law” originated in the late 1940s at Edwards Air Force Base. Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was an engineer working on an experiment designed to determine how much sudden deceleration a person could withstand in a crash. Murphy had a problem. Specifically, he had a team competence problem. A technician had wired the experiment incorrectly, consequently leading to a failure to obtain the crucial data during the test. Exasperated, he exclaimed something close to the law we now know and use frequently.

Then it got legs because it resonates with all of us. You already know this one. You’ve seen it in your life and probably cited it, usually in a moment of frustration or a pessimistic prediction of the future.

However, what if, at its core, it’s really a call to optimism?

Murphy’s Law encourages us to plan ahead, be resilient and flexible, understand risks, and innovate on solutions. It serves as a reminder not just of the inevitability of problems, but of our capacity to anticipate, adapt to, and overcome them.

Murphy’s Law is your friend.

The cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships that one can maintain is around 150. 

Kevin Kelly wrote a famous blog post about “1000 True Fans.” If you’re someone who makes things, or making things happen, you should read this.

He argues that if you can cultivate 1000 true fans of whatever it is you’re making or doing, you have a sustainable business. You can bypass the traditional channels that require someone or some group to select you for success, such as record labels, book publishers, media publishers, HR departments in corporations, etc. 

But what about the subgroup of 150 people inside that group of 1000 true fans? Your inner circle. 

What if every day you woke up and nurtured a true and meaningful relationship with one or a few of those 150 people. Not 150 every day. Just a few. Over the course of the year, you’ve touched them all. 

Now, what if each person on this planet did the same.

What kind of a world would we live in if each and every one of us cared about, nurtured, and built a relationship with our 150?

The attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse through unintended consequences. 

Economic theory states that you usually get what you incentivize properly. This one is closely related to Goodhart’s Law. 

Colonial India had a live cobra problem. So, the government offered a reward for every dead cobra. This worked. Eventually, there are very few live cobras. 

But now, the people making money from the incentive had a dead cobra problem. So, the people started breeding cobras just to kill them. This worked.

But then the government caught wind of the scam and eliminated the reward. So, the breeders just released all the captive snakes back into the wild.

And once again, colonial India had a live cobra problem.

Removing older, more polluting vehicles from the road can increase overall emissions due to the environmental cost of manufacturing new vehicles.

Using antibiotics to promote livestock growth can lead to the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Pay-as-you-throw schemes to encourage recycling and reduce waste can increase illegal dumping.

Traffic congestion taxes to reduce center city traffic can lead to grid-lock in neighborhoods just outside the fee zone.

Solutions to multi-variable and complex problems require rigorous analysis, experimentation, and assessment of consequences and reactions to incentive schemes. Reassessment of data. Adjustments over time. Willingness to change directions. Admission of false starts. Unbiased rethinking. Empathy and kindness. Forgiveness. 

What doesn’t work is soundbite-worthy, toggle-switch, single-variable, fist-pumping slogans. 

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

One of my friends and I have a funny little tension around the scheduling of software development work. We call it the 3X fudge factor. I look at the work he’s to do and I come up with my estimate of how long it should take him. I tell him, and then he immediately multiplies by three. If I say it should take a week, he says it’ll be three weeks.

It works in reverse also. If he gives me an estimate of three days, I immediately translate that as one day.

Who’s right? Well, we both are. Kind of.

I’m right if he’s totally focused, nobody gets in his way, and nothing goes wrong—the best-case scenario. But when does that happen? Never. So, his 3X estimate usually turns out to be closer to right and sometimes even aggressive, as the second clause of Hofstadter’s Law kicks in.

But you gotta know the best-case scenario to know how much Hofstadter’s Law will effect the final outcome. The longer the best-case, the more effect. Plus, if we need him to get it done ASAP, I can use my position to create the best possible environment by reassigning responsibilities, swatting flies, and giving him every possibility to remain focused.

One of the key leadership attributes is knowing how and when to apply Hofstadter’s Law.

Adding extra capacity sometimes leads to worse overall performance.

“More is better.”
“If I just had more money.”
“That’s easy for you, you have more money/time/land/etc.”

We often conflate abundance with advantage. It can be. But it isn’t automatically.

a) Don’t let them tell you why you can’t, what you can’t, or how amazing you can’t be with what you have.
b) Don’t tell yourself why you can’t, what you can’t, or how amazing you can’t be with what you have.