I often find most people are really bad at taking a step back and thinking freely about the problem at hand — especially if they are stressed out. And they (we) are stressed out all the time, because apparently it is considered good managment to not consider what happens when you put pressure on people.
I tend to say: "You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong."
If you are a manager and you want your people to deliver the most innovative, creative, best solution you have to lift stress of them and that also means freeing them of their daily duties and giving them the space to think openly about solutions. If your shop will collapse when you relive the best people of their daily duties for a week that means you shop is badly managed.
counterpoint: As a new-ish manager - who despite its impact on my pay would like to live in a world without middle managers - it's been my unfortunate experience that a lot of people don't work as well when there's zero pressure. The right kind of incentives would likely provide a sense of motivation without urgency, but those aren't in the power of most managers to create.
I believe there are two things to disentangle here:
1. What problem are you using pressure to sweep under the rug? I.e. why are your colleagues disengaged by default? Most people happily do things they find important. Have you hired the wrong people who don't share your values or are you asking unimportant things of them?
2. When you say people work well under a little pressure, do you mean they produce more... things during a given time interval, or that the long-term quality of their work actually improves?
I would argue that this is because you have the wrong people on the bus. I know that may not be your choice as a manager (you may be stuck with what you have), but make sure you are not misunderstanding the problem.
Good, 10x people don’t need pressure to perform. They are self-driven. Unfortunately, most places don’t optimize for the right people on the bus, only someone that can do what they are told. A team or organization populated with self-driven people with good judgement is a force to be reckoned with. A team without these types of people needs to be managed.
How do you find 10x people? Optimize for attitude, not skill set or intelligence.
I don't personally need a lot of pressure to keep me focused on delivering business value...but I think that's how I ended up managing people who do. Finding that "motivation without urgency" balance is both difficult and necessary.
> The right kind of incentives would likely provide a sense of motivation without urgency, but those aren't in the power of most managers to create.
So whose power is it, then? There are two ways to tackle this issue: Apply pressure to the ones below you, or buckle up and take a step upwards. One is easier then the other.
While this sounds legit in isolation, it's worth noting that it's not always managers who put pressure, but rather the circumstances. We live in a competitive world, and success depends on how fast we can deliver a product to the market. It's easy to put all the responsibility on managers, but this is only part of the picture.
I mean, you can create a better product by taking more time, and the whole company still dies because you're too late. This is where the stress comes from; managers only translate it.
The company dies anyway, so that argument is moot.
The solution lies somewhere else. For instance, actually taking the pressure off with resources - e.g. the manager can get their status reports by actually understanding the project by short one-on-one interviews and attending design meetings. Instead of asking everyone to come to a staff meeting, or send their status reports and jamming them into one aggregated email and forwarding that as their own work and pretending they did something.
A good manager is among other things a "shit umbrella". If a manager thinks they're doing a good job by 'translating' external factors into pressuring the team to work harder, faster, they're not.
Management as I see it has to do with managing the resources of a company just in the right way. That means there are many wrong ways and few right ways. So instead of providing to few resources for a task you could of course also mismanage into the other direction and have a ton of people doing nothing.
That is not the point.
Typical organizations very often have both at the same time, but in different places. (Bad) managment sometimes has a hard time telling the two apart, but in my experience they are more afraid of allocating too many resources ("wasting resources") than of allocating too little, because the cost of allocating too much is obvious to their superiors, while the costs of allocating too little is much more hidden, delayed and harder to correlate.
If that really good employee quits after three years of resource-starvation, the causal connection to mismanagment might not be drawn, the manager might even be applauded how well they managed the resources. The friction that comes with replacing that person, however, is real.
There are organizations that burn through employees like it is nothing, and they think that amount of turnover and the waste of resources and time that it brings is normal.
They were likely an IC at some point and now have to answer to higher up power who are under more acute PnL stress hence the pressure flows down to them.
The trick with manager is to release some of that pressure as it goes down to their directs, this might mean taking it head on directly and shielding directs from it or just re-directing it back up the chain.
What if your greatest strength is moving fast while making less mistakes than others, how do you identify when slowing down is valuable? Isn't the point of moving slow just to train yourself to go fast?
I want to agree with sentiments like this because they serve my interests, and maybe I’m just lazy, but with loose deadlines and minimal pressure I’m just going to be messing around and not “thinking openly about solutions”
The answer can be both. There are times when deadlines are fixed, the path is known, and everyone just needs to march in the same direction. There are other times when a company faces an existential threat from a new technology. This is when having your best minds “messing around” can be hugely beneficial. For example, pivoting your photograph company to a makeup company is not intuitive to me, and is an idea that could have come from someone screwing around in a lab. It is also a tome of huge pressure, and managing that dichotomy is what good managers do
I think you are taking my point to the extreme here. I did not say loose deadlines and minimal pressure. I argued against spreading your employees too thin. That doesn't imply automatically that I advocate for a complete laissez-faire approach to managing your employees (although with the right people, in the right situation this can work very well).
What I argue for is that during normal, daily, non-emergency work hours your employees should not run at or over capacity but with a headroom. And if you want them to solve a long-standing, complex problem and you want them to solve it well, you have to give them the resources (e.g. time, mindspace) to do just that. Sometimes this just means: "Steve, on Fridays you don't have to answer any emails and phone calls, or do any other thing, just focus on finding a good solution to $PROBLEM").
In my experience that yields better solutions and doesn't take much longer (quite often the opposite).
You are not going to innovate while you are being shot at. There is a productive amount of stress and there is a destructive amount of stress. I argued against the latter.
> You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong."
One of the benefits of questions that this article did not seem to cover is that it helps one avoid solutionising. "How can we help our users feel less frustrated with our service?" inherently gives you more alternative courses of action than "we gotta optimise page load time of the checkout function".
Sometimes the question leads to the first solution that came to mind, but the technique is at its most valuable when it does not. Maybe the checkout page load time isn't as bad as the dark patterns and getting rid of them improves user flow more at a lower cost than rewriting a critical component.
Interesting. I had only heard this in the context of Apple before and not Amazon. There is a clip from a Steve Jobs video describing how you need to work backwards from the end user experience and then figure out the technology
"the classic Amazon-popularised method of working backwards from the user benefit."
They do not implement that for everything, though. My last order done with a mobile browser, I could not checkout my order, without also choosing amazon prime. I had to activate "desktop mode" that it let me proceed. And I am pretty sure that is intentional to nag more users into prime.
IME avoiding solutionising very often leads to a load of abstract waffle containing nothing implementable. I agree that you need to solve the right problem, but "let's not solutionise" isn't a reliable way to make sure that happens
Do evil brainstorming. Instead of imagining solutions to the problem try to imagine ways how you can make the problem worse. Mischievousness unlocks creative potential and frees people from fear that some versions of those ideas will be implemented. But you can get a lot of insight why the problem is a problem and which parts of it are malleable and which are most worth addressing.
i would love to see a transcript or video of this in action (not a simulated exercise, but a real instance). It sounds hilarious, but I feel like it would take a lot of experience to extract something meaningful from it.
I am discovering this is also helpful in improving my listening and conversational skills. Asking questions is a powerful skill.
So when is it ok to brainstorm ideas first and not questions?
Emergency situations may call for rapid execution of any idea. A drowning child doesn't evoke a need for us to ask why we think it should be us that saves the child or what does it really mean to drown anyway? Probably ok to just throw out an idea and spring to action.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but brainstorming questions reminds me of brainstorming problems or failure modes. That makes me think of fishbone diagrams, which are used to try to root cause failures by structuring the main contexts of possible causes.[0] I’ve used this technique to solve for failures in the past. I could see the categories being good prompts for this type of brainstorming.
Readit News
I tend to say: "You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong."
If you are a manager and you want your people to deliver the most innovative, creative, best solution you have to lift stress of them and that also means freeing them of their daily duties and giving them the space to think openly about solutions. If your shop will collapse when you relive the best people of their daily duties for a week that means you shop is badly managed.
1. What problem are you using pressure to sweep under the rug? I.e. why are your colleagues disengaged by default? Most people happily do things they find important. Have you hired the wrong people who don't share your values or are you asking unimportant things of them?
2. When you say people work well under a little pressure, do you mean they produce more... things during a given time interval, or that the long-term quality of their work actually improves?
Good, 10x people don’t need pressure to perform. They are self-driven. Unfortunately, most places don’t optimize for the right people on the bus, only someone that can do what they are told. A team or organization populated with self-driven people with good judgement is a force to be reckoned with. A team without these types of people needs to be managed.
How do you find 10x people? Optimize for attitude, not skill set or intelligence.
So whose power is it, then? There are two ways to tackle this issue: Apply pressure to the ones below you, or buckle up and take a step upwards. One is easier then the other.
I mean, you can create a better product by taking more time, and the whole company still dies because you're too late. This is where the stress comes from; managers only translate it.
The company dies anyway, so that argument is moot.
The solution lies somewhere else. For instance, actually taking the pressure off with resources - e.g. the manager can get their status reports by actually understanding the project by short one-on-one interviews and attending design meetings. Instead of asking everyone to come to a staff meeting, or send their status reports and jamming them into one aggregated email and forwarding that as their own work and pretending they did something.
Right up there with the fake pressure to add a sense of importance.
That is not the point.
Typical organizations very often have both at the same time, but in different places. (Bad) managment sometimes has a hard time telling the two apart, but in my experience they are more afraid of allocating too many resources ("wasting resources") than of allocating too little, because the cost of allocating too much is obvious to their superiors, while the costs of allocating too little is much more hidden, delayed and harder to correlate.
If that really good employee quits after three years of resource-starvation, the causal connection to mismanagment might not be drawn, the manager might even be applauded how well they managed the resources. The friction that comes with replacing that person, however, is real.
There are organizations that burn through employees like it is nothing, and they think that amount of turnover and the waste of resources and time that it brings is normal.
I argued against that.
They were likely an IC at some point and now have to answer to higher up power who are under more acute PnL stress hence the pressure flows down to them.
The trick with manager is to release some of that pressure as it goes down to their directs, this might mean taking it head on directly and shielding directs from it or just re-directing it back up the chain.
"Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa". (dress me slowly, because I am in a hurry)
What I argue for is that during normal, daily, non-emergency work hours your employees should not run at or over capacity but with a headroom. And if you want them to solve a long-standing, complex problem and you want them to solve it well, you have to give them the resources (e.g. time, mindspace) to do just that. Sometimes this just means: "Steve, on Fridays you don't have to answer any emails and phone calls, or do any other thing, just focus on finding a good solution to $PROBLEM").
In my experience that yields better solutions and doesn't take much longer (quite often the opposite).
Deleted Comment
if in a hurry, move slowly
Sometimes the question leads to the first solution that came to mind, but the technique is at its most valuable when it does not. Maybe the checkout page load time isn't as bad as the dark patterns and getting rid of them improves user flow more at a lower cost than rewriting a critical component.
They do not implement that for everything, though. My last order done with a mobile browser, I could not checkout my order, without also choosing amazon prime. I had to activate "desktop mode" that it let me proceed. And I am pretty sure that is intentional to nag more users into prime.
- as a group, explore the problem space (ask more and more questions, diverge your thinking, embrace the waffle)
- as a group, pick something to focus on (converge)
- individually sketch out a solution or two (diverge again)
- individually, asses each others' sketches, identifying what you like and dislike
- synthesise a solution from all the sketches (we did it by voting on the detail points in the previous step; converge)
- storyboard, as a group, with people taking it in turns to drive
- build
- test on users (diverge)
- review (converge)
The coach told us this was mainly derived from Jake Knapp's "Sprint" book.
So when is it ok to brainstorm ideas first and not questions?
Emergency situations may call for rapid execution of any idea. A drowning child doesn't evoke a need for us to ask why we think it should be us that saves the child or what does it really mean to drown anyway? Probably ok to just throw out an idea and spring to action.
Most of the time; however, no one is drowning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishikawa_diagram
It’s all about the art of asking questions in order to solve problems.
Deleted Comment