Substrate

Experience becomes real when consolidated. I think this mainly stems from knowing how to ask the right questions that are expressly intended to cause a perception shift and require the consolidation of experience. Things such as: “What’s the most frequent anti-pattern that you see in our team’s work?” or “What types of work do we do that have the highest outcome leverage, and why, and how can we do it better?”

This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. ​ A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. ​ Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. ​ push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done ​ If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.

The core observations from Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man Month is that assigning more folks to work on a project often slows down delivery. Part of that is the predictability tax.