It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

The Future

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been in a management off-site this week. A lot of the work there has simply been about communicating where we are right now, with a fair amount of time also devoted to communicating plans for what we will do over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.

This is all necessary activity and if we weren’t at least trying to be serious about planning for the future we would be negligent as managers. The problem of course is that any manager with any experience at all knows planning is mostly futile. As many hacks have pointed out, it is a rare plan that survives the first shot on the battlefield. (And yes, we always revert to tired combat analogies in having these kinds of discussions, which is counterproductive at best. Business is not war, and selling free software is most certainly not war — more of a parlor trick, I sometimes think.)

I don’t need tired combat analogies to demonstrate the futility of planning — I can use my own career in software. Since I got into this dodge back in 1999, I’ve been involved in at least ten different software projects where the work we were doing was based on realizing some imagined future state that was more than a year out. Not a single one of those projects ever realized that planned state. That doesn’t mean they were failures, although many were — this is software after all. It simply means they didn’t go to plan.

So what is the point of even discussing “roadmap” (as we call it) in an industry where even our CEO says things like “Planning is dead?” I guess one alternative is just to be totally reactive — build a team that is super flexible so it can quickly jump on whatever opportunity arises. Nice idea, but hard to pull off in nature, partly because teams like this are expensive. Also, “totally reactive” doesn’t feel like a great way to be when people’s careers are depending on your leadership. We are compelled to try to imagine the future and try to position ourselves and the people who depend on us to take best advantage of it.

No, I think it’s best to continue planning, knowing all the while that the plans will be wrong. It’s just important not to depend on the outcome.

Show And Tell

“Check out this umbrella, folks! Isn’t it cool?” By woodleywonderworks – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2850669383, CC BY 2.0, Link

I was talking to a European colleague the other day about the differences between Europeans and Americans. He blew my mind with an idea I had never thought of before: It all comes down to show and tell.

I don’t really know why we even have “show-and-tell” in preschool in the US. I should probably ask one of the teachers in the family to explain it to me at some point. At any rate, my colleague holds that show-and-tell is a reason, if not the reason, why Americans tend to be so much louder than Europeans, and why we’re so much more comfortable standing up and talking to a group. Not just comfortable, really — more like compelled.

So what’s so special about show-and-tell? At age three or so, you are required to stand up and talk about a thing you brought with you from home that you think is important. If you do it well, you are praised for it — and you watch other kids being praised for it (or heckled if they do it badly). If you like being in the spotlight, you’re going to find out at an early age, and you’re going to want to keep going back there.

Apparently this kind of thing doesn’t exist in European primary schools, according to my colleague at least. I don’t have any inside knowledge of schooling in western Europe, but all my Czech friends have told me that “standing out” in school is a great way to get singled out for abuse or worse. They say this is yet another anti-pattern from forty years of communism. Anyway, standing up and being noticed is definitely not something Czechs are into, with the required exceptions of course.

Americans’ desire to stand up and talk is not entirely a virtue, of course — to other cultures, we look boorish, self centered, and rude. We’re also impossible to miss. Kim and I used to sit in cafes in Paris and guess the Americans walking down the street — you can just about do it with your eyes closed. Just listen for the loudest people around, and if you want confirmation open your eyes and check if they’re wearing white sneakers.