map – From the desk of Adam Thomas

“All models are wrong; some are useful.” – George Box

Models are necessary. They help us ship work and translate our taste.

It is important to recognize, however, that by using a model, we are making something fit.

Any time you find yourself making things fit, you are missing a piece of the story.

It’s an abstraction. Mostly, your camera is zooming out, and thus a bit of the picture becomes blurry.

That piece still exists. You just stop seeing it.

They can, however, help us to get where we need to go. After, though, switch it up.

Put people’s feet to the fire, but don’t hold them there

Control feels good.

The feeling you get when someone does a task exactly what you want them feels fantastic.

It comes with a serious trade-off.

Trying to run people’s lives is exhausting. It doesn’t scale. Most importantly, it caps their ceiling. You limit their potential.

The alternative is to challenge them. Put your person in a position to win, make a landing zone, and let them go.

Make no mistake; there is more risk involved. If you can’t write the map, you rely on them to give you a post-mortem. This ambiguity causes errors. When you combine mistakes with some ambiguity, it feels worse.

There is a major upside here.

In my experience, every time I controlled what they (person working for me) did, I’d get maybe, half of their potential.

When I compare that to when I challenged them, I got closer to 75% to 95%. Then, every once in a while, I’d see the person’s potential level up.

My reward for dealing with the ambiguity and giving them agency was someone who I could trust. For that trust, they would delight me.

Agency matters. Let them have it.