The Leaflet #129: a second hand on the wheel, inoculation to change, falsifiable experiments
A second hand on the wheel (yours)
When your organization is growing and you’re chasing a big mission, you’re going to encounter new chunks of work that need leaders. There will be more of those chunks than available, seasoned leaders. Someone young or relatively untested is going to get a chunk.
Some execs bend over backwards to avoid this. They spend big money to go to market and find a shiny veteran leader they can patch in. They outsource to consultants who can’t fully own the chunk but give adult-in-the-room vibes (or slides), at least.
A better approach is to use this situation to make your young leader nearly as capable as you are, with the confidence to match. To achieve that, the young leader needs to be the named and legitimate owner of the chunk of work. They are in the driver’s seat, holding the steering wheel.
Their work has real stakes. They make the decisions, they eat the crow, and they earn the credit. When the project is urgent and stakes-y enough, you are not abandoning them to the open road. Rather, your hand rests lightly on top of theirs on the wheel. You’re not driving or backseat-driving. You are near enough that a learning mistake doesn’t become a crisis.
Importantly, you gotta tell the young leader and the team what’s happening here. It can help to be quite concrete about this, eg,
“while [Young Up and Comer] is taking on [Gnarly Important Project] you’ll probably see me off camera in meetings they’re leading. You’ll see me show up in documents they’re writing and reviewing. You might even see me whispering in their ear real-time during meetings. Don’t take any of those as bad signs or a lack of trust in [Young Up and Comer]. Instead, I invite you to see those moves the same way I do: votes of confidence in [Young Up and Comer]’s growth.”
If you do this well, you get a compounding return on your effort. Instead of just having a problem solved, you also have a new leader capable of solving problems. Instead of a script that kills one particular bug, you have an agent who can find and kill other bugs independently.
-ben and eric
Inoculation to ambiguity and volatility aka change
When you’re in startup or turnaround mode, the rate and weight of change at your organization are high. People might have titles, but each role is more like a beach bag than a cellophane-sealed container. There’s lots of stuff in there, some of it is covered in sand, some of it leaks, some of it doesn’t make sense but there just wasn’t anywhere else to put it.
Good hiring practice includes a clear, detailed forecast of the hardest parts of the job. If you’re hiring for these beach bag kind of roles, you might not really know what exactly their job is going to entail in 3-6 months.
This means you should go one layer up with your forecast. Rather than describing particular tasks that might be hard, describe this pattern of volatility, ambiguity, and change. This person needs to be ready for – ideally, excited about – running into the unknown. If you can, illustrate what that might look like:
“Things change fast around here. That means you might work super hard on something for weeks, only to find that we’ve decided to shift course. That thing you worked on gets shelved and you’re going to have to attack the next thing with just as much energy.”
“We aren’t yet in a mode where we can accommodate preferences of work task and work style. You may have noticed we don’t really have an office yet. Don’t take this job unless you’re excited about becoming more versatile and trying new ways of working.”
The point of these warnings is getting folks on the team who opt in to growth in the face of your particular kinds of adversity. They will work harder and feel better that folks who get backed or bamboozled into that adversity.
-ben and eric
Make it a falsifiable experiment with a refresh date
The move I reach for when I suspect I’m right but can’t fully prove it and don’t have the data yet is almost embarrassingly simple: Could we try it for X amount of time? And at the end of X, I’ll put a reminder in our one-on-one to look at what we’ve learned/seen and check whether it’s still worth doing. This can unwind a stalemate and keep you from pulling an ugly power move involving some version of “because I said so.”
This approach can be especially useful when you’re working with a brilliant skeptic. This kind of person can balk at acting on an unproven judgment because, to them, acting without a first principles justification feels like surrendering rigor.
A time-boxed experiment with explicit success criteria can be rigorous without delaying you or sending you on philosophical birdwalks. Set up a hypothesis, a test, a decision rule, and a time to review. With this premise, they don’t have to abandon good epistemics; instead, they apply those epistemics to your bet.
You protect your ability to move nimbly in the face of uncertainty. Nobody has to say “because I say so,” because nobody has to win the prospective, theoretical argument. You just have to agree on how you’ll find out.
-ben and eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Former intelligence officer Shane Parrish on skill:
What looks like skill is mostly just a lot of work in the dark.
Investor Charlie Munger on ideology:
I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.’ I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.
AI observer Ethan Mollick on working with the wizard:
Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result. The conjuring happens somewhere I cannot watch, in hundreds of small choices I never get a vote on. The work has shifted from process to outcome. I no longer steer; I commission.