The Leaflet #136: two federal rules, not at the mercy of your software #2, naked objects
“Federal rules” for your flat organization
Schools in a network; franchises of a restaurant; research teams at a think tank or alignment non-profit - there are good arguments for decentralizing and distributing decision-making power in these organizations. A couple such arguments:
When sub-teams have freedom to develop their own cultures and ways of doing things, they can achieve some real local pride that rigorous standardization doesn’t enable as readily. These teams work harder for and with each other because of that pride.
You can run tests or experiments of a variety of approaches to the work that’s common across the teams. Not just an A/B test: an A/B/C/D/E/F/G… test.
If you’re a leader at the hub of a distributed organization like this, it can be useful to scaffold the decentralization with a shared understanding of the powers you, at the hub / nerve center / central office, do retain. Law students’ brains melt during the study of the near-infinite nuances this takes among federal, state, and local governments. In your organization, you can keep it simple.
I think a good short starting list of “federal powers” has these two:
Setting standards of performance. You spec the floor if not the ceiling. “Every team must at least deliver _____.”
Scaling best practices (as they’re discovered). If a team isn’t performing at least at floor level, you get to swap out a current practice of theirs for one that has been proven out elsewhere in the organization.
-eric
You are not at the mercy of your software, part 2
I’ve written here before about Claude Code as a rescue from the (oppressive) dominance of enterprise software that isn’t meeting your needs.
Maybe you’ve already gotten locked into a contract with Salesforce or your parent organization uses the Office suite so you have to use Office the suite, too, whether you like it or not.
The good news is that you don’t have to build a whole new CRM or email client from scratch. You don’t have to rebuild Salesforce. You can use Claude Code to build a lightweight layer on top of that big, existing system to get it to work for you and with you in ways you like better. You can say pretty much that exact thing to Claude Code in a prompt:
“I hate that I have to export this data from Salesforce, reformat the spreadsheet, then pdf it for this board report - this takes me an hour and I often make a mistake I have to go back and correct later. Can you build a lightweight layer that works with Salesforce to do this for me?”
So much of the computer-based work that happens in the knowledge economy, especially at resource-strapped orgs, is translation. You, wonderful human – hired for your deep experience, sound judgment, mighty head and heart – are converting one kind of bit into another kind of bit. You’re stuck doing the robotic part so you can hopefully get to the human part.
This is yet another vote for assigning the robotic part to the robots. When this goes well, you have more time for relationships, judgement calls, nuanced interpretive work, clever writing.
Worth a try.
-eric
Team roles as naked objects
The wonderful Rob Walker drew my attention this week to an essay by Roohola Ramezani about writing poems. Ramezani guided his students to write “phenomenological” poems about objects in their lives. The core rule was that the poems couldn’t ruminate on the meanings and contexts of the objects. The poets stripped the objects of all that cultural clothing to attempt poems about “naked objects,” described as directly as possible through the ways they struck the five senses.
Leaders of small, growing organizations often struggle to know whom to hire next. The stalwart band of co-founders has probably done a handful of jobs each. There’s a lot of work that isn’t getting done at all, yet. Some of these leaders reasonably look at what big, mature organizations have at the top of their org charts and try to mimic those lineups. This can lead to wasted energy in hiring and, sometimes, to hiring expensive, seasoned executives you don’t need.
One useful exercise could be writing up the next role you hire for as a “naked object”. Don’t write what your’re going to call the role or who is going to manage it or what it looks like at your highest-performing peer organizations. What, specifically, does this person need to do / change / achieve in the next year? Start with that and figure out what to call that bundle of assignments later. The title, org chart bubble, salary band, reporting line – that’s all clothing on the naked essential contribution you’re looking for.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Newly published author Cate Hall on serving as your own crisis manager:
Imagine you’ve been parachuted in your life as a stranger. Whoever was here before you certainly made a mess of things, but now someone more capable is here to take over. Using the resources available, how can you, the crisis manager, get to work on improving the situation?
When you’re messing your life up, the crisis manager is superior to your normal brain. It’s not worrying about sunk costs or wedded to your old processes. The crisis manager throws away the old to-do list and simply asks, “What is the most important priority, and what is the next thing required to achieve it?”
This is a key attribute of the crisis manager’s utility. The crisis manager doesn’t know or care about the standards of the person who created the crisis. She has one standard: better. She is simply taking whatever action would make the situation a little better, right now, over and over again.”
Former Marine Corps general Jim Mattis on technology and confusion:
Digital technologies do not dissipate confusion; the fog of war can actually thicken when misinformation is instantly amplified.
Student of habits James Clear on numbers and attention:
Whatever can be measured grabs our attention. How much money we make. How much weight we can lift. How many bedrooms are in the house.
And once we notice a number, it is natural to want to improve it. We find ourselves wondering how to make more money, lift more weight, add another bedroom. What is measurable becomes what is important. Not because it matters more, but because it is easier to see.
Sometimes a new perspective is helpful. Rather than asking, “How can I get more?” Try asking, “What is an inspiring way to live?”