In this post, I want to share one of the most important ideas I heard in the last few years — that most companies are too well-run.
Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash
Chaos, Order, and Productivity
The original formulation of the idea comes from Jim Keller who explained it with a seemingly trivial chart of productivity vs. organizational order.
In the chaos, nothing can be done. Priorities change overnight, untested code gets deployed to production, databases fail with no backup, and there are five different languages and three libraries for any single task.
When there is a sensible order, productivity is at its peak. People can focus on the actual goal at hand, have time to do it properly, release it, and have it just work.
But when the order is perfect, nothing can be done again. Writing a line of code requires three planning meetings, four approvals, and a separate team to deploy it. Anything remotely novel needs a couple of Ph.D. theses to even try.