Desperation-Induced Focus
rkg.blog
rkg.blog
"In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency."
I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different."
It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).
> "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time"
My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”
I like this.
I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.
I’ve often been in them in the baffling position of seeing two people try to discuss something in a way that’s abundantly clear that neither of them understands what the other is saying in more than a very basic way.
You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size. Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
And really, do everything you can to kill the meetings where it’s just an obligatory “everybody figure out something to say”
Yes! The meetings where a small number of people are just having a debate with spectators are particularly awful for everybody concerned.
> You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size.
One of the most frustrating meeting dysfunctions I've seen is where large numbers of people are mentally checked out of discussions they're actually needed for - they keep needing stuff to be repeated, which results in others mentally checking out.
Eventually it's like a punishment from Hades in which your meeting can never achieve anything but will never end until it does.
In the past I've actually run a (somewhat) larger meeting by applying pretty tight time constraints. Actually saying "we're going to get this process fully done in X minutes" focuses minds and makes it become true.
> Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.
Back when we were in a physical office I also experimented with banning use of laptops in larger meetings - I think it did actually improve the quality (and speed) of communication in the meeting.
But, generally, building that habit of good communication in a team feels really hard. And the shift towards massively more remote working over the last few years has changed the landscape a bit - it seems much easier to stay silent or check out of a video conference.
Any suggestions from HN for good principles / reading materials on this?
Here in the United States, the official cabinet has over 20 members, obviously too big to serve as such an inner circle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States#H...
Parkinson's book is really brilliant observation, with a humorous overlay.
And two people can just meet at a desk. If cubes were still a thing you could do three people without even getting a room.
I don't actually know what my real limit is because I try a little too hard not to find out. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm sure at some point I'll be paid to find out, and I'll go as slow as they'll let me.
(Stand ups, while arguably valuable, are like a series of short presentations, so IMO don’t count as meetings).
I can't get the sentiment to stay put in the 'right' or 'wrong' column so it's always just sort of there bugging me, like a raspberry seed stuck in my teeth. As someone said either elsewhere in this thread or in another conversation recently, waiting until morning to tell people you're stuck is not an optimal solution. I tend to find that pain points are information, but I'm not sure what the clever solution is to this problem.
Both of these folks asserted we'd be better off spending some time discussing the ways in which we've gotten unstuck, as a counterpoint to talking about how we got stuck, as a more pro-active way of broadcasting hard-won knowledge to the group.
For a while, even in a competitive market, they can waste money. I'm reminded of a friend who worked for a large national book seller in the late 90s. He was placed on a project to investigate the company branding (and possibly producing) their own wine, for sale in stores. In-store cafes were such a hit, upscale wine sales (and profits) would be huge right? This was green-lit from some sr management who... coincidentally, was a wine buff, and they put a team together to go research the wine industry (which meant... travel to wineries for research, etc). This project never got off the ground, but the team learned a lot about wine and retailing wine for about a year, then was disbanded. The company started losing a lot of ground within a few years, and was defunct shortly after.
Rather than pursuing better ways of accommodating the coming internet wave... they squandered whatever chance they may have had on ... lunacy. Another couple of contacts I had there were showing me their own skunkworks "personalized reading lists" (think barebones 'goodreads' system in 2000). Projects like that were frowned on and not supported, in favor of "wine exploration".
1 : loss of hope and surrender to despair
2 : a state of hopelessness leading to rashness
Am I missing something or is it a term that is coopted to romanticize something particularly horrible? I'm not a native english speaker so perhaps I am missing something, but with severe depression and suicidal attempts I had understood states of a certain learned helplessness to be what desperation is about.
Adversity and hope are what I believe small struggling companies hold on to, which seems wholly different from "desperation" and much more conducive to growth and creation.. but perhaps I'm not understanding what natives would understand.
Example: “The team’s desperation increased as their opponent continued to score more points.”
It's contextual, so if a friend is "desperate for a drink", it's not meant to be taken literally.
When the author says, "When I think of my time at Instacart, I remember desperation", I assume they were feeling actual hopelessness.
For example, an employee is shooting for a big promotion. He's hopeful that he's going to get it. But his boss tells him that he's still not doing enough and won't get the role. If he was hopeless, he would simply give up, believing that there's no chance that he's going to get it this time. But if he was desperate, he would take additional uncouth or unexpected actions, like begging and pleading, or sabotaging the coworkers who also have a chance at the promotion. If those desperate attempts failed, then it would be hopeless.
I’m actually surprised about your listed definitions because as a native english speaker, those definitions seem definitively wrong to me, as desperation means exactly that you haven’t quite yet given up hope even though the situation is dire. “Desperate” is like an intense kind of desire, which in my mind is the opposite of hopelessness.
Aviation Psychologist David Beaty on the phenomenon of ‘Set’ (1991):
“‘Set’ is a survival characteristic we have inherited. The human brain evolved to help individuals live and survive circumstances very different from our own. It predisposes us to select our focus on that part of the picture paramount at the time – a vision often so totally focused that it ignores the rest of the environment.
Once something is identified […] it takes on a reality of its own and sticks in the mind like a burr which is difficult to dislodge. […] The mind becomes tunnelled on a particular course of action. Add to that the ingredient of fatigue and it is not difficult to see that a ‘set’ as hard as concrete can result. Furthermore, ‘set’ is infectious. There is a follow-my-leader syndrome. So it is easy to see why most aircraft accidents are caused by ‘silly’ mistakes in the approach and landing phase.
[…] ‘Set’ has been a factor in many aircraft accidents. [In a case in 1972 over Florida], the crew of a Tristar were not sure that their undercarriage was down. The accident sequence was begun by a burned out light bulb in the system which is designed to show that the undercarriage is down and locked. […] the crew examined every possible of finding the trouble. The flight engineer crawled down into the nose, while the captain and the first officer tried every combination of switches and circuit-breakers. […] the three members of crew did not notice that the autopilot had become disengaged and the aircraft was sinking […] eventually crashing into the Everglades.
Because they had become preoccupied with an unsafe landing-gear indication, they failed to monitor the critical altimeter readings. Ironically, the air traffic controller noticed on his radar that the aircraft was losing height, but instead of pointing this out simply asked diplomatically “How are things coming along there?”.
The crew, still obsessed with their landing-gear problem, assuming he referred to that, for they could thing of nothing else, replied seconds before the crash, “Everything is all right!”
– Paraphrased from The Naked Pilot by David Beaty (Ch.6)
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Naked_Pilot.html?id...
That is not remotely true of flying a plane.
* The documentation will be here and look like this.
* The deployment is done using code that lives here.
* The code would have been in a PR here.
Etc.
Help align -> More meetings
Remove confusion -> More meetings
Maintain flow -> More meetings
Open up organizational capacity -> Meetings about having less meetings
For a while, I had a girl friend who had a remarkable propensity to get herself into serious trouble, often while I was on a different continent. We noticed that when I got apprised of these acute situations, far away, unable to do anything about it, I would often score exceptional high scores on my favourite games. The stress and desperation I couldn’t put to good use to help instead manifested itself in laser focused game performance…
“With great responsibility comes great power”
If you need someone to have amazing output, rather than shackling them with a process, give them responsibility and the corresponding power to make decisions and to execute.
A peacetime process though, then I’m. To agree
It's all a balance right? Sometimes process helps you guide decision making and make decisions faster. Sometimes it helps keep people from making the same mistake in the past. Sometimes it keeps you from tinkering with something that's working (i.e., don't fix what isn't broken).
Process can also be wrong, it can keep you from exploring needed changes. It's a fine line to walk between preventing "fixing" a not broken system, and being tomorrow's ice shippers.
Take for example, the US government. The process to pass laws is extremely complicated and difficult. That's on purpose. It keeps the government from meddling without cause and often forces compromise. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it's better than a dictatorship or simple majority rule.
One is about keeping things simple and having focus. Could not agree with it more. On every proposal, ask, "What problem does this solve?", "Is the cure worse than the disease?", "If this is added, what else can be removed so that the overall weight stays the same?". All good points; I don't think that is controversial.
But then, the post goes into what I can only describe as a rant. Something about going to the whiteboard. About desperation. Some random tangent on bottle deposits. I don't agree with this.
A "small company" is not synonymous with a "poorly-run company". Sure, Mario Andretti's quote "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough" applies to almost every startup. There always will be some portion of the company that needs urgent attention. But valorizing constant struggles, throwing your hands up saying "Duh, startup" is poor leadership, IME.
The big tell for me is that Ravi does not explain what is a good process. There never is a "no process" world. The choice is between a stated, well-understood process OR a poorly-specified, poorly-understood, inefficient process.
A few years ago, startups used to say, "Oh, we have a flat organization - no hierarchies," and wear that as a bad of honor. Not really; there always is a hierarchy - except now it is based on who hangs out with who. I notice that most startup leaders understand this now, and the "no hierarchy" line is not trotted out these days. The "no process" bit is also like that, IMO.
Absolutely brilliant paragraph, couldn't have said it better. I wonder if this is some function of "idle hands do the devil's work": that is, people with not enough work to do find some moderately useless thing to do that feels like work and seems like work but is actually wasting time or even counterproductive. Perhaps a properly lean company always has a bit more work to do than it has the capacity to do it.