Retreat to Win

“Without (leverage to change) policy, your tool is stepping back and allowing the brokenness to collapse under its own weight. A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by Band-Aids, but it can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability.” – Will Larson, Systems of Engineering Management [Sec 5.6.4] (2019)

What’s sad about it is people actively not caring about saving some systems.

“Not my circus, not my monkeys” becomes the default motto.

Sometimes it’s a character. They just couldn’t care less about anything that is “not their job description”. Mostly, it’s a bad environment.

It’s a signal of a deeply flawed reward system of the environment / management. Reward the superhero who saves the day after* shit happens. The ones who work tirelessly to avoid shit from happening? Meh, they’re doing their job anyways. How to even prove it would have gone to shit? It takes a certain amount of skill for managers to differentiate between those two situations.

Very similar skills are required to hire people who care for the right reasons and not burn them out (See my post about hiring).

If you couldn’t do the latter, you will fail at the former.

A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by Band-Aids. That holds when you are convinced it’s “deeply flawed”, and you don’t have the right authority to change things. You would be surprised how many times you will be given authority (if you ask for it) because no one knows what to do. Take a chance once in a while to learn what it takes to recognize and fix such a system and the importance of everyday tasks to avoid it.