Teaching Superman To Dodge Bullets
Appreciating a culture of problem solving over firefighting
Let’s consider two similarly staffed teams solving similar business challenges.
The good folks on Team Firefighters alternate between rushing to deliver something and putting out fires, often finding themselves on edge.
The more zen folks on Team Stillwater seem to know when to rush, when to pause and when to take it slow and steady.
Despite this seemingly drastic difference in visible activity levels, they both appear to be delivering pretty much the same level of business outcomes, except one seems to have taken the rocky road, often dragging bystanding customers over the rocks too.
Which team you would want to be on, is probably just a rhetorical question.
If both teams are blessed with similar talent, how does one end up in a very different state of frenzy?
Introducing Superman Syndrome
I could not do a better job than Shreyas Doshi when it comes to explaining this concept. So, why don’t you go read his take first? In fact, just read the first half where he describes a symbolic scene from Superman II to nail the concept, and come back here.
As Shreyas calls out, when Clark Kent tries to bring attention to the naughty kid trying to step over the guard rails on the cliffside of the Niagara Falls, hardly anyone seemed to care. Yet, when the kid actually starts falling into the abyss and Superman saves him from certain death, everyone cheers and celebrates the same Clark Kent dressed in a cape.
In a similar vein, leaders can inadvertently create an environment where fixing problems is incentivized over solving them or preventing them altogether. What’s the difference? Glad you asked!
Fixing a problem: Allowing the problem to occur, often in full knowledge of the fact, and then fixing it. This is often justified in the name of speed or urgency.
Solving a problem: A proactive measure to either address a problem that has been discovered, or avert it from ever occurring in the first place.
Look closer at the symptoms, and you are likely to find that on Team Firefighters:
Problems occur all the time, requiring heroes to save the day.
Problems are never fully understood or addressed, leaving room for more problems to occur.
While heroes are rewarded for fixing problems, there is no visible incentive for addressing the problem so it never occurs again.
This is a good time to remind ourselves that we needed superheroes to save us from supervillains, not from our own misdeeds. And yet, Team Firefighters is full of superheroes with this unwelcome badge of honour.
The Alternative
Let’s walk over to Team Stillwater and see what’s going on over there. Two things appear to stand out.
There is a measured, deliberate approach to everything. People seem to understand what risks they are taking and have a sense of what these risks entail. They pause often to consider these risks and when the risks are tenuous, make time to find better solutions.
When something does go wrong, taking the team by surprise, there is a one-two punch that follows.
Douse the fire, if only temporarily.
Collectively reflect on what went wrong, record the lessons, and put in the effort to reduce the risk of this happening again.
Clearly, the incentive models are very different on this team. The onus is very much on prevention, than on cure. This is a team of problem solvers that has been incentivized to minimize broken windows.
The Journey to Firefighting
How does a team end up like the Firefighters? While there are many paths to this terminus, you may find that they all have some characteristics in common.
When moving fast is what matters most, output is valued over outcomes, and busy work is celebrated.
“Look how many bugs were fixed in a week!”
rather than
“How can we avoid having so many bugs to fix?”
Battle scars from avoidable fiascos are glorified.
“Amazing feat, pulling an all nighter to plug the security hole”
rather than
“Let’s promise ourselves this is never required again”
The most critical factor of all however is what measure is used to define success. While metrics defining progress are easy to setup - turnaround time to delivery, bugs fixed or tickets closed - it is easy to forget that it is notoriously hard to measure what matters most.
So, while it is trivial to count how many problems you fixed, how do you count how many problems you avoided? Or, like my friend Geeth Alladi likes to tell me, how do we measure the bullets we dodged?
Stable systems can only be observed over time. When your fighter jets come back in one piece after multiple sorties, you know you have built a robust machine. When your product starts to withstand the test of time and scale, you can start to appreciate the bullets you dodged.
But in an environment where there is little patience, it is easier to incentivize fixing problems with a quick feedback loop rather than solving for them with a longer feedback loop.
Is One Team Really Faster?
Team Firefighters is always in a frenzy, a bunch of busy bees working hard all the time. Team Stillwater appears more measured and relaxed. Certainly, despite all the hiccups, the Firefighters must be delivering more, moving faster, and helping the business advance a lot more, right?
Unfortunately, we live in an era where most people have heard about and decided to emulate Facebook’s famous slogan “Move fast and break things” but did not pause to note that they changed this to “Move fast with stable infrastructure” back in 2014. We glorify the monopoly Facebook managed to accumulate believing it stemmed from the hustle and brazenness of their teams. We also forget that when Facebook is down, no one really suffers, except Facebook themselves.
Your business may not be as lucky when it comes to your customers being immune to you breaking things. Each time an outage occurs, or things become slower for your users, or they can’t do something with your product, you lose their trust and risk losing them as customers. Your Firefighters are not recovering value - only stemming the bleeding wound.
In the medium to long term, most of the problems you create for yourself or your customers need to be solved. And solving problems requires time. Whether you solve them tomorrow after customers uncover them, or solve for them today, is a matter of choice. By rushing forth with half-prepared solutions your Firefighters are only pushing the problems to a future where they can don a cape and save the day multiple times over.
Where Firefighters defer solving some problems until they come back to bite them, the Stillwater folk invest calculated effort to choose what they are prepared to deal with tomorrow.
Firefighters may look faster in the moment, but over the longer haul, the folks at Stillwater deliver more business value.
Now, Choose
If you are a leader or person of influence on your team, you can certainly appreciate the delicate balancing act between speed and quality. Sometimes you have to deliberately take risks to meet urgent objectives. At other times, the quality of your work is more important than how quickly it is rushed through.
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, you can at least be mindful of the incentive models you create - does your Superman fight supervillains or save naughty kids of negligent parents from drowning?
Another unintended and dangerous outcome of glorifying firefighting - people will wait for the fire so that they can don the cape rather than do the silent thankless drudgery work of putting guard rails in place. As a leader, I thank my fire fighters but always make it a point to publicly appreciate the work someone puts in in coming up with a plan for ensuring a fire doesn't break out and implementing guard rails.
Senior leaders need to be even more mindful of not glorifying noisy busy work over painstaking planning and execution that leads us to a quiet dinner :-)