So one of the reasons I'm thinking about this is that work at abstract levels, like management and leadership, suffers from a lack of natural detail. A manager can't be a detail-oriented to the same degree as a mechanic because social reality has a lot less natural detail
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I think the way great managers and leaders become great is by creating a world of detail for themselves that is comparable to the natural detail environment that accompanies individual contributor work. Those who fail to do this fail at their jobs.
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The thing is, the "domain" of leaders/managers is other people, and people are not things. If you bring "thing" like detail orientation to people, you'll come across as creepy/stalkery. You don't want to obsess over people the way you might over a car engine.
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Some aspects do carry over. Attentive listening, empathy, individualization, are "detail orientation" in relationship mode, but it's fundamentally limited by the fact that the other person is a PERSON with boundaries beyond which they reserve details for themselves.
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One interesting new management learning Eg: in the covid WFH world if you ask N people to do task “A” which is not directly part of their job they will 98% of the time fail to do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a VP or Mid Level manager doing the asking.
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I can imagine. You don't even have to quickly open up an excel sheet to cover up the game you were playing. WFH is the opposite of open plan offices with their visibility pressures to at least pretend to do things asked of you.
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Yeah. There’s a big loss of agency for managers and coordination is much slower. I wonder when these will actually impact output.
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This is one reason I decided this was a good time to push the yak collective experiment. No better time to try doing away with managerial patterns of organization. If people aren't listening to "managers" 98% of the time anyway, why not try to make things work without them
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The phenomena isnt intentional just new rules of a new context. And there’s nothing to say that in this context it isn’t much more work to add independence to regular work.
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98% independent work is on the other end of the barbell and probably much much more work and a completely new way of working.
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It's way more work if you try to do the same kind of work. Ototh if you match message to medium and pick work content to match the mode, it becomes more efficient. Kinda like wisdom of the crowds or distributed computing. You have to pick the right problems for the approach.

