I’m mediocre at all of them, except for firefight where I’m terrible
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Pick 2 of 3 for work: meaningful, alive, scrutable. Any kind of management depends on making work more scrutable, which involves sacrificing some meaning, aliveness, or both.
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Scrutable+meaningful = big picture vision, mission, values, charismatic goal etc. Such things are walking-dead zombies. Scrutable+alive = solid ground game, things happening, stuff being shipped, "doers" pumping fists. But nihilistic and draining to be in that mode for long.
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Meaningful+alive = inscrutable, illegible. There's a sense of narrative vigor and meaning AND live action and shipping. Unfortunately "unmanaged" soon devolves into "unmanageable" and chaos.
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None of the 3 vertices is stable. You kinda have to rotate through them. Generalization of Andy Grove line "first let chaos reign, then rein in the chaos." Just a 3-way version.
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Don't have a pithy line, but basically when chaos reigns, you rein it in with process discipline, then nihilism starts to reign, so you rein THAT in with some meaning-making by powerpoint keynote. When THAT starts to suck the soul out of the action, you let chaos reign again.
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Truly exhausting to run this triangle. Which is why the role tends to get split into 3: meaning-maker (project super-ego), chaos-maker (project id), and operator (project ego). Parent, child, adult if you like transactional analysis. Every project needs all 3.
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One of the things you learn early on as a consultant is that you can only add value along 2 of the legs that either increase scrutability or keep it constant. Clients correctly subconsciously fear that consultants adding scrutability might kill golden geese of meaning/aliveness.
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Which means to be trusted, you have to learn to say, "this seems to actually be working pretty well, let's not mess with it" and back off. If you try to "add value" everywhere all the time, you'll do more harm than good overall, even if well-intentioned.
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Replying to @vgr
Could it be inferred that some of the best management is gonna be what a person is naturally suited for vs any specific style or approach?
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Well it also has to be suited to the work. Some projects need whitepapers to run them. If you try to run them by 1:1 meetings they'll unravel fast. So it's a 3-way fit: person, style, task.
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