Value Theater and Pencil Sharpeners
I had some grand plans this week to do a Chess TDD post and a reader question post, but I wound up agreeing to do a quick contract gig that was very time sensitive, so I’ve been coding furiously all week, logging 50 billable hours in 4 days and still going strong. That’s why, instead of any of my best laid plans, I offered cross posts. Ah well, it turns out the cross posts tend to be quite popular, so I suppose everyone wins.
Given that I’m tired from all of this work and just kind of freewheeling a bit here, I’ll just type extemporaneously (or as close to that as you can manage with typing). It’s been a while since I just typed what was on my mind in a stream without structure, so this is kind of fun. This is a topic that’s bubbled near the surface for some years, but never quite made it into a post. I’d like to talk about what people do in professional situations with a high degree of ambiguity. This comes up a lot, often during transitional situations for groups or organizations.
To be a little more concrete about it, let’s say that you’re part of a team that’s just delivered a multi-year project, and it’s time to figure out what’s next for you as a group. There’s an idea that, while the C-levels figure out the next long-term play, your team will spend a few months “cleaning up” an internal, legacy app. What “cleaning up” means is yet to be determined.
At this point, all you know is that you’re going to do stuff to this application. This lack of specifics is the ambiguity to which I’m referring.
Dealing with Ambiguity
Watching how people react in a situation like this is interesting. Sure, at some point, circumstance will squeeze specifics out of some reluctant manager and the team will have their marching orders, but until that happens, you can witness a small study in human psychology.
Some people will interpret this situation as either quasi-time off, or else as unplanned “20% time,” triggering a period of some degree of coasting. They’ll bone up on general knowledge, work on a little project they’ve always thought the company could use, work on a side project of their own, or maybe even just spend all day on Facebook. The common theme here is that they’re content to wait for more specifics before proceeding.
Other people will fill the ambiguity with virtuous specifics according to their own office ethos. I think of this as “sharpening the pencils,” and it’s usually accompanied by a crisp, earnest, and slightly urgent, “alright. come on, guys, let’s all {sharpen the pencils}.” For some people, this means filling in the void with comfortable structure. “Let’s decide who is going to be the liaison, the project manager, etc.” For others, it’s haggling over tools of the trade — “alright, well, I think we should use that new text editor and it might make sense to update this code base to node.” For others, it may simply be “time to lean, time to clean” activities, like “we don’t know what we need to do, but it couldn’t hurt for us to get started adding comments to every method in this thing.”
I call this “sharpening the pencils” because in my mind, it can be crystallized to this image. “Well, we don’t know exactly what’s coming, but it can’t hurt to greet it with pencils sharp, ready and willing to take notes and get started on whatever comes!”
Getting it Right
In my opinion, one of these camps is decidedly the ‘right’ camp, and it’s the former. No, I didn’t confuse directional words. I think the non-pencil sharpening loafers are doing the right thing, both for themselves and for the business. And it’s not because I find “let’s all sharpen pencils” enthusiasm to be hard to take (though that can be the case). It’s a lot more pragmatic than that.
