so efficient … you don’t even get the thing done

made w/ midjourney

A shrewd operator looks for ways to automate process. Fewer keystrokes from fewer participants probably means fewer errors and more speed. 

With a new endeavor or a cash-strapped team, you might be creating this automation for the first time. The automation set-up is an experiment that necessarily involves some trial and error. 

I’ve been on teams where achieving this automation becomes an obsession. A very time-consuming obsession. The manager responsible outsmarts themselves. They miss a goal or deadline because they spend so much time trying to construct the dashboard or script or killer app.

Once their intellect and ego are engaged in this kind of pursuit, smart managers can miss an annoying truth: there are cases where the person willing to blister their own hands on the ax will beat the person trying to build a chainsaw from scratch. It can be worth a minute in a pre-mortem or other planning meeting to sketch a threshold where the automation experiment stops and we just do it the sweaty, old-fashioned way.

-eric