I can listen to a system but I cannot control it
💎CORE ARGUMENT
There is a kind of competence that consists of making things happen, and for most of my career I thought it was the only kind. This year gave me three lessons in the same sentence: I can listen to a system, and I cannot control it.
The launch. I had a date, a plan and the authority to push. The load test failed at a third of expected volume anyway. The system had been telling us for weeks, through a QA lead who thought the test too gentle, and I had let a compromise stand because the plan needed it to be fine. Recommending the slip on 12 February was not control. It was the first time that month I acted on what the thing was saying.
The finger. A pulley heals at the speed a pulley heals. I could load it on schedule, tape it and stay off small holds. I could not make it September in June, and every attempt to hurry was a way of not listening.
The reorganisation. On 29 April the structure I worked in was changed by people who did not ask me, and my manager left. Nothing I did could have altered that. What I could do was learn the beat of the new arrangement before trying to steer anything in it.
Listening is not passivity. It means watching how a system behaves before deciding what it should do, trusting the unwelcome signal over the plan, and making moves small enough to be corrected. It also means sorting, each time, what is mine: my judgment, my effort and my next move. The outcome is a negotiation.
I find this harder to believe in a good week than in a bad one.
Where I might be wrong. It is a comfortable belief for someone who has just lost a few rounds. I could not have controlled it and I did not try hard enough feel identical from the inside, and this note gives me no test for telling them apart.
It can also slide into a kind of spectator's wisdom. Katarina does not pay me to listen. At some point the listening has to end in a move.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
- Before I push, I spend a week watching what the thing already does.
- I state plans as bets with a check date, not as promises about outcomes.
- When I catch myself rehearsing an argument with something that cannot hear me (a tendon, an org chart), I ask what part of this is mine and do only that.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- List what was mine and what was not in the launch week
- Watch the merged team for a month before proposing any change
- Reread this in a good week and see if I still agree
An essay on getting the beat of a system before disturbing it, and a notebook written by an emperor reminding himself what was and was not his to command.
Listening takes time because of 💎 Delays make a sensible reaction look like the wrong one. What the system puts in my way is covered by 💎 The obstacle in front of the work is part of the work.
A complex system responds to its own structure and history, not to my intent. I can observe its behaviour, change my own inputs and watch what comes back. I cannot set its outputs. Acting as though I could means ignoring the feedback that would have corrected me.
Systems do have handles. 💎 Changing a parameter is the weakest way to change a system only makes sense if some ways of changing one are strong, and a person who has found the right handle is not merely listening.
A reflection written after the slip, an axiom with my caveats attached, and the person I wanted to be in launch week and partly was.