Don't Create Chaos | Hacker News Reader

Don't Create Chaos

staysaasy.com

96 pointsbengtan31 comments

Great leaders don't just vacuum up chaos. They also gracefully stay out of the way when they realize they've missed a big decision. If they were inappropriately excluded from the decision or kept in the dark about it, maybe some individual or individuals need to be held responsible, but in the meantime, if they can see that the team has taken a direction and is comfortable with it, they don't insist on revisiting it.

This is a pitfall for engineering managers that get promoted and end up spending a lot of their time unavailable to their teams because of travel, executive-level meetings, and dog and pony shows for customers. They have to get used to major technical decisions flying under their radar.

It's also a hallmark of one type of toxic boss: the kind that wants everyone to think that he is the only smart person in engineering. On one hand, his big brain cannot be wasted on boring stuff. On the other hand, he always has to intervene in big meaty decisions in case his moronic minions are messing something up. When this kind of boss realize that a decision he delegated as not worth his time was actually strategically important, he will stop everything, halt work, and reopen the discussion. The resulting chaos is a collective punishment for his organization, and it gives him a chance to find some reason to choose a different solution. Then he can declare that he has averted disaster and prove (once again) that he is indispensable.

This is very true. Great leaders are Stevie Wonder - they are super good because that's what they want. They want to see the good in humans.

Hey, that's us!

I'm really passionate about this topic... I think that causing chaos is one of the most dangerous and annoying things that a manager/leader/human can do.

On the flip side, the best leaders I've met make everything feel clear and effortless. It's like how great teachers can explain complex concepts in a dead simple way.

Thanks for reading!

"So I'm not sure if our budget is going to be approved and that would mean we'd have to let some of you go. Anyway have a good long weekend and we'll get back to our project goals next week. Just keeping it real!"

I don't understand what this article is about, but it made me self conscious about something I believe to be productive (and enjoy) doing. Whenever I'm communicated of a decision the team reached without me (because I wasn't in the project yet, for example), my first Instinct is to poke holes in it and try and see how it can fail so we can think about it together. It's helped me immensely over my career, but now I'm starting to wonder if it just introduces chaos.

(OP - thanks for reading!)

Imo asking questions and figuring out where there are holes in a plan is natural, expected, and part of a responsible person's job. In a sibling post Bjartr describes how to do this really well.

The chaos-creating behavior that this post referred to is disruptive behavior that accidentally or intentionally distracts the team from accomplishing its goals in a high quality way. Eg disagreeing with or poking holes in a plan in order to get to a good outcome is totally normal – but poking holes just for the hell of it is not.

Also if you're worried, I'd consider just asking your teammates for feedback on whether the way you approached situations was helpful. Most people are really amenable to giving this type of feedback.

> Also if you're worried, I'd consider just asking your teammates for feedback on whether the way you approached situations was helpful. Most people are really amenable to giving this type of feedback.

That's a very good idea. Thank you :)

I think doing that can be framed in different ways, some more chaos inducing than others.

If you dive straight into poking holes, it might be chaotic. In the other hand if you frame it as "I'd like to ask some questions about why we made this decision the way we did to help me understand it and get me onto the same page as the rest of the team, when's a good time?" This makes it clear your goal is understanding the decision and not changing it.

I find there are two motivations here.

First: "I am seeking to understand", and

Second: "I am seeking to cause disruption - perhaps just because my opinion was not centred in the original decision-making process"

These can look similar, because the second will disguise itself as the first.

Good leadership should permit as much of the first as possible, and stamp out the second.

The tips in the article, which are great, make it much easier to quickly distinguish between these two cases.

100%. Thanks for reading!

My partner actually wrote about the second case you described as well: https://staysaasy.com/management/2020/07/01/Dont-Block-Proje...

This is usually just an excuse to entrench status quo behavior. People don’t like being confronted with needs for radical change, so they invent reasons why it would violate social norms to espouse anything perceived that way.

Challenging the established plan at the 11th hour is often critical because nobody validated the plan would succeed with customers or actually was viable with engineers etc.

Lobbying to get something in the roadmap may be critical because the whole process is bullshit politics and nobody is actually solving customer needs.

The bigger and more bureaucratic the company, the more urgently needed an agent of chaos really is.

“Don’t create chaos” sounds patriarchal to me. Keep papa company happy. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t go against the grain. Just keep your head down, forget your creativity, don’t lobby hard for what’s right.

I especially hate that this article associates it with being a manager or leader.

“A good leader just smiles and eats the shit, doesn’t stir up controversy.” That’s not any leader I want to work for or become.

The 11th hour change was just one example of causing chaos provided by a leader, but for the sake of argument, let's focus on it. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a product does ship next week, there are some pretty critical flaws, and we're doing some final review with leadership. I think we can still raise red flags and follow the author's advice. The author of this article is suggesting there's a good way and a bad way to handle this.

Bad way: "Back to the drawing board, we can't ship, this is garbage."

Good way: "I see some serious errors here, let's outline them and make a plan to address these specifically."

I really like article's litmus test because of this - "Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it." That's not suggesting that there can't be a change of plan.

I think your reply is a bit disingenuous though, because whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly. Otherwise all you are talking about is having good manners and diplomacy, which is not what the article is talking about.

If you propose the changes, you’re rocking the boat. And if they are urgent and can’t be overlooked for the convenience of sticking to the status quo for others, you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.

The article’s advice is about reading the room and doing what won’t upset the others, because if we reinforce this as a norm, then existing leaders don’t feel threatened, and we can all celebrate mediocrity and keep our jobs. The more we advocate for this to have a hallowed place in our most critical workplace social norms, the more that the dissent of intellectual integrity can be quelled, so people write like this to popularize that tribal norm.

> whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly.

Respectfully, I disagree. One scenario results in a plan, one doesn't, and that's a core distinction between the two scenarios. Whether it's a good plan or not is a subject of opinion, but its presence or absence is not.

> you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.

That's not true in my experience. It sounds like you've worked in some pretty rough places!

Not really. I’ve worked in three large publicly traded ecommerce companies that are household names, one large education tech company, two startups and a defense research lab after grad school.

All of them were identical in this regard. What defines a “good plan” or what qualifies as “good leadership” is fully subjective and at the discretion of leaders most interested in entrenching their power.

This also has a lot of research behind it, eg like in the book Moral Mazes.

The description you give sounds like an extreme outlier that doesn’t have relevance for that vast majority of modern workplaces.

(OP - thanks for reading!)

Yup, that was exactly the idea ^^. Plans need to change all the time, that's expected and just a part of life. The goal is just to raise red flags in a way that adds clarity and helps people to productively adjust.

We should remember that conflict does not equal chaos.

A good leader should not be afraid of conflict and keep open to conflicting ideas to his/her own while still being assertive about his/her ideas.

To introduce conflict, a leader does not necessarily resort to chaos. As an example, a leader in an oligarchic group can resort to persuasion to sway votes to his/her peers instead of causing discord between his/her follower/team-member and his/her peer's follower.

Some of my personal experience tells me that persuasions are easier for an opposing ideas to seep into the whole group rather than direct confrontations.

Whether it’s well managed conflict or chaos will totally be opinion / politics based. In fact, it’s articles like this one that are exactly the type of thinking used to politically argue that something which is in reality just well managed conflict about urgently needed changes is instead FUD-style disinformation or chaotic unprofessional communication.

“Chaos” is in the eye of the beholder and “don’t create chaos” means stay subservient to the eye of the beholder.

> Don’t rock the boat. Don’t go against the grain. Just keep your head down, forget your creativity, don’t lobby hard for what’s right

I don't think that is what the article is implying in any way.

It’s not implying it, rather it’s the explicit central premise. It’s just dressing it up in other language to appear like a reasonable social norm.

If you come right out and say you’re using “avoid chaos” to steamroll reasonable dissent, your control will be undermined, because people can’t be seem aligning with an overt tyrant.

But if you say “avoid chaos” doesn’t steamroll reasonable dissent (even though it does), now people can argue, debate, obfuscate, whatever and rationalize they aren’t doing anything wrong by aligning with you, at least not publicly.

In this limited management context it seems like sound advice.

In a broader view I think most people err far too much on the side of order. A greater respect, tolerance and appreciation of chaos and it's utility is something almost everyone could stand to learn and benefit from.

This is one of those messages that seem obvious, that it is hard to deeply appreciate, until one works underneath a director or boss that creates chaos.

If you and your org aren't willing to confront and fix these behaviors... run, don't walk, to the nearest exit.

I can relate to this. I used to work in a role with multiple bosses (co-founders) who all held the same job title and description.

They didn't sync up well, were spread across time zones, and would often disagree. So, depending on who you talked to there would be a different set of priorities and requirements. And one would call a meeting to review/challenge the others designs and decisions. It was very chaotic and stressful.

Pretty interesting - I'd love to hear more about the "how to scale as individual piece below"?

I have highlighted a relevant excerpt below.

My experience is that a lot of this has to do with the cohesiveness of the founders. If there are 2 or 3 founders and they all acknowledge the necessity to scale, engage support, and seek out mentorship, there is potential to scale.

Alternatively (and more frequently), one founder (let's say the CEO) may be able to scale a bit more than others (story-telling, pitching vision can grow overtime) or could benefit from bringing on experienced leadership to replace founders/other leaders.

In this case, early employees/forward get hired over but they likely have an equity reward relative to the risk (joining early). Wouldn't it then be best for these early employees to hone in on roles and opportunities to scale as opposed to trying to scale into roles they probably aren't qualified to do overtime (but were owning early on -- i.e., engineering, operations, HR, product, etc.)?

"You’re heading a key function at your 25-person startup. Maybe you’re head of engineering; maybe you run marketing. Hell, maybe you’re the CEO. You kick ass and your startup grows fast – and with that growth, the needs of the company evolve. Things in the new world are now going okay, but perhaps not optimally. Eventually, the CEO and board of directors get in a room to discuss what to do.

I can tell you what will happen in this room. The board will discuss your performance, and compare it to the performance of other, hypothetical executives – just as if you were interviewing for your own job. In your favor: you are a known quantity, presumably viewed as talented, and perhaps even a close friend. Against you: you haven’t done this before, and we need results now."

I had an ex-boss who, on the intranet messaging system, had a profile which said 'I cause confusion' (or something that like that. My memory is vague.).

That's rough... I think it speaks to the fact that some people unfortunately view causing chaos as a virtue (because it feels like doing "real work").

No no, you misunderstand.

I didn't put that label on him. That was a description he chose for himself on his (intranet version of) social media profile.

Nobody thought you put the label on. They were speculating on why someone would ascribe that label to themselves.

Yup exactly

Hail Eris

Came here for this. Fnord

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