Photo by RDNE Stock project.
We’ve never watched a single episode of the TV series about the 401. But we know it exists because our family outside of Canada likes to ask us about it. Why are there so many accidents? And is it really the deadliest highway in North America? Or just the busiest? And do you drive with the kids on that road? Aren’t you terrified?
Honestly, when we’re driving along the 401, we try not to spend too much time on these questions. It takes our full collective attention to merge safely onto the highway and then exit as quickly as possible.
The highway is 18 lanes across. Eighteen! That’s nine going one way and nine going the other way and if that seems like too many lanes, you’re correct. It is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. To distract us from the abject terror of driving on this very large highway, we imagine the civic planning meetings that got us to this point.
Too much traffic? No problem. Once we add the 11th lane, then we’ll be in a good spot. What’s that? Still too much traffic? OK, OK, here’s an idea. How about 12 lanes? That oughta do it. Yeah, 11 didn’t work out but now that we’ve got 12, we should be all set.
By the time you get to your 17th lane and 18th lane, the entire table is face-palming, right? And poor Dave is sitting there waiting for a chance to speak and when he finally does he says, “Listen, I know this is gonna sound negative, but we tried that approach before and it’s never worked out. Not the 11th or 12th time nor the 15th or 16th time. So maybe we’re gonna need to consider a different approach? Y’know?”
And the person running the meeting, we imagine, says, “Look, Dave. I understand what your concern but we haven’t tried this before. Sure, we tried adding other lanes. But no one has ever had bold enough vision to imagine an 18th lane. You can’t see it yet because you’re just not thinking big enough.”
Maybe this one will stick
It’s easy to goof about how you can get to your 18th lane and never really address any of the underlying planning issues that got you in this mess. The dialog sorta writes itself. But this doing-the-same-thing-and-expecting-different-results isn’t limited to massive highways.
Friends, if your org is on your seventh layoff or Lord-have-mercy, your 82nd re-org, we suggest that it’s time to take a hard look at your underlying planning issues. Between layoff six and seven, what’s changed? Do we have a theory about why this is the key to reducing organizational gridlock? Metrics we’d expect to move to let us know we’re on track?
If you ask the SLTs in question, they will hit you with a veritable bingo card of folksy management. Listen, it’s just common sense. The team’s gotten soft. It’s time to shake things up. Bring in some hard-chargers. New blood. A-players. We have a lot of people who probably shouldn’t be here. High performers can’t be expected to work alongside low performers. It saps their motivation. We need to cull the herd. Trim the fat. Tighten our belts. And any number of other phrases that sound cooler while wearing a Stetson.
We stay in business because so much of how you motivate teams, drive innovation, and get a group of humans aligned around doing really cool shit is counterintuitive.
You may have wonderful people in your life who remind you to wear a coat when it’s cold out so you don’t catch a cold, but that’s not how colds work. Even though, for a long time, this was common sense. And business is like this, too. There’s a bunch of stuff that sounds good, that sounds like common sense, that seems like it should work. But doesn’t. And it helps to be able to spot it.
Adding another lane to the highway should reduce traffic, but it doesn’t. Another layoff should get the org back on track, but it doesn’t. And one more re-org should align our ways of working to our strategic objectives, but it doesn’t.
Trillion-dollar baby
One of the most visible efforts at this common-sense management approach in modern history has gotta be the DOGE-ification of the US federal service. It’s worth looking closely at it because, by rights, it should be the singular best proof point for this whole system of thought. As a leader with a theory of how to make an organization more effective, no leader in history has been more set up for success than Elon was, here.
Massive profile and institutional support for the incoming leadership. Unspeakable, probably illegal, levels of decision-making authority and autonomy. A workforce very oriented around understanding and adapting to changing priorities with a new administration. And such an immense global financial and personnel footprint that even incremental wins will amount to billions of dollars to celebrate.
Like. Elon. Honeybear. The President of the United States called your work The Manhattan Project of our time. Your mandate was standard-issue common-sense-management stuff: cut spending, eliminate bureaucracy, yadda yadda. This was a lay up. You said you were gonna cut $2 trillion from the budget and you said you’d do it quickly. All it would take is someone with the moxie to go hardcore.
So anyway as you’ve probably heard, DOGE is dead now. Not triumphantly wound up, just disappeared like a failed experiment no one wants to talk about. And in terms of impact? Welp. The federal workforce is in disarray and the staff who remain are in rough shape. Research and scientific progress has been set back years, maybe decades. Boston University ballparked about a quarter million dead kids back in June, and the number’s gone up since then. The $2 trillion weirdly never turned up, even on their own cooked scoreboards. Overall, spending is actually up a bit.
And you know? None of us — not us writing it or you reading it — are actually surprised. Right?
Cassandra is no fun at parties
We called it, if you want receipts. We called this particular shot back in March, when DOGE was ascendant. And we called the general question of his approach years ago. Honestly, those weren’t even hard calls, and we were far from the only ones to see it. If he would stop inflicting new management horrors on the world, we’d be delighted never to write his name again.
But he’s an emblem of a bigger problem that we do need to write about. This idea of shaking things up. Knocking some heads. Make hard calls, it’s not personal it’s business, that’s above your pay grade, in my day people would never speak to their boss that way. This management philosophy built around making workers afraid again. That’s not specific to any one asshat. That’s a broad spectrum, fact-resistant, airborne toxic management disease.
And sooner or later, it’s gonna show up in a meeting you’re in.
Someone is going to say something about getting real. Probably someone senior, but insecure, who wants to sound tough because they’ve confused aggression for competence. They’ll say that your team is losing their edge, getting soft, becoming too comfortable. The way this disease takes root in an organization is that this feels like a hard frame to disagree with. And if you accept it, either by agreeing or by staying quiet, then part two is inevitably a set of proposals to make your team less…comfortable.
Are we saying no team has ever gotten complacent? No. Individuals, teams, whole companies frequently lose the plot. They confuse luck and timing for wisdom and excellence. Money hides all kinds of sins until it stops flowing, and organizations can take on a lot of debt by not addressing problems when they’re small and manageable. The petty tyrants often overstate the amount of waste they see, but we’re not saying waste doesn’t exist.
We’re saying this approach to addressing it, this common-sense scare-em-straight chest thumping is not a management theory, it’s a bad fucking joke. We’re saying that if it shows up in a meeting you’re in, the single best thing you can do for yourself, your team, and your org, is to laugh that clown right out of the room. Deny it any organizational oxygen. Not because we can’t hear out different approaches. But because this approach has been heard out. Thousands of times. It predictably and repeatably sucks. Anyone suggesting it is telling you that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
You don’t need to build a 19th lane on the 401 to know that it won’t solve things. You don’t need to hear it out. You don’t need to spend some time defining measures for success. Not only will it not solve the problem, it will make things worse. And, worst of all: the time and money and physical and emotional labour you put into it take you away from the creative work you could be doing to imagine and build better ways to get around. That energy is precious. And protecting it? Well, that’s just common sense.
— Melissa & Johnathan
