On the Details

I like details. They are kind of my bag. I’ve always thought that if you can get the little pieces right then the whole will fall into place. Like a rocket requiring tiny adjustments to keep it on track. Bury me in the minutiae and I’m pretty happy.  

Or to put it another way. I’m the kind of person who will review a bunch of code, go home, lie awake at night and then send a note asking you to change the order of the parameters on a method because it would be a tad more consistent to do it my way.

At the same time, I’m trying to keep an eye on the big picture. Where are we going, how are we different, how do we show up. People ask me these questions and expect answers. That’s part of being a leader. You do your best to point in a direction and persuade the people around you that it is the right one.

The net of all of this is that I’m forever jumping between these viewpoints. 100,000 feet down to ground level. Taking the elevator to the observation floor, and then worrying about the plumbing in the parking garage. I imagine it like some kind of schematic, forever breaking down into the floors, the beams, the foundations, the nails. Like you could somehow keep all of this in your mind’s eye, zooming in and out like some kind of mental Google map.

But it turns out that this is really hard to do. At least for me. Jumping from the javascript function to the business case is quite the leap. The context shifting alone will throw your head for a spin. As you try to scale yourself, you can’t keep it all in your mind. It’s too much.

I read Douglas Hofstadter’s G?del, Escher, Bach just as I was starting to develop my world view. To say that this was formative to me would be an understatement. I took away from it a bunch of things. But the prime was that behaviour arises from complexity. I thought that this meant that you should manage the details if you want to manage the output. Now I think that I got this wrong. Yes, behaviour emerges, but the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.

So I’m taking a deep breath. I’m being more thoughtful about where I jump in. I’m trusting others a bit more, letting them know that I have their backs and they can do this. I’m picking the places where I need to go deep. Not because I don’t want to, but the map has so many crossing lines, elevations and details. It’s too easy to get lost. 

To say that I’m finding this difficult to do is an understatement. Every cell in my body is telling me that I need to understand it all, have every answer, anticipate it all. But I don’t.

Small steps for the moment.