The Myth of the Master Molecule

Previous Post: On Mentoring

We love heroics! Something in the romantic image of a singular achievement trumping insurmountable odds appeals to us in a primal way. Somewhere deep inside our psyche is a preference for the spectacular moment of heroic triumph over a steady "boring" progress and an "invisible" victory.

However, for each moment of heroism, the celebration of it should be tempered by a deep introspection of how the need for that came to be and what to do to avoid such exigent situations in the future. This mode of thinking leads to moments of crisis when said extraordinary individual becomes unavailable due to some reason.

Remember the wise words of Sun Tzu:

“The greatest victory is that, which requires no battle.”

"Art of War"

Our affinity for taking heroic moments as the norm, leads to a lopsided framework for creating roadmaps and structure for a team/organization.

I learnt this lesson due to words of wisdom from a mentor.

Note: Due to various reasons (NDAs, privacy, personal relationships etc.), I'll try not to use real names of persons and companies involved (unless I have explicit permission from them to do so). I can neither confirm nor deny any assumptions about the real identities on parts of the reader. :)

As the team lead of a team of six people working on an up and coming backend service in a large organization, I had been careful about recruiting our team members to optimize for both a selection of deep vertical expertise needed as well as the ability to compliment default system generalist and troubleshooting skills across the board.

The goal was to create a group that could move with confidence on both broad and deep bets as we sought to increase the adoption, feature set, and utility of the service (whose first version was wildly successful). As part of the recruitment process, I had to make hard choices due to limited open slots in choosing the team members.

However, right before we were to embark on a big push to create the next version of our service, I was informed that one of the team members had decided to part ways. Their decision was a mix of the fallout from an unfortunate social incident at work as well as their own personal philosophy about the broader direction of the company. I respected their decision, but it left the team up the proverbial creek. Our roadmap included a particular enhancement to our feature set that required a deep knowledge possessed by the soon to depart team member. Also, in order to recruit them, I had to turn down another promising (but less tenured) engineer who embodied a lot of the values we as a team and company cherished. The other engineer found another team and had started with them.

I walked glumfaced into my 1:1 with a mentor (from a different org) and upon being asked about the sad face, unloaded about my situation in detail. First of all, just the cathartic act of voicing my dread and concern for the future helped me even out my state of mind. My wise mentor listened to me patiently and when they were sure that my agitation had gone down, they asked me in an even and quiet tone "What do you think is the main problem you are facing?"

"I'm about to lose an indispensable member of the team.", I said (almost as a reflex).

My mentor smiled and said "The graveyard is full of indispensable people."

There was a moment of silence as I wondered why my mentor would switch to such a seemingly morbid analogy. But I was slowly beginning to see the shape of the wisdom offered.

"Take a walk in the graveyard. Each gravestone marks the time on earth of a person, who, in their own way, was indispensable or essential to one or more things. They have passed on, yet the world still keeps on turning."

This simple statement opened the floodgates in my mind. We have ascribed so much value to individual heroic contributions that we (most times inadvertently) have created plans and roadmaps built around individual expertise and brilliance.

But, inherently, such plans come with built-in low bus factors.

Ideally, any healthy organization or team should be able to survive and overcome the loss of any individual team member. "The world should keep on turning" as my mentor so aptly put it.

Heroic endeavors should be the exception and not the norm in planning a team's future. Obviously, the loss was not trivial, but, as a leader, my responsibility was to factor that in and come up with a contingency plan to move ahead.

In keeping with the principle of graceful degradation under load, we achieved that by rescoping the version deliverables and creating a path for some interested team members to get cross trained in the specific expertise of our departing teammate. It took a couple of quarters more, but we were able to achieve the goals we had set out in our roadmap.

This brings me to the catchy title of this post "The Myth of the Master Molecule". In comics, superheroes like Wolverine have the ability to regenerate and heal from any wound. As a thought experiment, consider this:

"If Wolverine were to be sliced in exactly half (by some mad scientist's secret weapon / laser beam scalpel) ... would both halves regenerate into identical copies of Wolverine or would only one regenerate and the other wither away and die?"

The usual in-canon explanation given is that there's a "Master Molecule" and whichever half contains the master molecule, will regenerate and the other will die.

As the title points out, this is a myth!

Teams don't have master molecules. They have leaders, vision, culture, roadmap, and engines. Loss of a person fulfilling a role can be devastating to a team's immediate trajectory, but healthy teams recover by rescoping, adapting, and reorganizing.

My mentor taught me this valuable lesson and I've ingrained this into every team I've worked on or with.

Personally, this translates to a couple of habits I have developed over the years. The first is personal, one of training my replacement on the team from day one. By growing my teammates with potential to take on the leadership role, I have initiative to up my own game and play for bigger stakes. This bit of information also made recruiting potential teammates easier as they knew that I'd do everything to make sure they "level up".

The second is to make sure there are no "pockets" of specialized knowledge. There's documentation of assumptions, design, trade-offs, and operations through out the lifecycle of the projects and any given team member has sufficient knowledge about the whole thing to address issues and decisions without being blocked on a "leadership decision".

TL;DR

Teams are made up of people with expertise and roles. Loss of a team member (via churn or otherwise) shouldn't derail the team. A healthy team relies more on culture, vision, and contingency planning than the trap of siloed knowledge/expertise and heroic individual intervention.

Spread that knowledge, grow your teammates and remember ... the Master Molecule is a myth! :)

#mentoring #teamculture #churn #planning