Steel Bending Lessons for Leadership

I bend steel with my bare hands. 

No heat. No tools. Just my hands and a couple of pieces of suede for protection. 

I bend steel with my hand and it makes me a better developer of technology. You might be thinking “How?” Or “Why?” The less articulate amongst you perhaps, “Huh?” 

The physical experience of bending a piece of steel that’s beyond your previous capacity is very much like that of tackling a really difficult technological problem, but in moments not months. Actually if you’ve done anything that was really difficult and worth it, you’ll recognize the pattern. 

The Experience of Bending Steel in Four Phases

The Brick.

First its like trying to bend a brick. As you start to apply force to the steel bar, nothing happens except a feeling of intense discomfort where your flesh presses into the steel that ramps up and down with your own effort . If the bar is too far beyond you, that may be all you ever feel as you repeatedly bounce off the unaffected steel. It’s pretty much what you’d expect to feel when trying to bend steel with flesh and bone. 

The Spring.

If you keep ramping up the pressure you’ll suddenly, joyously feel the steel start to move. Your eyes have probably closed without you realizing it by now. Your entire body is tense from head to toe as all 650 or so skeletal muscles stretched across 360 or so joints in your body try to find a way to coordinate that will turn you briefly into a solid enough machine to crush a piece of steel. 

But as you press harder and harder the steel moves less and less until it finally stops and again feels immovable. This can be incredibly discouraging. Here is where the inexperienced stop in total disappointment to find the steel unchanged as you’ve only managed to bend it within the spring tolerance of the steel and it’s bounced back as if you were never there.

The experienced know that this is where the real bend begins. You are so close! 

The Decision.

Now is the time to check in with the discomfort and differentiate between simple intensity of sensation and warnings for lasting damage. Now is the time to decide whether to save it for another day or lean in and give it all you’ve got. 

The experience of going all in on a bend is difficult to put into words. As best I can: It’s like the world whites out to all senses except the feeling of pressure where the steel is and your whole consciousness drops away or perhaps is funneled into the mental command that might roughly translate to “MORE/NOW/CRUSH!”, but is less an utterance and more a sustained torrent - all the mental/chemical/electrical energy your brain can send through the wires. 

The Melt.

Slowly, so much more slowly than that first springy movement, so slowly the distraction of questioning its reality can cause you to fail, the steel will begin to move again. If you can persist, the speed of that movement will grow quickly until the last impression is one of the steel melting in your hands. And indeed, if you touch the bend to your cheek you’ll find it hot.

Steel Bending Lessons for the Technological Edge. 

The lessons from steel bending are surprisingly deep and numerous but I’ll focus on three. 

1. Know When to Lean In. 

In my experience all worthwhile, hard things seem to follow the steel bending pattern of No Progress -> Some progress -> No Progress -> Very Slow Progress -> Whoosh and We’re Flying. When working at the edge of what is currently possible or at your team's edge, it is crucial to develop a sense for where you are in the process. 

Are you at The Brick bouncing off a project that is too far beyond your team for the moment? Are you at The Spring of a project where you’ve had the first breakthroughs - a place to celebrate, but also to prepare for more, perhaps much more, effort to come? Or are you right on the verge of the Melt, just a touch away from feeling the problem yield? Where you are in this process impacts everything from how you communicate and set expectations up and down the chain to resource allocation and hiring decisions.

2. Develop Your Instincts. 

Knowing something in theory is much different than knowing it from direct experience; Knowing something beyond your brain and down into your body is different still. 

When my mind is reflexively telling me something can’t be done. I know in my guts and my body and my hands: that’s just my mind talking. I can remind myself of this daily rather than on the monthly, yearly timescale of ambitious technology development. That matters, because building an instinct takes repetition.

3. Build, don’t Break Your Team. 

You can’t bend steel at the limits of your capability more than once a week or so. The whole human system needs time to recover. If you give it that time you come back better and stronger. If you bend close to your capability more often you’ll get weaker and weaker. Then you will break.

It’s important to ask your team to lean in when it will count. If you've got them running at tolerance already they'll have nothing more to give.

It’s equally important to move into a period of less than business as usual for a time after a great effort. If the body knows you will give it time to recover and come back stronger it will give you access to more of the strength you already have. It’s the same with your team.