Go-to People Considered Harmful
Blog: Form Follows Function
Okay, so the title’s a little derivative, but it’s both accurate and it fits in with the “organizations as systems” theme of recent posts. Just as dependency management is important for software systems, it’s likewise just as critical for social systems. Failures anywhere along the chain of execution can potentially bring the whole system to a halt if resilience isn’t considered in the design (and evolution) of the system.
Dependency issues in social systems can take a variety of forms. One that comes easily to mind is what is referred to as the “bus factor” – how badly the team is affected if a person is lost (e.g. hit by a bus). Roy Osherove’s post from today, “A Critical Chain of Bus Factors”, expands on this. Interlocking chains of dependencies can multiply the bus factor:
A chain of bus factors happens when you have bus factors depending on bus factors:
Your one developer who knows how to configure the pipeline can’t test the changes because the agent is down. The one guy in IT who has access to the agent needs to reboot it, but does not have access. The one person who has access to reboot it (in the Infra team) is sick, so now there are three people waiting, and there is nothing in this earth that can help that situation.
The “bus factor”, either individually or as a cascading chain, is only part of the problem, however. A column on CIO.com, “The hazards of go-to people”, identifies the potential negative impacts on the go-to person:
They may:
- Resent that they shoulder so much of the burden for the entire group.
- Feel underpaid.
- Burn out from the stress of being on the never-ending-crisis treadmill.
- Feel trapped and unable to progress in their careers since they are so important in the role that they are in.
- Become arrogant and condescending to their peers, drunk with the glory of being important.
The same column also lists potential problems for those who are not the go-to person:
When they realize that they are not one of the go-to people they might:
- Feel underappreciated and untrusted.
- Lose the desire to work hard since they don’t feel that their work will be recognized or rewarded.
- Miss out on the opportunities to work on exciting or important things, since they are not considered dedicated and capable.
- Feel underappreciated and untrusted.
A particularly nasty effect of relying on go-to people is that it’s self-reinforcing if not recognized and actively worked against. People get used to relying on the specialist (which is, admittedly, very effective right up until the bus arrives) and neglect learning to do for themselves. Osherove suggests several methods to mitigate these problems: pairing, teaching, rotating positions, etc. The key idea being, spreading the knowledge around.
Having individuals with deep knowledge can be a good thing if they’re a reservoir supplying others and not a pipeline constraining the flow. Intentional management of dependencies is just as important in social systems as in software systems.
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