Don't Know Much

I'm having lunch with my oldest son today. He turned 25 this year! It was a big birthday for him, and a big moment for me too.

Looking over the last 25 years, I can't help but try to figure out what's changed. Am I the same guy I was at 21? Of course not.

A lot has changed. I think one of the most interesting changes has been in the last five years. I've decided I don't know very much.

Up until then, I studied a lot, learned as much as I could about something, then dove in and took charge. In the last year or two, however, as my startups start taking off and I finish up my agile/kanban book, looking back over all of it, I realize how little I actually know.

Please don't think I have a lack of self-confidence: I'm still the arrogant asshole I always was. But now I don't automatically assume that the world is the way I suppose it to be. Looking at dozens of teams get more productive -- and some fail -- has made me rethink what it means to construct success.

In the western world, many of us are model-builders. Give us the specs, the shape of the system in question, and we will build a mental model that emulates it. Then we work the model to see what happens. If that works, we move to the real world.

As an example, if you were coding a large client-server system in the 2000s, the first thing you should do is talk about your domain model -- which concepts are important enough to be in the system and which aren't. Based on that discussion, identifying concepts and their relationships, you could continue down the path of development.

Or take playing a video game. As we play, we construct a mental model of how things work. Pull that lever there and the door opens. Do these three things in order and you can do the forth, and so on. As our mental model gets more detailed, we are able to play the game better. Life, it seems, is just a series of models that we learn to some degree of fidelity and then master.

All of this is true, but as I continue writing my book and looking back on teams I have led or coached, it occurs to me that successful teams were always rebuilding models, not elaborating even more on pre-existing ones.

If you ever worked in a successful startup, you've seen project managers do what comes natural to them: take what works best from each project and combine it into a master "cheat sheet" of how good projects should operate. I have seen this several times. These are all well-meaning efforts, but in the end they all fail. They hurt more than they help.

Why?

I think it's because the human mind naturally models way far beyond anything that might be actually true. We can see a butterfly in a meadow in the morning and have a 3-page poem dedicated to it by lunch. Or -- a much likelier scenario -- we can observe 3 or 4 projects that do well, identify commonalities, then extrapolate that to the universe of projects.

But it's not just technology teams, that's the kicker. We all do this, and we do it in every part of our life, whether we realize it or not. It was learning about startups that taught this to me. You'll have an idea, try to sit around and decide if it's a "good" idea, then, based on that judgment, elaborate on it some more. Maybe you write some code. Maybe, if you're new to this, you write a lot of code. Perfect code. Use a bunch of TDD and have a rock-solid architecture and implementation. Make sure you're able to scale. Pick the best problem to solve. Use a data-driven implementation. Pick the right corporate structure. Hire a lawyer.

How can I say this nicely? There are a thousand things you can do in a startup that don't amount to jack shit. There are very few things that are important. All of them directly relate to getting customers.

You see, it's easier for us -- it's more natural for us -- to construct these models and flesh them out, turn them into reality -- than it is to actually see the real world. The real world wants an iPod app that farts when you push a button. You and I may want a super-colossal app that ends world hunger, but nobody else will buy or use what we make, so in the end it doesn't matter. But -- and here's the crazy part -- instead of adjusting our work habits to try to continually find out what the world wants, instead we create more and more complex models or what we think they should want. We love models a hell of a lot more than we love feedback.

That's why I think being stupid and humble is probably the best attitude for having a startup. I don't know what people want, I actively resist learning, and the best I can do is struggle with that truth.

The same probably goes for the rest of life as well, although most of us (including me) are uncomfortable looking at it like that.

I don't know much.