I’ve mentioned in the past how emphasizing Mean Time To Resolution over Mean Time Between Failures can be just as effective in human relationships as it is in computer operations engineering.
When I think about it, I see that there are many other engineering principles that can serve as insightful metaphors for human system designs as well.
I’m not going to go into any detail today, because I think you’re smart enough to figure out how to apply these to your specific situation. But here are a just a few of those engineering principles for you to consider in your human relationships.
🔵 We carefully configure caches to avoid repeating costly calculations, but we regularly override and invalidate our team members’ decisions, positioning ourselves as a mandatory external lookup for their future queries.
🔵 We minimize coupling between components in software design, but our workflows are so intertwined, no team can make internal changes without creating ripple effects into other team’s processes.
🔵 We encourage parallel asynchronous processing to maximize data throughput, but we demand real-time synchronous meetings to report progress and make decisions.
🔵 We promote redundancy in hardware to avoid single points of failure, but we celebrate the individual hero engineer who single-handedly resolves the most challenging production issues.
🔵 We avoid premature optimization of software code without real-world runtime data to guide us, but we introduce onerous gates and checklists into our processes to conform to some theoretical “best practice.”
I’m curious. What other engineering metaphors do you find that translate well into leadership? I’d love to read your ideas in the comments.
And if you’d like to explore any more of these in detail for your personal leadership, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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