Take Off Your Snowshoes

The right tool for the job is often the wrong tool for the job.

I walk on trails daily, and we get a lot of snow in the winter. 95% of the time I wear a pair of runners, because the snow is so packed that it's like pavement. It doesn't get cold enough to make my toes cold, either.

Every few days I come across people on the same trails trudging slowly with snowshoes and hiking poles.

Usually it's irrational for the conditions. They’re going 3x slower than they would with sneakers, and 2x slower than they would with winter boots.

I imagine them thinking: "There’s snow, so I should wear snow shoes". Or maybe they didn’t check the conditions. Or maybe they just had a romantic desire for snowshoeing that they had to fulfil.

Snowshoes in Organizations

A lot of bloat in organizations looks like this too:

Tools

We implement clunky tools that seem like they are “right for the job”, not realizing how much they are actually slowing us down—and how a “worse fit” but adaptable tool might serve us best. Similarly to having a romantic desire to snowshoe, we can feel a romantic desire to use a lot of technologies, or want to pick the tool that “checks the most features off the list”.

New Hires

This comes up in headcount planning: a new problem comes up like, “we need a better social media presence”, and the solution is “let’s hire a dedicated social media manager”. If you repeat this 50 or 100 times, you’ll have a very bloated and inflexible organization. Rather than hiring a snow shoe person (a deep specialist) to solve every problem, in many cases you could have just hired more sneaker people (great generalists who can help you solve a wide range of problems fast and adaptably). This is especially important in startups, which demand agility.

Process

Thirdly, this comes up as over-architected process: we have a desire to design robust processes that “check all the boxes” for our problem. We may have a romantic attraction to the idea of processes humming smoothly. But rigid process can result in people walking 3x slower in snowshoes. Even if process provides safety from errors, it’s often not worth the friction.

Bloat is Seductive

When people get frustrated with organizational bloat, it's often not overt waste that they are talking about.

They just see people walking 3x slower than they need to because they're wearing snowshoes.

They point out the inefficiency and people say: “Well, it’s snowing, of course I’m wearing snow shoes. I’m not going to wear sneakers. Are you crazy?”

It’s hard to convince people that they don't need snowshoes when there’s snow.

The dopamine reward I talk about in How to Finally Make Something is also incredibly seductive. Real creativity and real problem solving is deeply ambiguous and anxiety-inducing. Playing “match the tool to the problem” or “match the hire to the problem” gives us a reprieve: a concrete dopamine reward like what we get playing Sudoku or snapping together legos. We wish that if we selected the right two lego pieces, they would snap together and just work. But nothing ever works that way.

Snowshoe Groupthink

We are social creatures who continually underestimate how much we are motivated by our need to fit in. When we undertake an identity like “engineer” or “executive”, there is intense pressure to look the part. We look around at what others are doing and often mirror it. We know that we won’t be singled out if we do the same thing others are doing.

That’s how you get a team of 500 people all wearing snowshoes.

Caveats

There is of course a time and place where snowshoes are warranted:

1. It is rude to break fresh trails with your boots or sneakers, as it makes it bumpy for other walkers, skiers and bikers.

2. Sneakers are also just not going to serve you well in breaking trails. If you are exploring off the beaten path, you might need snowshoes.

It takes a nuanced understanding of the world to recognize when the situation calls for a specialized tool.