James King

When I spoke to some engineers once, they talked about stress testing things beyond their breaking point. The mantra was “keep increasing things until it breaks, so you know when that will be – then work out how to predict and mitigate trouble before it occurs”.

But doing so assumes you can replace, repair and strengthen the thing you break. Otherwise you just break something and learn nothing. In fact I think that is the difference between good engineers, who find tolerances and capacity, versus bad ones who sign off that things seemed to work when they were there last, or worse, who just break things and ask for replacements.

I think many safety systems rely on the learning from good engineers, breaking things in practice, rather than just a bad run of events.

But should we break people?

Where I think it gets interesting though, is when we apply this to people rather than engines.

I have heard that athletes might push themselves find their breaking point in training, but I assume it is a deliberate action with a planned recovery. I have never tried it myself.

Maybe experienced athletes, commandoes and others learn to predict their breaking point in the future to avoid it, push closer to it or even extend it. But the key is in the recovery and learning, not in the finding that breaking point and then staying broken.

Going agile and breaking people

A long time ago though, I noticed a pattern when large organisations went agile. They would “go agile” with a pilot group and it would be really successful. They would add more teams and more empowerment and the successes kept coming .. until they didn’t. The cause was good people being unleashed to take on more responsibility.

The good people would be successful at first but the success was credited to “agile transformation” when it was actually “this good person feeling obliged to do enough to keep things working”.

But the failure came when the person or people reached their breaking point. They would either leave, ask to step back, or just wear out. And when they did, all the things that they were driving so successfully seemed to start to crumble. Then other good people would step into a broken system (our “new way of working”) and then the system would inevitably fail. People thought it was agile failing but in fact is was unsung heroes eventually stepping out after mitigating issues for some time.

I wrote that article 10 years ago – https://kingsinsight.com/2015/06/03/if-you-want-to-scale-agile-watch-out-for-the-heroes-they-might-bring-you-down/

Break/fix/grow more generally

Since then I have found it is also a pattern in change management and leadership growth generally.

Good people like to help the team (or wider organisation) succeed. They “go the extra mile” and they are pro-active.

This is great and it works well for people’s entire careers by creating a virtual circle or pattern:

• The person sees a gap in a process, team capability or task
• The person pro-actively takes the action needed to fill the gap
• Often they change the way things are done, but sometimes they take on more work to keep things working well
• They get stressed at times because of this and they feel good when things come together
• The “good stress” helps them grow and become resilient and the feeling good helps give them more energy. They also often get a good reputation that leads to more opportunity
• The person sees another gap and the cycle continues

But we need to manage it

The problem comes when they, like me, feel personally responsible instead of learning to take a system wide view. When I was younger I fixed a lot of things through hard work and arrogance about my talent. It worked well quite often, but also meant that systemic problems were mitigated rather than resolved.

This works but is not optimal and is not scalable as people grow. So what really needs to happen is small tests and “breaks” that build confidence and resilience, not long periods of stress and hanging on, followed by good people getting burnt out.

Breaking things in small steps can involve metrics to see where the stress is appearing, as long as it is accompanied by fixing the system when the stress appears, rather than hoping good people will just work harder.

Breaking things in small steps can also involve coaching and personal growth, as long as it is accompanied by making it safe to fail and adding learning to the post-recovery experience.

So one thing I am focusing on today is to notice when good people, who are the most critical resources, get the chance to stretch, with the protection against stretching too far at one time.