Part of The Intelligence Series, about working and building with AI.
Somewhere in the move into leadership, the read on me changed. Big ideas, smart, and they don’t always get implemented.
This was news to me. Years of building things and getting them out the door, and no one had ever described me that way. Then the job changed.
Over the years since, more than one leader sat me down and told me some version of it. I was fortunate that they cared enough to help me understand it. Most people never get told the thing that’s being said about them.
And I still had a hard time seeing it. From the inside it made no sense. I knew what we had delivered. I knew which systems were running because my teams were the ones who put them there. But the people telling me weren’t wrong either, and I didn’t have a better explanation to hand them.
The job had changed shape. When I was the one making the thing, the idea and the work lived in the same place. That’s not the case when you’re in leadership. And plenty of the ideas aren’t even mine. Things only move when the thinking exists outside of someone’s head so the rest of the team can act. Making that happen is the job.
I find it difficult to spend my time on things that take a long time for me and not for others. Eventually I figured out that it wasn’t about the work being unpleasant. It was about the cost of doing the work.
An idea often shows up in my head more or less complete. I can see the whole shape of it, how it connects to three other things, where it breaks. That part is fast and it has always been fast. Then comes the part where I have to turn it into something another person can hold. A document. A deck. A diagram that makes the idea obvious to someone who can’t read my mind.
I’m good at that part. I can build a clean deck and I care about how it looks. The problem is that producing one takes me a week.
A week to render something I saw in ten seconds. And during that week the next three ideas arrive, and they’re also good, and now I’m on day four of five with the first one while the queue builds behind it.
So the ROI didn’t always work.
When I wrote code for a living, none of this came up. I had the idea and I built it. Nothing had to cross from me to anyone else first, and I got fast at going from one end to the other because code is a translation I happen to do quickly. I wrote about giving that up in The Loss of Leadership.
Then the job became getting the thinking out of my head, and for years my answer to that was a whiteboard. Put me in front of one with a marker and I can take a group anywhere. I draw while I talk, the picture builds as the explanation builds, and they land together.
That works because I’m standing right there, clarifying and answering questions in real time. The whiteboard never has to carry the idea alone, because I’m next to it doing the part it can’t.
Then my teams went hybrid, and I kept moving up. Those two push in the same direction: the more distributed your people are and the higher you sit, the more your thinking has to travel as a document or a deck. It has to hold up when you’re not in the room.
That’s where it comes apart. An artifact has to do the job I would otherwise do by being present, and producing one is exactly the work that costs me a week.
The obvious move at that point is to hand it off. Or something short of it: draw the thing on a whiteboard, have someone else write it up, let them carry it the rest of the way. That works sometimes. It also still costs time, and now it spends someone else’s, because their hours and attention go to my idea instead of whatever they were already doing.
Mostly what happened was simpler than that. I suffered through the week, or the thing didn’t get made.
Those ideas weren’t sitting in someone else’s queue. They just never got out of mine.
This can be hard to see from the outside. You can’t observe a rate. You see what arrived and what didn’t.
It isn’t that the ideas were invisible. People heard them. What they saw was that not all of them landed. Then the next idea would arrive, and the one before it would look like something I’d walked away from because it wasn’t any good. Given what’s visible from outside, that’s a fair assumption.
I made the same assumption about myself, which is worse, because I had all the information. When one didn’t land I took it as a verdict on the idea, or on me, and went to the next one.
Back in April I wrote a story called The Thinking Partner, about what changed when I could finally think out loud at the speed I actually think. In it I described the weak half of my wiring as thin. Was the capacity ever missing? It never had been.
Thin is the wrong word. It’s slow.
Thin means the capacity was never there. Slow means it’s there and it costs me more than I’m sometimes willing to pay. Those two produce identical output for most of a career, which is why I couldn’t tell them apart, and they are not the same problem at all. One of them is a limit. The other is a tax.
You work around a limit. You stop paying a tax the moment the cost of it changes.
The cost of it changed.
Now I can talk, and the idea comes out at the speed it showed up, mess and self-corrections intact. Something on the other end turns it into the artifact. Work that used to cost me a week costs me half a day.
It isn’t free. It still takes real time, real judgment, and a lot of revision, and the parts that are mine remain mine to do. It’s condensed, not eliminated. The difference is that the work now fits in a space I can afford, which means things get finished that used to get abandoned.
And you’re reading the proof right now.
This newsletter goes out every Tuesday morning. This one is number twenty-seven.
I couldn’t have done that before the toolset I have now. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. It would have taken too long. A weekly deadline, in public, where every miss is visible, is precisely the kind of sustained sequential commitment the old read on me said I’d never hold. And the version of me that needed a week per piece would have been right not to start, because that time was never going to exist.
Faster ideas are not better ones. Mine aren’t. I generate a high volume of ideas, and plenty of them are still wrong, still exactly as wrong as they were before.
What changed is that I can now build an idea fast enough to find out whether it’s good or bad. That used to cost a week I wasn’t willing to spend, so they never got tested. They stayed possibilities. They sat in a notebook or in the back of my head with all their potential intact, because nothing ever put them under load.
An idea that failed a test is worth more than an idea that never took one.
If any of this sounds familiar, the useful question is which one you’ve got. There’s a big idea of your own you keep not finishing, and you’ve probably filed it under discipline or interest, because that’s where the filing system puts it by default. Maybe that’s right. But time it once. Measure how long it actually takes you to turn something you can already see into something another person can hold. If that number is ugly, consider that you might not have a character problem. You might have a rate problem, and rate is the thing that finally got cheap.
Every single Tuesday. Six months and counting.
Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.