Chapter 16. Gaming the System
On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard.
The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full-size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in a moment of desperation.
It was end game. The time in the project where you pay for every single shortcut youâve taken, for every specification you didnât write, and for all the warnings from engineers that youâve ignored. All the data is grim. Bug arrival rates are skyrocketing while bug resolution rates are pathetic because, uh, well, engineers are still finishing features.
Like I said, grim.
The endless stream of bad news was grating on everyone. We were already three weeks into working weekends with no end in sight. A normally pleasantly pessimistic engineering staff had gone uncomfortably quiet. Everyone was staring at âthe date we canât missâ and thinking, âI guarantee weâre missing it.â
I needed a game.
An Entertaining System
As I said at the beginning of this book, geeks are system thinkers. We see the world as a very complex but knowable flowchart where there are a finite number of inputs that cause a similarly finite set of outputs. This impossible flowchart gives us a comfortable illusion of control and an understanding of a chaotic word, but its existence is a handy side effect of a life staring at, deducing, ...
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