Failings of the optimizing achievers

Optimizations in its very essence are like a surgical knife. They’re made for one specialized purpose. They’re very efficient and successful in delivering their given context; a surgery.

Due to the contextual nature of optimizations, they can cause failure when used outside of context. Beside the very inherent clumsiness of the tool, it creates some false sense of trust and security.

This type of tools; be it physical, or of ideological, can trick its user with high confidence due to how humans are motivated and driven to complete tasks.

Achievements and success feed into our primal sense of confidence. It can be very difficult to reset into a different context when the scenery has changed outside of the control of the optimizing achiever*.

Achiever might find themselves blaming the changing environment, its drivers, motivators. From a successful actor, to a grumpy, frustrated, conservative old timer.

Battling this is as troubling as calibrating PIDs of a complex machinery, when you are the very machinery itself. Go one side too much, become a skeptic of your own confidence at every change, you become too malleable, a victim of every hostile move. Go the other side, you stay stagnant, holding onto the stories of a successful past.

A versatile approach might be to distinguish your achievements gained through optimization for the given context, and the ones achieved through operational excellence.

Operational excellence is when you self-monitor and create flows, whereas optimization is where you make do through hard work and adaptability in “a big dataset” of changing atmosphere of chaos.

Operational excellence grants you power and credit through the control of the very jargon, of the way the story unfolds. Optimization grants you only temporary glory, a tap on the shoulder.

This task was written as a retrospection by a developer struggling in organizational changes and ways of working.

— To be continued —