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Consider nearly any professional sports team and the relative effort that athletes put in. There's very little disagreeing on objectives our outcomes (score/pre
by phillipcarter 2y ago
Consider nearly any professional sports team and the relative effort that athletes put in. There's very little disagreeing on objectives our outcomes (score/prevent points, win games) and incentives are directly tied to this (win more games, get more money).
And yet when you listen to what some of the highest-performing athletes say, they'll readily admit they don't go 100% effort 100% of the time. In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do because you can burn out quickly, and then the opposing team who paced themselves a little better starts running over you. However, there are spurts of intense activity where you really do go 100%, and then you quickly dial that back again to make sure you have effort reserved in the tank. Ideally you get down to 0 at the end of the game, but it's also readily acknowledged that sometimes this is out of your control, and often in quite significant ways, like the football bouncing weirdly when it popped out of someone's hands.
All of this is to say that there's a deep obsession in the corporate world around efficient teams performing labor, but when you get into organized sports where there's literal teams fighting for an objective, they don't chase "efficiency" that would amount to "time doing useful things on the field". Such a measure would be ridiculous.
- pfortuny 2y agoRomario (soccer player from long ago) is a prime example of this. One of the best scorers ever, he was pretty much static most of the time. Until.
- bandofthehawk 2y agoI pretty much agree with everything you said, but trying to think of a counter example I'm reminded of the movie Moneyball. Reviewing the detailed stats of each baseball player vs. the cost of hiring them seems pretty close to measuring "time doing useful things on the field". I'm not sure how common this practice is in general in current professional sports.
- phillipcarter 2y agoIt's also worth pointing out that the "Moneyball" strategy ultimately failed because it produced a team who could succeed in the regular season, but fail consistently in the playoffs and ultimately lead to good players leaving due to salary constraints.
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y agoThis is exactly my issue with "sprints" and "Agile". As a business, even as a "project" the needs change between the start and the end of a project. Periods of low and high activity coincide with the various phases of things. Expecting some crunch time at the end and allowing some slack time at the start/middle allows a natural flow. Now managers have decided employees must work at a high level of output/at crunch time pace ALL the time. Any change in forecasted points, burn down results in meltdowns at the VP and higher levels, while actual expectations, requirements and deadlines are changed at the drop of a hat multiple times. Waterfall (not the sprint version of waterfall, the Deming version of waterfall with iteration between steps) gives a much more natural alignment of this while also ensuring the starting point doesn't get shifted at the whims of a VP with a "good idea" in the middle of a project.
- itronitron 2y agoIt's a general rule in operations management that you never run at more than 80% of your productive capacity. The extra 20% 'slack' is there to be used to ensure your throughput remains steady.
- sangnoir 2y ago> In fact, that's often a very bad thing to do because you can burn out quickly Bingo! Sport's teams avoid burning out the talent, because they are hard to replace. Corporates are ambivalent at best, with most accepting some churn for higher profitability. They may even pay for mental health benefits to ameliorate the effects, but remain happy with a "high performance" burnout culture where people cycle out after 18-24 months.