Corporate Triage, Splinters, and LSD

Lately, I keep thinking along the lines of this metaphor: a tornado has blown through and collapsed a building on some poor fellow. He is dragged from the wreckage barely alive. He has brain damage, liver damage, a collapsed lung, renal failure, broken ribs, broken arms and a wicked splinter in his big toe.

There is a whole team of medical professionals attending to him and they are all focused in on that splinter.

LSD (*) works, they say, because it screws up the brain's ability to make discernments. What's loud, quiet, bright, dim, yellow, alive, inanimate? Everything becomes a swirl of equal importance.

There may be 1,000 things that are broken at a company. Strike that, there are 1,000 wrongs at every company. But 900 of them are probably splinters. Spend some time doing triage. Take off the kaleidoscope eyes - not everything is of equal importance. It's much better to spend time deciding what you're going to focus on and fix rather than just jumping in.

I'm reminded of two things. One is the WIMP principle - Why Isn't Martin Programming? There's some big project that's just beginning and the VP of Something or Other walks the cubicle farm and is dismayed to see people meeting and drawing on whiteboards. Why aren't they coding?

Which causes the second thing I was reminded of - a cartoon with the caption, "you guys start programming and I'll go find out what they want."

Ready, Aim, Fire. Any other order won't work out so well.

(*) a silly aside - Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds may or may not have been about LSD, but the title came from a schoolmate of Julian Lennon named Lucy. She drew a picture with stars and diamonds, and young Julian wrote the title Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds on it.