Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role

I had a role, we got a new CTO. This man could not stop wiggling things. Almost from day one. Not just small things but larger things too (let's migrate to a new issue tracker/wiki thing (back when Redmine was popular)). Flipping staff to new focus (eg: moved a help-desk staff to top NetAdmin, replacing Cisco Certified guy, which caused some havoc during an audit). What a mess, just had to put his fingerprint on everything!

Another time we got bought, merged into a new company, their CTO was our new CTO. In one of the initial meetings said "things won't change much" and, naturally, we didn't believe. She moved slow on all the things, methodical. Spent some time with each component team. It was months before we started making changes to better mesh with the new company. Very little chaos. Still admire that management style.

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely.

I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me.

I'm curious to know though whether or not the "author" used Gemini. I've been using Gemini a lot in the past year, and the writing sounds exactly like Gemini. But it's possible that all the models sound the same.

Edit: I'd like to add that I still liked the article and agree with it, and in general I find Gemini's writing style to be quite enjoyable.

Cannot cite Chesterton's fence too often.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

Sort of the antithesis of "Move fast and break things." I find it quite reasonable, but also despair that this advice even needs to be given. It's just basic "horse sense."

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a5/b3/10/a5b31033a487595f913639c35...

Solid article. Its worth calling out one thing thats maybe not emphasized enough though: while your contributions may start small make sure to publicize them appropriately. No need to cross post to every channel, but do post about it somewhere or socialize it somehow. Take a lot of time to craft a thoughtful and easy to read message.

Reputations are hard to earn and easy to destroy. Trust building at any new institution takes a lot of time and effort and can seem annoying. But just doing solid work and communicating about it consistently will make sure that like minded people notice you, vouch for you and then give you more opportunities.

There's one caveat to this – I think it's good to have bias to other people's actions early on in a new role. Taking on little projects that are already understood, taking on cleanups, things other people aren't volunteering for, is all a great way to find where some of the bodies are buried, understand how the team works, and prove yourself as a team player.

OT: This is the first time in a while that I’ve seen the phrase “load-bearing” used in a natural way. :-)

Thoughtful and to the point, I like it. I’m curious how long this process takes others. I’m in a new role for the first time in a while and trying to find the right balance between ramping up quickly and taking enough time for deeper learning.

This whole conversation reminds me of the Career Cold Start discussion [1]. I remember looking it up at some point when I started a new job. It was somewhat useful, but a lot of this is also hard won knowledge once you understand what actual "working at a company" entails. I'm only beginning to get that sense after 7 years work experience at different companies (small startups, scaleups and now F500).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16550270

This article is great advice that I should take if I ever get a role where I’m not going to be pressured into delivering some kind of low-value BS during Phase 2 that causes me to hasten the delivery the most useful organisational changes I can. I can’t help myself when the wick gets turned up.

As a result, after 15 years as a software engineer, I’m genuinely considering leaving the industry altogether because the only roles available to me are ones where I’m expected to deliver features rather than organisational change and growth. It’s like my heaps of experience have navigated my career into a cup-de-sac, and the only way out is backwards. I’m so jaded. Hopefully it’s a phase. I need a coach. Help.

Nobody talks about SEI anymore but their Capability Maturity Model informed and/or aligned with how I approach new-to-me projects whether that 'new role' is internal or a new employer.

CMM says that an engineering team whose processes aren't written down is level 0, and writing them down, even if they are batshit, gets you to level 1. Which leads to a fun bit of catharsis with the older employees where they get to say things like, "and then a miracle occurs".

Also writing things down gives someone else a peek into what's going on in your head and they can correct bad assumptions you have before they get cemented and take more effort to dig out of your thought processes.

So I always start with fixing the documentation, the runbooks, the CI process. It's a deliverable you can engage in without breaking production, it demonstrates mastery, it fixes a pain point that the more professionally mature members of the team care about, which gets you brownie points with the right sort of people. And it makes it easier to onboard the next person, or pick back up a project that has been on the back burner for several quarters.

TODOs emerge from the documentation or get explained away as unnecessary or wontfix. By the time you're touching something you have a better idea of why things are like they are, so you make up for 'lost' time.

Solid approach, although I’ve certainly seen many managers/staff that never actually break out of Phase 2

It’s critical to start showing some Phase 3 impact, even if not with a sledgehammer, before peers quickly loose faith

My experience as a long time corporate software developer is an exceptionally heavy bias towards inaction. There always seems to be fear and hesitation towards any kind of pivot or new initiative outside the rails of comfort. For example most corporate software developers cannot write an original new application from the ground up no matter how tiny or simplistic.

In such environments the people that do demonstrate a bias towards action tend to fall into one of two camps: those that wish they hadn't and those that are chasing attention.

The corporate developers who do have an overwhelming bias towards action, not the sociopath attention chasers, just end up contributing to open source projects unrelated to employment tasks.

This is why I like to build analysis tools first.

Making the ultimate visibility tool isn't just helpful to me as a newcomer. It may be useful to many veterans and people who haven't had the time to make this tool for themselves.

But I'm also somewhat biased towards laziness/observation.

Sort of the antithesis of "Move fast and break things." I find it quite reasonable, but also despair that this advice even needs to be given. It's just basic "horse sense."

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a5/b3/10/a5b31033a487595f913639c35...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16550270

This article is highly AI generated. The first paragraph is probably not AI generated, but the rest is definitely.

I also double checked on gptzero me and it 100% agrees with me.

Edit: I'd like to add that I still liked the article and agree with it, and in general I find Gemini's writing style to be quite enjoyable.

Cannot cite Chesterton's fence too often.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

OT: This is the first time in a while that I’ve seen the phrase “load-bearing” used in a natural way. :-)

Solid approach, although I’ve certainly seen many managers/staff that never actually break out of Phase 2

It’s critical to start showing some Phase 3 impact, even if not with a sledgehammer, before peers quickly loose faith

This is why I like to build analysis tools first.

Making the ultimate visibility tool isn't just helpful to me as a newcomer. It may be useful to many veterans and people who haven't had the time to make this tool for themselves.

But I'm also somewhat biased towards laziness/observation.

I think there's a middle ground. I used to be intensely critical of "doing things just to do things." The more perspective I get, the more I realize that, in a situation where things are not going right by whatever criteria you use to determine that (outside scope here), you need to make changes.

The right way to make those changes, or at least one way and I don't know a better one, is to perturb the system and see how it responds. This is necessarily risky and uncomfortable, and choosing the right things to perturb and the magnitude of those peturbations is a very, very tricky skill.

But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are, and you want to make it a more transparent system that can change, that risk and discomfort are necessary side effects.

This is of course very situational, and the methodical method is by far preferred, but if you'll permit a metaphor: you get dropped into an unfamiliar cockpit, and the controls are labeled in some foreign language. The plane is crashing, or at least you don't know if it is. What do you do? You wiggle things and hope that, in doing so, you don't crash, and you take very careful note of what happens.

The AI generated images are classic slop to the point of being actively distracting.

Definitely stinks of LLM phrasing, metering, and punctuation. But I'd say the ideas are the author's alone and they do cut through.

I think this comment is AI generated.

> a fence or gate erected across a road.

Except in many cases it is your responsibility to ask. If something has indefined legal status, and no documentation, it is a major red flag. Very often corruption, drug or people trafficking or other shady stuff.

If you want gate in middle of the public road, show the paperwork! Or I will call authorities!

I’ve always liked Chesterton’s Fire.

Maybe there’s a reason you’re on fire. Until you can say for sure, I will not put it out.

I will just be here roasting these marshmallows on your burning flesh. :)

Is it natural? It immediately made me suspect AI, if for no other reason than every human is avoiding it now so they’re not confused with AI.

Props to the author if they simply don’t care though.

Pangram says 100% AI generated.

Nobody talks about SEI anymore but their Capability Maturity Model informed and/or aligned with how I approach new-to-me projects whether that 'new role' is internal or a new employer.

Maybe your responsibility is to push back against the pressure put on you to deliver short-term.

It's also, inevitably, the newest people who are often the best at fixing basic documentation — because they're the ones who don't already know it.

I do the same. You work your way around the edges and get a genuinely good feel for the workflow while improving on it as you go.

In such environments the people that do demonstrate a bias towards action tend to fall into one of two camps: those that wish they hadn't and those that are chasing attention.

The corporate developers who do have an overwhelming bias towards action, not the sociopath attention chasers, just end up contributing to open source projects unrelated to employment tasks.

Definitely stinks of LLM phrasing, metering, and punctuation. But I'd say the ideas are the author's alone and they do cut through.

I think this comment is AI generated.

Pangram says 100% AI generated.

I think a bias towards inaction often creates better outcomes for everyone, but a bias towards action creates better career results. Most of these places evaluate performance based on impact, and it's way easier to spin any kind of activity or impact as positive impact than it is to spin inaction as positive impact.

Is it natural? It immediately made me suspect AI, if for no other reason than every human is avoiding it now so they’re not confused with AI.

Props to the author if they simply don’t care though.

> a fence or gate erected across a road.

If you want gate in middle of the public road, show the paperwork! Or I will call authorities!

The AI generated images are classic slop to the point of being actively distracting.

I’ve always liked Chesterton’s Fire.

Maybe there’s a reason you’re on fire. Until you can say for sure, I will not put it out.

I will just be here roasting these marshmallows on your burning flesh. :)

Maybe your responsibility is to push back against the pressure put on you to deliver short-term.

It's also, inevitably, the newest people who are often the best at fixing basic documentation — because they're the ones who don't already know it.

> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are,

While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.

The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are getting the most complaints and refunds, and so on.

[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example

A great philosophy for anyone who is pretending to know what they're doing that will still result in the plane crashing because you need to know how to fly a plane to fly a plane, and you need to know how to run a business to run a business.

FWIW I've been saying it in a sarcastic way since I was in my teens because of the Simpsons where Bart says "It's a load bearing poster." I assume if anyone uses the phrase (that isn't like a civil engineer) it probably came from here lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRVExJZKIT8

The responsibility to ask is literally the point of Chesterton's fence in my mind; when something looks out of place, and you think it doesn't make sense, you need to ask and learn about it. Sometimes the fence genuinely is unnecessary, and you can then proceed to dismantle it, but other times it might be useful for surprising reasons; it might be a mitigation for an issue that would require a much more time-consuming fix; and it might sometimes genuinely be unnecessary. The point of finding out this information is that the correct action is different for each of them; taking down the fence is fine if it's genuinely useless, and leaving it alone is necessary if it's genuinely useful for reasons you didn't anticipate. In the middle ground where there's a better solution that would take more time, the correct action depends on the answer to a follow-up: is replacing the fence the most important use of my time right now? I've experienced all three of these situations before (and both possible answers to the follow-up in the third case), so I've found this framework helpful for how to deal with the fences when I come across them.

How you ask the question matters just as much as whether you should ask it. Impressionable ears are everywhere and asking 'is there icecream in the house?' means that everyone is about to get a bowl or be upset.

Yes, Chesterton clearly hadn’t started working at a job where he was responsible for the security or accuracy of a process. “Then Marge calculates the late penalties by hand and enters them into the system? It’s fine, she … has a method?Really?”

The images are awesome, in an “I cannot believe someone would upload this to their site” kind of way.

The blueprint with the “LOAD-BEARING WALL!!!” includes nonsensical labels like “Dining Broom” and “Witchen”, and I am supremely disappointed that there isn’t a bubbling cauldron or pointed hat to be found.

What a ridiculous misrepresentation of the principle. In fact isn't that a good illustration of the principle? The fence is just sitting there, maybe it's annoying or slows you down but it isn't actually an acute problem or an emergency. All the more reason to not just rip it out without taking the time to understand why it's there.

My version was Chesterton's Facehugger.

Something which, as soon as you discover it, you should immediately respond by trying to remove it, without asking questions about where it came from or what its purpose might be.

I do the same. You work your way around the edges and get a genuinely good feel for the workflow while improving on it as you go.

My version was Chesterton's Facehugger.

Something which, as soon as you discover it, you should immediately respond by trying to remove it, without asking questions about where it came from or what its purpose might be.

I also repeat the process with people that I'm responsible for onboarding. But it becomes my responsibility to compliment their contributions to the project in those early days so that it quells their nervousness about me tapping the brakes on their Bias Toward Action.

This is action, just not action that can tarnish both of us by shipping bugs to production.

Edit to add: I used to take ex coworkers out for coffee or beers around their last day and ask for a rundown of all the reasons they left. What you generally find if you let them keep talking is that they will run through the problems in reverse chronological order. The last thing they will mention is almost always what a joke the onboarding process was.

Last straws are the most recent thing that set the person off. All the straws before it add up, and if a person is already questioning the maturity of the organization on day 2 on the team, then I believe that multiplies your turnover rate. The longer you can go before a new employee says "what the actual fuck", is a multiplier on how long they will stick around.

Effectively, I think "the first 100 days" rule of thumb goes both ways. You get 100 days to show you're useful as an employee, but everyone already on the team is being held to the same yardstick by new employees. And if you're hiring at a high enough rate, having 20% of the team think the old employees are a waste of oxygen is not good for consensus building.

> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are,

While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.

[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example

The images are awesome, in an “I cannot believe someone would upload this to their site” kind of way.

You can never understand complex adaptive systems to anywhere near 95%, and leaders believing that they can—that the map is the territory—leads to some pretty bad dynamics.

Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly, you can't just demand "move X number up" and expect any success.

My hand drawn images would be far worse!

Chesterton was talking about politics (public policy). And 'responsible for security or accuracy' well, have you heard of politics? If you haven't, don't look it up, it will just depress you.

I think the opposite. The best outcome for everyone is continuous growth and accomplishment of goals. Inaction only solves one important problem: comfort. The focus on comfort as a primary objective tends to be the quest of high neuroticism.

On the other hand, because you've run business A, doesn't mean you have a clue how business B is actually working. I've seen that one more than a few times too.

Sometimes the plane is going to crash and the best you can do is a soft landing.

You can never understand complex adaptive systems to anywhere near 95%, and leaders believing that they can—that the map is the territory—leads to some pretty bad dynamics.

My hand drawn images would be far worse!

This is action, just not action that can tarnish both of us by shipping bugs to production.

Chesterton was talking about politics (public policy). And 'responsible for security or accuracy' well, have you heard of politics? If you haven't, don't look it up, it will just depress you.

On the other hand, because you've run business A, doesn't mean you have a clue how business B is actually working. I've seen that one more than a few times too.

Sometimes the plane is going to crash and the best you can do is a soft landing.

My recent move from Monzo to Engine by Starling brought a familiar feeling rushing back: the intense, almost overwhelming urge to prove my worth immediately. When starting a new job, it’s completely natural to want to justify the company’s decision to hire you by making an instant impact. We want to show up, roll up our sleeves, and start fixing things.

But a bias toward action is a superpower only when applied correctly - action without context is just noise. If you swing a sledgehammer before looking at the blueprints, you might knock down a load-bearing wall. Here’s how to frame your bias toward action not as rushing, but as moving decisively only after you’ve built a foundation of context.

A stick figure swings a sledgehammer at a brick wall with eyes closed, while an unrolled blueprint on the ground clearly labels it a load-bearing wall not to be demolished

Phase 1: the collection period

Listening is an action if done deliberately. During your first few weeks, focus on being active in your passivity.

Map the terrain. Identify key stakeholders and observe team dynamics before suggesting changes.
Investigate the “why.” Apply Chesterton’s Fence - don’t remove a barrier or criticize a legacy process until you know exactly why it was built in the first place.

Two panels: a stick figure swings an axe at a fence without looking beyond it, then discovers - once the fence is gone - that it was keeping a bull out

Gather data. Read historical documentation, shadow your peers, and conduct 1:1s focused entirely on discovery.

Phase 2: the synthesis phase

This is the bridge between collecting information and taking action. It requires dedicated, analytical thought.

Connect the dots. Look for recurring pain points mentioned independently by different stakeholders across the business.

A stick figure stands in front of a corkboard, using red string to connect several sticky notes together, revealing a pattern

Categorize opportunities. Separate the low-hanging fruit - quick, low-risk wins - from the complex, systemic issues that will require a long-term strategy.

Phase 3: strategic acceleration

Now it’s time to unleash your bias toward action safely and effectively.

Start small and public. Execute a quick win that directly makes someone else’s job easier. This builds immediate political capital.
Share your hypothesis. Before launching a major project, write a one-pager outlining your intended action and share it for feedback.
Shift gears. Gradually transition your working ratio from 90% listening and 10% doing to 20% listening and 80% doing.

A stick figure's hand moves a lever along a dial, shifting the needle further toward one end

None of this is about moving slowly - it’s about making sure that when you do move, you’re pushing on something that actually needs pushing.

So, the next time you find yourself in a new environment, fighting the urge to fix everything on day one: take a breath. Put down the sledgehammer. Pick up the blueprints. The real work will still be there when you’re actually ready to build.

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