Atlas syndrome

A year ago, I wrote Decision hoisting, about a technique for connecting a decision-maker's actions with their consequences. Rather than saying "you can't do that", you can say "if you do that, it will have these consequences; if you do it this other way, it will have these different consequences". In other words, you hoist your technical decision up to a management level. Doing this lets you avoid being the reason why something can or can't be done. It can abolutely be done, it just depends what price you're willing to pay.

The interesting thing about this technique is that it's not really optimal. Ideally, you could just make the technical decision and be done with it. But often, in the real world, you need these constrained-rational solutions that are rational only because of the distorted landscape of business decisionmaking. Often, these strategies have the unfortunate situation of being locally, rather than globally, optimal, which is something I think merits a bit more examination.

Normally, I'm an advocate of global optimisation; it's all very well to say "well I did my bit", but if the outcome isn't one you wanted, and you could have done something more, what good does that get you? It may not have been your responsibility to do more, but if you had done more you would have gotten a better outcome. The responsibility is besides the point. You want to win, and that's hard to do that when you create "not my fault" zones where you can safely and honourably lose.

But you have to be very careful with global optimisation, because it has none of the safety inherent in a more myopic attitude. If you're working on a project and you can tell that it won't be successful without a heroic effort from you, what do you do? The local-optimising answer is "I did my bit, not my problem", but the global-optimising answer is "I will do whatever I need to achieve the goal". And all of a sudden you've taken the entire project on your shoulders. You have made yourself responsible for its success or failure, no matter what is reasonable.

So let's back up a little. The real issue here isn't that you're attempting to globally optimise, it's what you're optimising for. Particularly in employment, it's easy to get mixed up about whose priorities you're satisfying. If for you, in your life, according to your preferences, this project is really the most important thing, then by all means do whatever you need to to get it done. But, if it's someone else's project, designed to meet their needs, this is rarely the case.

You have to be very wary of goal substitution, that pernicious process where you have a primary goal, realise you can achieve it by working towards a secondary goal, and you somehow end up chasing the secondary goal to the detriment of the primary one. You can often want a project to succeed for your own needs, but the thing to globally optimise is the success of your needs, not the success of the project.

These things naturally limit themselves if you just focus on your part. After all, you're limited to local consequences if you only take local responsibility. But once you start thinking globally, those limits fall away and you have to be very careful to make sure the global consequences you take responsibility for are really ones you care about. Otherwise you end up shouldering the burden of a global optimisation that doesn't even benefit you.