I have migrated toward process and disaster recovery/avoidance over time. In the last ten years I have spent a lot of time thinking about the latter because everywhere I have ever worked, if an emergency goes on long enough I am one of the last three people still having a coherent thought at the end, and often the only person with enough brain cells to summarize what just happened and propose a 5 Why’s theory. Which sounds like bragging if you ignore the consequences of this, which is that I am also the last person to recover to 100% in the following days. Which is exactly why I’m thinking about it so much.
I have learned at least two things about myself and a few about other people from all of this. For myself, I know I am overly acclimated to blowing past my limits into my reserves. I am used to constantly monitoring my mental state and pushing for breaks.
For others, I know that adrenaline and cortisol reduce everyone’s cognitive abilities. It’s why we do fire drills. It’s why NASA launch facilities ritualize everything. Save your brain cells and improvisational skills for things we can’t predict, not for things we can.
In the first hours of an emergency, everyone else’s brain turns to mush while mine gets just a little squishy. What for them is their worst work day in months is to me just a bad Tuesday. And self monitoring is one of the first things to go. They’re operating at 80% while I’m at 95%, and they absolutely won’t call for breathers without prompting.
On projects where I am at the periphery, we all struggle together. On projects where I get to influence the agenda, or even father chunks of it, people often walk back out of that room feeling like they braced for a collision that never came, because I’ve routed around all of the foot guns and created low cognitive load ways to answer the important questions. If anyone has been complaining about me spending “too much time” on this, about half of them are convinced after one or two non-event events. If the majority of the people didn’t agree with my methods before, they do now.
I used to say I spend my A-game days protecting myself from my C-game days, but these days I’m more likely to cite Kernighan’s aphorism about not being smart enough to debug your own code. Write all of your code like you’re going to have to wrestle with it on an off day, because you certainly will at some point.
And putting high functioning ADHD people in charge of process and tooling is not a terrible idea. If you can figure out who those people are, that is. To be high functioning means constantly masking, because in this world it’s better to be rude and aloof than to be seen as broken.
On my current project our hot fix process is so bullet proof that I could do a hot fix in the middle of our sprint demo. And I have, three times. Once while I was the MC. All of that was me, and the automation tools I wrote for myself are the official process now. And instead of a bus number of 3 it’s somewhere north of 6. Important, especially this time of year.