The Hagakure #74: Constraints That Enable

On why constraints are not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the contrary.

Let’s play a game.

You go first.

…

If you’re like everybody else I played this “game” with, you froze. You didn’t know what to do. And that’s because I gave you complete and absolute freedom.

Funny how complete freedom paralizes us.

But when faced with constraints and restrictions, we often wish we didn’t have them. In Republic, Plato famously wrote: “Our need will be the real creator”, which was moulded over time into the English proverb:

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

In fact, we need only look back through the last year to see where having virtually no economic constraints led the startup world. No wonder most of the best companies are built during times of hardship.

So, I have been pondering upon the power of having constraints, and how being intentional about them is a big part of what leadership is about. Great leaders see constraints not as restrictions but as enablers.¹

One of the biggest mistakes I see inexperienced leaders make is diving headlong into the tactical, day-to-day minutia without sufficiently constraining the playing field. One obvious example is a chronic lack of engineering strategy that appropriately constrains decision-making across the org.²

It’s not easy, per se, but here are some different (hopefully inspirational) examples of what I mean by this.

Frank Slootman’s “Amp It Up”

In the context of hypergrowth (context matters for this), Snowflake’s CEO Frank Slootman insists on 3 simple principles that orient everything that happens in every organization he leads³:

• Raise Expectations

• Increase Urgency

• Elevate Intensity

He breaks these down into a 5-part framework: 1) increasing standards, 2) aligning people, 3) sharpening focus, 4) picking up the pace, and 5) transforming strategy.

Safe to say that, for example, taking weeks to make a (reversible) decision is frowned upon.

The TCP/IP Protocol

The original version of the Internet (ARPANET) was built upon an aging protocol, NCP, which eventually showed its limits. TCP/IP was then designed to overcome those limitations and to enable a true “network of networks”—thus the name “Internet”.

The new protocol had four very simple and elegant design goals:⁴

• Network connectivity: Each distinct network had to stand on its own, and no internal changes could be required of any such network before being connected to the Internet.

• Error recovery: Communications would be on a best-effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would quickly be retransmitted from the source.

• Black box design: Black boxes (later called gateways and routers) would be used to connect the networks. No information would be retained by the gateways about individual flows of packets passing through them, keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.

• Distribution: There would be no global control at the operations level.

How beautiful is it that such a small set of constraints literally enabled the Internet that we know to this day?

Chamath Palihapitiya’s Growth Framework

As I wrote a while ago, the early growth at Facebook was largely attributed to strict discipline in following a simple framework—everything had to be about answering the 3 most difficult questions for any consumer product:

• How do you get people in the front door?

• How do you get them to an aha! moment as quickly as possible?

• How do you deliver core product value as often as possible?

Anything that did not address at least one of these was irrelevant (including “how do we get virality?”) The rest is history.

Constraints also work (well) for individuals.

Bradford Fults is an experienced engineering leader I was lucky to meet and chat with recently. His website stood out to me. Right on the landing page it reads:

“I live my life and choose my actions according to principles of my own assembly. Many people derive their principles from religion or social institutions, or they live in a more reactive manner, focused on immediacy instead of tying their actions into an overall framework. I find that my principles work well for me, and am always delighted to find those who are also attempting to live by thoughtful principles of their own.”

Bradford’s 3 core principles?

• Quality

• Liberty

• Perspective

That’s a great rudder for conducting yourself in the world in everything you do. It’s about leading yourself first and, hopefully, making it more likely that you live a good life.

1. There are a few excellent write-ups on constraints in the context of complexity which I recommend if you want to dig deeper: here, here and here.

2. Luckily, Will Larson has recently shared his notes on a talk he’s giving on engineering strategy which includes a ton of concrete examples.

3. He’s done this serially, 3 times in a row, to great success.

4. Quoted from Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s Leading Lean Software Development (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 116). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.