Eiso: [00:00:36] Hi, I'm Eiso Kant, and I'm joined by Jason Warner, and this is Developing Leadership, the podcast where we chat about the biggest lessons we've learned on engineering leadership throughout the years. Good morning Jason, how are you?

Jason: [00:00:49] Good morning Eiso, how are you doing?

Eiso: [00:00:50] Pretty good. I'm having one of those, very very busy starts of the week. I don't know about you.

Jason: [00:00:57] Same, summer ramping up, still no vaccine, a hundred percent coverage in Canada, but with the first dose, people are starting to venture out to parks and all that sort of stuff again. So, and it's sunny, you know how that goes.

Eiso: [00:01:09] Exactly. It's, it's gladly sunny here as well. So last time when you and I spoke, I actually just remembered. We decided to,to make this episode about a topic that we left off on, which was that, a lot of the issues and challenges that we see in engineering leadership are often best solved top down or require a top-down leadership, which is quite controversial because a lot of the ways that we build software and also the way that we like to build our organizations are more bottoms up and you said something around, you know, "control what you can control". And I'd love to just kind of kick it off from there today and hear a little bit about how you look at decision-making top down versus bottom up and go from there.

Jason: [00:01:51] There's a couple of types of decisions I think that require tops down decision-making um, and if you make those types of decisions, then you can get to a, let's call it a middle out decision-making process, or at least, you know, everyone wants to say bottom up, bottom up is not really what happens, it happens somewhere in the manager, director, tier in their structures that a lot of those decisions kind of get sorted out. And I think that if you understand, and you've done this enough, you understand what types of decisions to be on the lookout for. So let me give you some non-work examples and then we can kind of translate it.

[00:02:24] But the first time I ever heard this, by the way, I know people don't like to use military context, but the first time I heard it was in the military context, so I want to like translate it  here exactly the way I heard it, then I'll use my examples.

[00:02:36] If you're on a mission in the middle of whatever, the way that you wanted to train everyone in the military to behave. There's certain places, the military that are more free-thinking than not than others, but they always say that like, you have to understand the mission. That's the most important thing. So if the commanding person is sitting over here saying "our entire goal in life is to take that hill over there". And that person then gets wiped out, captured whatever everyone should know, where their responsibilities are to help go take that hill.

[00:03:05] Ultimately, if there's a ravine or a stream or a river, or, you know, you're pinned down because of whatever, or you're worried about, you know, something over there, everyone kind of has to know how to move and mobilize ultimately to go take that hill. And in the sports context, I'm a sports person. You know what I think about his style of play. Like basketball or football or soccer clubs, all of them have different styles of play.

[00:03:28] Do you want to be more aggressive? Do you want more defense oriented? Do you want to like get the one goal lead and protect exclusively? Like how do you want to play these things? Those are Coach level decisions because Coach then has to, and GM, have to kind of like stack team to have certain types of players. And then you have to coach about what to do in situations like that, but on the field players have to make in the moment decisions. And I think about that a lot at work, which is, "ok, what do we want to be? What are we going to do over a certain amount of time horizon? What is incredibly important that we get right? What can we let flex and get wrong or can delay?"  And those are types of decisions that you have to make at the top. But everything else below that typically in some way can kind of get sorted as long as it aligns to the top level.

Eiso: [00:04:09] So it's interesting that you put it this way, it reminds me a lot of the, it's called the Eisenhower Matrix, which has been massively important over the years for me, which is looking at the impact of the decision versus the actual effort of the decision, or the reversibility of the decision. So what I mean by that is, you know, high impact decisions that are hard to reverse.

[00:04:30] Those are the ones that you want to spend a lot of time on, and probably also further up at the top of the organization and get everyone's input, while decisions that are, you know, high-impact and easy to reverse are much more, it's a type of decisions that you're willing to let people make much faster with less input and also maybe more middle out or bottom up in the organization. And in the decisions of kind of the categories of, you know, low impact and hard to reverse or easy to reverse. Well, those are the ones that you don't really want to be spending your time on anyways.

[00:04:58] Jason: [00:04:58] I'd never actually heard of the Eisenhower matrix, but I just looked it up while you were talking, and its exactly, it's a perfect representation of my meandering thoughts. So go listen and research what Eiso just said, not what Jason just said. It'll help crystallize it, but it's exactly that, it's I talk about one way door decisions. Only I, at some point can make a one-way door decision. It's almost like pivoting the company line engineer line sales person. They can't pivot a company, I can pivot the company, you know, that's a one-way door decision. I have to be very respectful of the type of decision I'm making there. And interestingly, people inside, almost everybody has a type of one-way door decision to make inside their decision-making context. But if an engineer's making a one-way door decision, now but in the company typically, and if they are it bubbles up to the point where you're betting the company, but if you're saying like, "well, this could go wrong or bringing down production and what would happen if we brought down production as we haven't had these safeguards in place."