
Freedom to fail – or managing to succeed? - matt4077
https://international.brandeins.de/ingman-freedom-to-fail-or-managing-to-succeed
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jdbernard
False dicotomy. Give freedom but require accountability. There should be
milestones. Give the team the freedom to determine what the plan is, what the
milestones are, and how to show progress. But make sure the plans have some
grounding in reality and hold them accountable to their own plans.

To explain in more depth:

People need both accountability and autonomy. But different people need these
in different amounts, and not everyone has the maturity to know how much of
each they require. A large part of forminga strong working relationship is
learning together how much of each is needed, and building the trust that
allows for greater autonomy.

You want to start any relationship with the expectation of trust, but
ultimately trust must be earned. However, if you're constantly verifying
whether you can trust the team then you don't really trust them. Allowing them
to set the plan gives them autonomy, and also gives them an initial chance to
show that they are worthy of trust by creating and communicating a realistic
plan. By giving them the responsibility for defining what their milestones are
it changes the dynamic. Instead of you the leader inspecting them to see if
you can still trust them to do a good job, it becomes an opportunity for them
to show off what a good job they are doing. Small change in ownership, big
change in relationship.

Unfortunately some people will show you that they are not able to keep
themselves on task with too much autonomy. Even then you have an opportunity
to create trust. You can invest time in helping them identify why they are
underperforming, and try to help them succeed. Act as a mentor, not just an
overseer and you will gain their trust in your leadership. Even then, some
people will still not step up, but most will.

Ultimately real trust must be earned. It can be given optimistically, loaned
so to speak, but must be eventually earned. Always assume the best, and try to
ascribe good motives to your people, but don't set them up for failure by
allowing them to be disconnected from reality. Set them up for success by
giving them accountability and opportunities to demonstrate the great job they
are doing.

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mockingbirdy
Wow. I'm glad that somebody did that experiment. I'm disappointed, but not
surprised.

From the article:

> “They did admit that of course things hadn’t gone too well. But afterwards
> they spent half the day playing Counter-Strike again. There was no learning
> curve at all.”

> He ought to have become sceptical sooner, when he noticed they had formed a
> close-knit community, from which he was largely excluded.

He basically hired a bunch of 20-somethings and literally hoped that it would
work out - doesn't sound like a plan to me even for an idealistic person.
Sorry, but he seems highly incompetent as a manager. Maybe it would work for
people who come from bureaucratic environments and who are grateful for this
opportunity.

I wonder how he managed to finance that for so long.

I would like to repeat the same experiment with people who are self-motivated
because they've been in the workforce and burned out. I guess this might work.

~~~
mcartney
Same at a shop where I worked, an endless stream of 20-30 hires. Each of them
was seen as the new rock star by the manager, then nothing emerged for 6
months, then the next batch came.

Manager didn't allow senior devs to have any authority, because who can
contradict a 25 year old in the middle of the cultural revolution?

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pjc50
Allowing people to experiment: good

Allowing people to do so completely disconnected from customers or funder: bad

Picking a team entirely of inexperienced people: also bad

------
Kurtz79
Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, Broken Age, Star Citizen...

Even experienced industry professionals need some guidance and supervision.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

~~~
soneca
Why Broken Age is in that group?

I think it had a much lower expectation to start with, but also the delay to
launch wasnt absurd and the end product is quite good in my opinion. Also, it
was a comercial success for its niche.

~~~
Kurtz79
The game was largely overfunded, and yet they had to rely on splitting the
game in two acts and rely on the sales from the first to fund additional
development.

I agree that among the titles I mentioned is the less disastrous, but is still
an example of developers being given a large amount of money and almost free
reigns, and delivering something late and below expectations (I played the
game as well, it was decent but really not that remarkable).

~~~
soneca
It was overfunded on Kickstarter, but then they - very transparently -
expanded the scope of the game.

They delivered a documentary series, with a high production quality, while
they were developing the game that was incredible to follow.

The communication through the forum during the development was excellent,
transparent and informative.

I was very hyped about the game and it was not below _my_ expectations. I
enjoyed every minute of playing. It is not the best point-and-click adventure
of all times if that was _your_ expectation.

I believe it is nonsense to put in this list as well as comparing to the
situation of the OP

------
patd
I don't understand why he phoned the client to say they were late instead of
letting the appointed chief executive do it.

~~~
superhuzza
If you promise something to a client, it's you who delivers or doesn't
deliver.

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gdfer
A significant amount of freedom is necessary to maximize people's potential in
terms of both productivity and happiness. People also need clear expectations
and accountability for their work. These are not mutually exclusive, but much
easier said than done. I always lean toward more freedom than control and
always will.

Sometimes you need to let people have enough rope to hang themselves.
Sometimes you need to take risks that may come back to harm you for the
betterment of your culture & team.

Micromanagement should be a last resort and is indicative of other issues that
should be addressed.

I like what the Netflix culture slides say about Freedom & Responsibility [1].

[1] [https://jobs.netflix.com/culture](https://jobs.netflix.com/culture)

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hevi_jos
Those founders would have learn a lot for next businesses in the future. The
problem is that they did it with someone else's money.

It is a good idea letting people to fail early with the minimal amount of
money possible.

That was exactly the idea of YCombinator. Experimenting before scaling could
be cheap.

------
indigochill
Isn't the early MIT AI Lab a counterexample: that you can have smart people
with basically free reign make big strides (such as HAKMEM)?

My understanding is they had very minimal supervision but effectively endless
money from government funding.

~~~
dahauns
Well, there's "free reign", and there's Best-of-its-kind-in-the-world-
University, DARPA-funded free reign.

~~~
stephengillie
There's Ayn Randism, and there's 20% time. These have wildly different utility
to society.

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frou_dh
Didn't get much out of that article. A bunch of kids were messing around in
largely undocumented ways and burned through a pile of someone else's money.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Isn’t that inscribed on road signs as you enter San Francisco?

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leaveyou
omg the naivety of those founders..

~~~
mario0b1
Maybe they weren't naive, but just curious? There could've been a (obviously
really really) small chance that this project went perfectly fine and they'd
build one of the greatest games ever. But if it went like that the resulting
article would be even worse. You just can't know if something like this is
ever going to produce something.

