One time I proposed an idea at work that I felt very strongly about. I made an argument that I thought was comprehensible and convincing.

But I made a critical error. I started the discussion in a slack thread.

I got lots of buy-in to my proposal at first. One message in agreement. Then two. Five in succession. Then one dissent. Then another. Then another. Every message from then on was opposed. Not one argument for either side was proposed outside of my initial work.

At the time slack seemed like the correct choice. It gave space for everyone to voice their concerns and was the most visible option I had available. And people did give their opinion - the thread got quite large.

The issue with the slack thread was that the energy of the discussion was controlled by the last person who posted. There’s not a lot of room to have branching discussions in a slack thread - after all, you can’t make threads in a thread. So there’s one linear stream of consciousness which can be whipped in any which way by the last person who speaks.

This is the flow of energy. It is a powerful force, but within your control if you learn to be aware of it and how to use it.

I’m sure I’d make a Star Wars analogy if I watched half of those movies. Jedi something something. Light saber. Is that good?

#Controlling it

Getting good at this is important, especially for high level ICs, but really for anyone who wants to use the collective of people as a tool.

Both The Staff Engineer’s Path and The Engineering Executive’s Primer make reference to it. It is for those with no reports and also many reports.

The slack thread I started should have been a google doc. And I should have shopped it around with all the people who would have most opposed it before making it public.

This is, in some sense, playing politics. Good ICs tend to think they’re exempt or even that they should be exempt from this battleground. Good work should stand on its merits and if it doesn’t, that’s a moral failing.

It is simply not possible to build a good and large organization without the manipulations of energies. Best case scenario, you do it accidentally, but it’s still happening.

Optics. Perception. Passion. Whatever you want to call it - it exists.

Between two people, such a framing is called manipulation. It’s called being conniving. Within a group of people, this is being the energy conductor.

#Incentives

There’s lots of work within a company that does not have a proper incentive structure aligned with it, but it is still necessary to do.

Within engineering a good example of this is incident management or being proactive about fires that haven’t started yet. There’s no good way to measure this kind of work in a way that doesn’t create more misaligned incentives. So you need to ask that this work be done, but not give a measure by which it is incentivized.

As an engineering leader, you need to create the right energies.

Clever enough ICs will notice that the work isn’t incentivized and move onto something else. This will cause deterioration or even negative performance reviews for that employee, later down the line.

So you need to “rally the troops”. Make a speech, write a post, whatever. We are the builders of good software. We care about our work or the customers or the craft, I don’t know. Again, whatever. You need to direct energy at problems that incentives don’t align with.

Some staff engineers need to do this a lot. If your job is in getting departments aligned on some initiative, you’ll need to direct energies. One way of directing energies is by changing incentive structures, but this is not always within your control.

Nerd sniping is a good way of directing energies of specific ICs. Sometimes that’s all you need.

You post something technically interesting in a public way and get buy-in from interested individuals. The energy itself being public creates more buy-in. People want to get in on the fun and start contributing.

It’s like asking people to tweet about your event to get an entry ticket. It’s a fire that feeds itself.

#Kinds of energies

There are many ways to direct energy. There are many “energies” you can have. You can replace energy with the word emotion for the sake of this section to get a clearer picture of what I’m talking about.

If you’re highly combative, that might be a way of getting a certain kind of result. In the effort of motivating people, this might be angered passion. “How could we make such a terrible product?! We must do better!”

You could shame people. “This work is really not acceptable for a company of our standing!”

Or you could excite! “It would be such a delight to our customers if we built this!”

Your approach will change depending on the circumstance. I don’t like being mean, but there’s a time and place for lots of the spectrum.

I think there’s some analogy to Avatar that I should be making, but it eludes me. Fire nation energies something something? Man I’m bad at this.