In September 2019, when I got promoted and took over the Ruby on Rails unit, all I wanted was to keep everything working as it was with the previous m

Second-order Thinking - Mental Model

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2024-05-06 09:30:02

In September 2019, when I got promoted and took over the Ruby on Rails unit, all I wanted was to keep everything working as it was with the previous manager. Keeping teams happy and growing — that was my job.

For years the team had had monthly meetings with knowledge sharing presentations but we were really struggling to find engineers willing to present. The issue was that the team was approaching 100 people, so these meetings were no longer small and cosy. One of our senior leaders proposed to open them up to an even broader audience and rename them to Backend Meetings, connecting people from other technology units.

The results of the decision were immediate ( first order consequences) and satisfactory as we did not struggle to find participants. Problem solved?

After a few months we realised that Backend Meetings were even more difficult to maintain. People missed their old meetings, and my team had no single place to discuss important announcements specific to us.