The Voodoo Magic Death Spiral — A Terrible Blog Post #12
Yesterday as I was reflecting on how this journey of 300 terrible blog posts is coming along I made the analogy that my head is like a giant maraca with ideas rattling around in it. I need to grab those beans and take a look at them so that they stop rattling around in my head. Maybe there’s 300 beans in there, maybe there’s more. Maybe I can silence the rattling.
Here’s one that’s been in there for a while making noise: when people treat software development practices like voodoo magic. Actually there is a deeper principle here. Humans have a tendency to treat any theory like voodoo magic when they don’t understand the practical application of it.
I’m trying to draw an easy example of this from my memory and am having a hard time with the specifics. Take for example a business meeting talking about an Agile software development team. There are a bunch of business people in the room and someone says “the velocity of the team is 12 and fifty percent of the work was maintenance work.” Well to someone who doesn’t have a practical understanding of Agile projects, these sound like controls that can be adjusted. “How can we get the velocity higher? Surely if we increase the velocity to 24 and reduce the maintenance work to thirty percent we’ll cause the revenue numbers to go up!” This is the moment—unless someone tells that person to shut up because they don’t know what they’re talking about—where we enter the realm of the Voodoo Magic Death Spiral.
I’m being dramatic, but sometimes a serious situation requires some serious exaggeration. The main problem here is that someone is trying to manipulate something that they have zero practical understanding about. I like to draw this analogy over to other domains. Imagine someone who is color blind making decisions about what colors to use for a website or to paint their house. They have no ability to experience the effects of their decisions. For them it’s all theoretical knowledge. “I read in a design book that high contrast makes colors pop. So let’s go with black and yellow for the wall colors in our living room.” This person has no ability to practically experience the results of their decisions.
What’s the result of this inability to have a visceral experience of the results of a decision? It’s an inability to learn and adapt, or at least a severely hampered ability to learn and adapt.
As a leader, this is a death trap. Seriously. If you are in a leadership position, don’t play with voodoo magic, ever. If you don’t have any ability to have a visceral and practical understanding of something and you are making decisions about it, then you are doing it wrong. You need to defer the decisions to the person who has the practical experiential relationship with the topic.
I loved listening to Momoko Price at CTA Conf 2018 partly because she was circling around this concept of Voodoo Magic. She posted a slide that just said “Multi-dimensional Data Universe” and told a story about a former boss that insisted that they use this term as the main product description for their advertising copy on the website. This very smart CEO would not listen to his copywriting expert (Momoko) even when she broke down in tears and begged him to listen. This is really the story of someone who has absolutely no practical understanding of copywriting or marketing who is making decisions about it. Engage Voodoo Magic Death Spiral warp drive! We’re going down fast!
The problem with being a leader and doing the voodoo magic dance really comes down to the fact that you are crippling your smart people’s ability to do their job. Please refer you to my terrible post #10: Stop! You’re doing it wrong.
Unfortunately I’m out of time, Dear Reader, so I need to wrap up. I do have a basic rule of thumb to offer you, particularly if you’re in a leadership position and you are in danger of doing the voodoo magic dance: If you don’t have a practical understanding of a theory, or the ability to have a visceral experience of the results of your decisions, don’t make any decisions! Instead, delegate the decision to the person who does have the practical working understanding and experience. Of course, you’re going to need a practical working understanding of a delegation model. But you’re in a position of leadership so you understand how to delegate effectively right? 😜
