You’re flying over Mount Rainier and a hole opens up in the bottom of your airplane. In that moment, you think hard about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what matters.
My friend Ty actually had this happen. In that moment, she decided to stop wasting her days on a career that pleased her family, and committed, if she survived, to quit and go build something that mattered to her.
Of course, in the months that followed, honoring the commitment was hard. If it were easy, she would have done it far sooner.
But it’s an oath. The sort of promise you don’t negotiate.
The really cool thing is that you don’t need to avoid a possible plane crash to wake up, see what’s going on in your life and take an oath. You can do it simply because it’s May 13th.
What a chance we each have. To take agency, to make a deal and to honor it. Don’t wait for an excuse to care enough to take an oath. Simply begin.
Long after the fact, these are the best kind. They remind us of how far we’ve come. They’re proof that not giving up was a good idea. They are fuel for the next thing.
But, at the time, they’re pretty hard to live with.
All we can do is remind ourselves that it’s an unskippable part of a useful journey.
Runaway selection happens when organizations compete with each other far beyond the point where it’s rational to do so. We see this in species as well–peacocks have ungainly and inefficient feather displays because, as Alice’s Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
In organizations, there’s a desire to do good work. Pressure to outdo the others. And a desire for deniability and certainty. Add those up, and we are left with a quest for more long after it’s helpful.
How many people applied for that good job you just posted? 1,000? Spread the word, more applications must be a good thing. It’s not unusual for digitally-amplified hiring processes to see 5,000 applications arrive in a day. 360,000 people applied for a slot in the Goldman Sachs internship program. Would a million have been better?
And then, let’s use AI to pick the 80 best candidates and interview each via Zoom.
Take the ten best and put them through a series of interviews, rotating through each person on the team, including aptitude tests and real-time projects. In many organizations, there are 6, 7 or even 10 rounds of interviews.
It costs a typical organization more than $14,000 to hire an executive, and the time and emotional cost to applicants is many times that. This all leads to lowered productivity, wasted time and a damaged brand.
What do we get in exchange for this investment? Are the people you hire with this exhausting/exhaustive process adding more value than the ones we found with much less time ten years ago?
And the second question: would your third or fourth choice have worked out just as well, if not better?
If Red Queen hiring actually worked, then we’d see that organizations that spend more time on it would outperform those that don’t. It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case–it’s not an investment in the future, it’s a sign of bureaucratic stasis, a quest for deniability, and a thoughtless pursuit of the wrong sort of more. We’ve made it much easier for people to apply for jobs, but done little to improve what happens after the applications arrive.
What if we spent the time wasted on Red Queen maximization doing something useful instead–training and orientation, perhaps. Interview until you find someone who can do the job, then hire them. Then get back to work.
We can’t even ask that question, because it feels like a compromise. Without any data at all, we’ve bought into the Red Queen race that our false proxies, sufficiently polished, deliver better results. In fact, there’s a huge increase in the cost to the applicants and the organization, but no measurable increase in the value created.
Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.
It requires skill and effort. It can be taught. And it’s worth prioritizing.
When we wing it, allocate little time to it or assume it’s a side effect of our work, we diminish the effort and blur our focus.
“I wonder what it’s like to be you” is part of what makes us human, but we’re rarely as focused on this work as we could be.
Simply announcing how hard it is is a fine place to begin.
Where did the five-second rule come from?
Science makes it clear that if disgusting germs are going to go from the floor to your toast, it’s going to take less than five seconds for that to happen.
It might as well be the four-minute rule as far as food safety goes.
But it’s compelling and universal. A chance to fix a relatively small error, one associated with an outcome you were hoping for.
Innovation involves lots of failure, but we rarely encourage ourselves to adopt a five-second rule when we’re brainstorming, inventing or developing what’s next.
Please do.
Tiny mistakes are fixable. Avoiding them is how we get stuck.
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