🐿️ Synecdoche - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter

Originally published 25th March 2024

Hands up if you’ve ever passed on a request “from upstairs” or counted “eyeballs” on your website or celebrated a victory by “Birmingham” or “Boston”. I bet you have, which means you’re an accomplished synecdochist . Naming a group according to just one of its characteristics is a great way to keep your language lively and your audience engaged; you’ll wait a long time before you see ChatGPT write anything as zippy as “a plague on both your houses”. Synecdoche–which rhymes, sort of, with “delectably” and “Schenectady”--can give you an easy and accessible shorthand for complex concepts, if you’re careful not to misuse it (as a callow youth I complained to my colleagues about the “suits” running the company, which didn’t exactly foster collaboration). But there’s an even better reason to assign clever, memorable monikers to your teams and divisions and departments: it makes it easy and natural to applaud the entire organisation for its results, and giving the whole group credit is much more accurate and effective than elevating and rewarding a few “stars”.

This is heresy, especially in individualist cultures where nearly every drama celebrates exceptional heroes who overcome impossible odds. After all, don’t we pay millions to top football players and huge commissions to the best salespeople? The problem is that these “cash for results” rewards just don’t work, and they’re especially ineffective for highly collaborative knowledge workers. Mary Poppendieck explained two decades ago why stack ranking and merit rises and performance bonuses are hopelessly counterproductive for tech teams: incentives for individual initiative miss indirect contributions like testing and knowledge-sharing, and worse, they promote cutthroat competition that kills the very cooperation vital to success. 

Unfortunately, this knowledge doesn’t seem to have spread very far, so I have a constant parade of executives phoning me for advice on designing an “engineering ladder” or “evaluation framework” that will let them accurately measure the contributions of their individual tech staff. Thankfully, lines of code and function points seem to have gone the way of the dodo, but despite the objections of experts, the myth persists that the road to tech success is paved with evaluations of OKRs and “IC3 career framework checklists”. Instead, abandon the dream of differentiation, and apply a little synecdoche: applaud the great business outcomes from “the front end” or “machine learning” or “infrastructure”, and be sure to follow up with collective rewards both intangible and financial for all the people behind the figure of speech. They’ll thank you with even greater alignment and co-operation–and that’s what you want anyway, isn’t it?

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 8th January 2024. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/