the work never complains

When I was a kid, I read and re-read fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.1 They’re probably the most influential books that shaped who I am today. And although they are books aimed at kids, they contain many nuggets of wisdom that benefit everybody, especially the fourth book in the series, Taran Wanderer. In it, Taran (our protagonist) is on a quest to discover information about his heritage and his place in the world. In the final section of the book, he spends time apprenticing with different craftspeople, and he has this exchange with the weaver-woman Dwyvach and his sidekick Gurgi:

“The finest wool is useless until it’s spun to thread,” the weaver-woman told him “So you’d best begin learning that, as well.”

“But spinnings are woman’s toilings!” Gurgi protested. “No, no, spinnings are not fitting for bold and clever weaver-men.”

“Indeed!” snorted Dwyvach. “Then sit you down and learn otherwise. I’ve heard men complain of doing woman’s work, and women complain of doing man’s work,” she added, fastening her bony thumb and forefinger on Gurgi’s ear and marching him to a stool beside Taran, “but I’ve never heard the work complain of who did it, as long as it got done!”

The phrase “I’ve never heard the work complain of who did it” is going through my head a lot these days. At Duolingo, we’re currently in one of our planning phases. As part of planning, each team writes down their primary objectives, and I’m convinced that there’s never a way to set up teams where all of the work that needs to get done nicely and unambiguously falls under a single team’s charter. Things get fuzzy at the boundaries, so the we frequently find ourselves asking: “Which team should do this important work?”

When this happens, I mumble to myself, “I’ve never heard the work complain…” then stop when I realize that none of my coworkers will understand this reference.

In a nutshell, here’s how I think of things during planning season:

1. The key thing is that the important work gets done. If you find yourself following decision making rules-of-thumb that lead you to a spot where this is no longer true: stop! You’ve made a mistake somewhere. Back up and try again.

2. Team charters are tools, not a straitjackets. As a tools, they help people make quick and consistent decisions about who should do important work. Charters become straitjackets when they are the only criteria people consider, because they’re not effective decision making tools at the fuzzy boundaries between teams.

3. When team charters don’t work, fall back to the more reliable criteria: Who has the time and talent to get the important work done? Better yet: Who will grow the most by doing the work? (For more on that, see Let’s Make a Bet.)

4. A closing thought about team charters: While they’re a good but fallible heuristic for work allocation, they’re a fantastic tool for work discovery. Telling a team, “Your job is to figure out how to make our phone-based math education more effective” is the best way to identify all the important work for that objective, even if that team itself lacks the capacity to do all of the work.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you suspect that team charters have turned into a straitjacket and are preventing you from getting important work done, remember: the work never complains about who does it.