[efwfwef]

What he said at the beginning is true for so many things...

* management. My current manager refuses to understand actual technical challenges that we're dealing with. Instead he is just trying to figure out how the team can organize itself, and work with other teams, and scale itself, and collaborate, and track work, etc. I think we are making a lot of wrong decisions at the moment due to this stubbornness to understand the actual types of problems we're trying to solve, and from there understand how we can organize work to better serve us and allow us to make progress.

* research. There can be a lot of bike shedding, or drive-by feedback, on complicated projects. Rarely people want to actually dig into one part of the problem, and really understand it. Most engineers think that it any problem is easy to solve. Yet when they have to solve it, they get lost. Research is about taking it one step at a time, understanding everything that's in front of you before going to the next page. It's only when you accept that you are going to have to invest time into this, and take it slowly, that you start making real progress, and start getting a real understanding of the whole problem.

[anjc]

What Bill's talking about applies to artists/craftspeople/experts in a niche. Organisations are vastly more complicated than composition of music, in that many thousands of experts are needed to work together, each with their own unique expertise, versus just 1 for composition.

Managers are needed to communicate between these experts, and it should go without saying that it's impossible for them to have the same expertise as each of the 2-1000s of experts under them.

> I think we are making a lot of wrong decisions at the moment due to this stubbornness to understand the actual types of problems we're trying to solve

Almost certainly you don't understand the types of problems your manager needs to solve also.

[Juliate]

Yes organizations are vastly more complicated, in a way they're some kind of chaos, like a garden.

A garden, being big or small, is still chaos: not that there's no order, but that there's different species (animal, vegetal, mineral) that coexist and upon which coexistence you can plan some sort of order.

But that plan and that order is purely the product of both what you, as a gardener/manager have in mind, and what the species can and let you do with them.

If you don't have a good understanding of what you can or cannot do with what you have (the framework), and what level of engagement is required from you (let it flow or actively intervene/change/break rules). And if you don't know people that are experts/practitioners as you are, that may help you - you may by chance have something nice/according to plan. Or not at all.

Well, music/craft/painting can also be (and is often) the result of a complex organization/network, when you take all the elements in place to obtain something: you, your skills, your desire, your tools (and those that build them and can help you), your fellow artists.

What Bill's talking about sound like a particular perspective on the Donning-Kruger effect, that applies to both small scale (managing single-person projects) and large scale (managing at large in an org).