Work is Lindy
A "maybe-not-true, but helpful in practice" way of thinking
Hi all —
If you haven’t read any of Nassim Taleb’s books - put them on your list (especially Antifragile and Skin in the Game). These belong to a small cadre of what can best be described as worldview-breaking books.
One of the concepts in one of Taleb’s books is the Lindy Effect:
For most things, the longer they live, the SHORTER their remaining expected lifespan. AKA, any living thing. Your remaining expected lifespan is shorter at age 70 than it is at age 20.
For some things, “Lindy” things, the opposite is true: The longer they live, the longer their expected lifespan. This explains “the classics” - I expect Plato’s Republic, despite being around for a few millennia, will remain popular for much longer than will the movie How to Tame Your Dragon 2.
I have started to think about project work and product work as Lindy.
Which means, the longer you work on a specific project or product, the further out its expected completion date gets pushed.
To put it differently: Bigger projects have a nasty habit of metastasizing and the longer you work on a project, the more it metastasizes.
Or: Big projects rarely get completed.
The scope of a project really matters. The bigger it is, the more complicated it is, the more moving parts it has, the less likely it is to reach completion. The same is true with the number of people involved in completing a project. “More cooks in the kitchen” = Everyone starves.
For the projects that really matter, continuous delays create real pain. And delays create opportunity costs, because there are other important projects you’re not doing.
Plus the ambiguous, big-sounding projects that are never completed - in SaaS, these usually rhyme with “fixing the customer onboarding process” - crowd out mental energy that could be devoted to leveling up other parts of the business.
So what do we do about this?
Treat project and product work as if it is Lindy. Force your teams to do the same. Think about what factors are more likely to make a project Lindy than not: Project scope, team structure, ownership, and multi-tasking can all increase the Lindy-ness of a project.
A few neuroses I’ve developed that help me avoid metastasizing projects:
Shaping & de-ambiguation: Most big-sounding would-be projects are just ambiguous, and because they’re ambiguous they’re scary, and because they’re scary we outsource the hard thinking to big teams that were never necessary. In reality, 15 minutes of two smart people thinking hard about “what are we really trying to accomplish here?” will shape away the ambiguity and narrow the scope so the solution is somewhat obvious and much less big and scary. You realize there is a 3-day, 1-person solution instead of a 6-month team marathon.
Sequential prioritization: As I’ve written before, I’m extremely skeptical of multi-tasking at an individual or team level. Multi-tasking makes projects MORE LINDY, by adding distraction and excuses (“I wasn’t sure what to focus on” or “I was blocked”). Sequential prioritization makes everyone hurt when someone or something is the bottleneck, which is a pretty effective way of eliminating bottlenecks. It makes problems visible, which is important because multi-tasking tends to hide nasty product/project problems that only emerge when everything’s delayed by a billion years.
Singular ownership: Committees and bureaucracies have a tendency to accomplish nothing, claim victory and/or blame someone else. One high-agency person with the right mindset and real ownership can deliver more value in less time than [insert your favorite consulting or corporate joke here].
Pushing your teammates to adopt the anti-Lindy crusade: When they bring big-sounding ideas and projects to you, ask: What can YOU ship TODAY that would solve most of this, without any help from anyone else? This will initially be difficult for other people to adopt. But they will come to love it and feel energized by their own power in creating real value, really fast.
And no, maybe not all work is Lindy. Some big projects are large by necessity, I assume. But I have seen so many 3-month team-level projects get whittled down to 3-day (better) solutions that I am starting to be skeptical of the entire Big Project enterprise.
Also. For startups. One metastasized project can kill you by preventing you from doing all the other important things you need to do to stay alive. That one feature that just won’t come together after weeks, months, years can be your downfall.
So even if it’s not 100% true that all work is Lindy, it is EVOLUTIONARILY IMPORTANT that you behave as if it is. Just like it is evolutionarily important for you to mistake sticks for snakes (sticks won’t kill you, but snakes might, so your mind behaves as if snake-looking sticks are snakes just in case).