Aspire, but act your scale

Over on the technical side of the fence, the go-to thing to poke fun at in terms of overkill decisions these days is “you probably don’t need Kubernetes”. There’s a lot of these: “your data isn’t Big Data” and “your blog needn’t be a SPA” and so on.

These tools aren’t without their use! They exist because some people and orgs truly needed them, and built or sought them until they were brought into existence. None of those places, however, brought those tools into being solely because it was the default approach for Serious Companies that do Serious Things.

And when other people and orgs with simpler needs implement these tools aspirationally, it’s often rightly pointed out that they’re using a fusion cutter to slice bread: it’s shiny and sparkly, but expensive, overcomplicated, and may not even do as good a job.

Yet when it comes to management, we often forget this wisdom.

If you have a department with a dozen people in it, you probably don’t need matrix management. If everyone in your organization knows each other by name and face, you probably don’t need deeply-tiered OKRs. If your org sells gimmick t-shirts, you probably don’t need a dedicated sales department.

But the temptation remains to use the tools that bigger, more complex places have come up with—for sheer interest, for aspiration, for résumé padding.

What tools and frameworks are you using in your work? Are they there to support the node level of your hierarchy in doing their best work? Or are they there for Another Reason?