Consensus Reality vs New Hires
The group-think for PMs & white-collar conformism
Every established company - big and small - has a consensus reality.
The reality is widely accepted by the members of this closed community.
These are views on the company goals, general intangible moods and certain behaviours depicting the “us against them” as in a small army. If the company/system is functional, there is some consensus.
It is hard to steer this reality, nearly impossible to create and very easy to destroy. It is fragile in its intangibility, especially in bigger enterprises where the system's deficiencies become part of that reality but still something acceptable and well-known; these deficiencies are also consensual.
The outsider (new employee, for example), while tailored differently, is given a choice to accept this reality or fight it (arguably, some folks are getting hired to fight). Admittedly the latter is rarely successful or rewarding unless the structure is full of cracks already - the group is looking for a new consensus reality.
New PMs are those outsiders, the menace to those tiny societies that bring heat, desperation and chaos along with them. And I am not talking about choleric personalities of immense arrogance and short tempers here. Every PM is a transplant in a way (you know, human hearts never become genuinely ‘native’ again, even though they are pretty good as replacements one can live with).
Every time I hear the moan about feature factories and rat houses, I repeatedly observe a clash of realities. The transplant is free to decide how the integration works - based on experience, convictions & personality (orders and disorders). They bring the new order, the new reality, to the table, which must be demolished or integrated. Or the transplant “doesn’t work out” and leaves the body (as I did a couple of times in my career).
I have a list of epiphanies I can’t share, but the situation is prevalent in Europe, where we learn to act the lean way to find ourselves downgraded to the ticket monkey, as they call us.
I have recently finished Melissa Perri’s book called ‘Build Trap’ which depicts pretty much a similar fork in the road:
Go with the flow
Redirect the river (and/or go down with it)
Pretend to join the pack while pushing your line in secret
I joined many companies, so I know a thing or two about these choices.
And being short-tempered, sometimes I had to suffer trying to ingrain the ‘right’ things I considered fitting. I saw people going with the flow - it rarely teaches you enough as you are downgraded to an operator pushing the levellers, nothing more.
On the opposite side of this spectrum, you would see a strong character everyone hates to deal with. So the status quo is slowly changed, but if there is a mishap or a failure - they are burned the most.
After I started mentoring people, I realized everyone’s choice would depend on their private lives quite literally. The amount of pressure one wants to tolerate at any given time.
I came across this wonderful post on LinkedIn recently, which depicts the raw horror of stuff Product folks have to clash with; check it out.
It got me thinking about all the vanilla books I have read full of ideal examples with companies no one has heard about.
How much of a sales pitch lies beneath the surface out there?
How much bookish idealism is too much?
p.s. the image for this post has been generated with the stable diffusion model; you can generate one here.
Huge thanks to CompVis, Stability AI & Hugging Face