This is a leadership piece which I was planning on applying at Builder.ai before its collapse. Sadly, I did not get a chance to present it.
“Shoot, move, communicate” is a key phrase in military training, emphasising the three essential elements of tactical operations:
- Shoot accurately
- Move effectively
- Communicate clearly
It’s a guide for soldiers, focusing on how to operate as a team and prioritize actions during combat.
Shoot => Take action => Decide
Clearly, we are not soldiers and we do not shoot weapons.
What we have instead is decisions to make. These are our targets that we “shoot” at.
Decisions of the kind that choose the direction in which we go.
Making decisions is what we do as engineers. This is our main job. It is not coding. Our value lies in architectural decisions and problem-solving, not the implementation.
We are not engineers if we are not making decisions.
We are a professional team. Everyone on this team is a Professional. Everyone on the team is an effective engineer that can make decisions.
I think we sometimes have this feeling that we are somehow inadequate to make decisions. This is common, but misguided. All of us have the necessary experience and are equipped to make these kinds of decisions.
Move
Movement is critical to make progress.
Decisions establish the direction, but only together with movement do they create velocity.
All movement is progress.
Think about this scenario: you are in a foreign city, trying to find your way to a landmark. Let’s say you want to visit a museum. You don’t know the exact route. You need to discover it, you don’t have a map or GPS. How do you go about it? You make a guess as best you can and you start going in a direction. You come to an intersection, you make another guess about which way to go, and you go. These are not random guesses though. You are making decisions based on your best ability to navigate. If you take the wrong turn, you go back when you realise it and decide to go in another direction.
There are two types of decisions you can make:
- Right decisions
- Wrong decisions
We tend to be afraid to make the wrong decision. But, even the wrong decision is progress, because it eliminates an option that we were uncertain about. Eliminating uncertainty creates certainty.
Most wrong decisions are also reversible. So, we can always go back to where we took a wrong turn and choose to go in the right direction. All you need to do is make sure a decision is reversible, make it, and then MOVE in that direction.
This is how Velocity comes about. Constant movement, by making decisions.
Communicate
Communication creates situational awareness. In combat it means knowing the position of your team and of your enemy.
As engineers we don’t have enemies as soldiers do in combat. Our only enemy is inaction.
But we do have team members which are working on other parts of the system. Knowing where they are positioned with the work they are doing is important. Not knowing where others on your team are can result in duplicated effort, or producing work which does not match up when it needs to (think FE / BE contract implementation).
We must both:
- Communicate where we are ourselves.
- Understand where others on the team are.
The Decision Log is a channel where we can capture this communication on decisions. It must be used as such. This is not a tool for creating Accountability. This is a tool for creating Velocity.
Notice that none of this is saying “be sloppy”, or, cut corners. Tactical operators cannot afford to do this. If they do, people die. But they are still able to operate the mantra “shoot, move, communicate”, which means that cutting corners is not required. You can maintain a high level of excellence in terms of quality of output, while still having high velocity.