You can Turn the Oven Down

The other day I was cooking something in the oven. It was browning too quickly on top so I was juggling it between shelves and covering it with foil. My partner came in and said “Why don’t you turn the oven down?” I was treating something that is variable as invariable.

There was a project within my team where we were running behind and tensions were high. We had a particularly fractious meeting and my manager at the time stepped in. She told us all to take a long weekend, and she will see what she can do. On Tuesday we came back and she had spoken to the relevant stakeholders and moved the deadline back by 3 months - the deadline which had caused so much angst was flexible.

Recently I was helping some engineers in the team. They had implemented some complex manipulation of data in the frontend to render the UI correctly, and wanted some help with refactoring. I suggested we could avoid a lot of the complexity by adjusting our domain model and getting the API to return data in the correct format - the data coming back was open to change.

Notice a pattern: in all three cases, someone else pointed out the variable constraint. The oven temperature, the deadline, the data format — I couldn’t see any of them as variable from inside my own assumptions.

That’s the real lesson. Next time you tackle a piece of work, write down your ‘constraints’ and share them around — see how constraining they actually are. Others aren’t inside your mental model, which is precisely what makes them able to see what you can’t.