Are you an Incrementalist or a Completionist?

Joel Spolsky wrote an entry today that talks about several books on management that he is reading. One is Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by a guy named Michael Lopp, who also has a blog from which he got many of the entries and anecdotes in the book. Lopp’s blog is an absolute hoot and I’ve added it to my daily reading list to see if it continues to hold up to all that has promised to be (all blogs I read go through a “trial period” in which I evaluate them….if they’re good, they stay, if you don’t impress me within 3 or 4 entries, kkkkkrreecccckkkk!)

Joel throws out an anecdote from the book, talking about two types of people in the workplace, one that solves problems a step at a time, taking into factor the resources and time involved, which he calls an “Incrementalist”, and the “Completionist”, the person who wants to make sure the problem is solved right the first time so they don’t end up solving it again down the road.

Unfortunately, Joel stops at quoting these few paragraphs describing the types, which leaves out the context in which they were actually written, making all Completionists to look like absolute ignorant assholes, which wasn’t Lopp’s point at all. His point in the full entry was that both types are really required for having a good business, because the discussions generated when you put both in a meeting room are well worth the results that end up emerging from that banging of heads.

What Joel fails to mention and Lopp only somewhat describes is the employee who can put a combination of the hats on their head, assuming the best of both roles, and processing the discussions that would have taken place inside a meeting room inside their own head. This is the person I am constantly striving to be.

My employment experience has shown me the advantages of both sides of the table. Getting things done because they must get done and must get done within a particular limited framework of people, time, money, and resources is a business reality. No employer has fountains of any of these categories, meaning that anything you work on will be limited by at least one of these constraints if not by all of them, which is more likely. It ends up being your job as an employee to weigh the consequences of a decision or direction in a project against what the Realities of Life are and, if necessary, adjust the goal to fit. This very often ends up being an Incrementalist decision, taking small steps in larger goals to fit what is available now rather than throw the towel in on the whole thing.

However, my jobs have also taught me about the value of taking the Completionist view of the road ahead. There is great wisdom in evaluating a project and being able to detect the future issues and problems that will plague it if something isn’t fixed now. You will, of course, always have that person that insists on redoing something completely because, “it’ll cause huge problems in the future,” and yet cannot tell you exactly what those issues would be. This is worthless. But the guy that can look at it and say, “A reworking of this will cost us a fair whack now, but in the future will save us from X and Y and Z, which will cost us way more,” is absolute shining gold. Due to the way projects constantly evolve, it’s essential
to
always have
people that are
looking aheadit’s essential to always have people that are looking ahead to the future and saving everyone time and heartburn.

Figuring out when to play the Incrementalist and when to be a die-hard Completionist is the hard part.

And flexibility is something to be prized as well. Nobody likes a flip-flop, but it is absolutely necessary to have the skill to constantly re-evaluate the project situation and suggest at the appropriate time that Johnny’s Incrementalist approach really needs to become Suzie’s Completionist method in order to solve the issue, because the extent of the difficulties didn’t rear their ugly collective heads earlier in the game. Knowing when to make this call and how to back it up takes a lot of experience and research.

If I had to say which I was more like, I’d definitely say I tend to be a Completionist, more because I feel it serves myself and my business better than if I was purely an Incrementalist. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking ahead on the problem at hand, anticipating what the company, marketing and sales, support, other departments, and the customer will do or want to do in the future that will invalidate or cause me to expand or rework how things are planned right now.

The old adage proves to be correct more times than not: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Much of designing a system follows this path and one must always be warping, manipulating, and stretching the original idea like so much mental Play-Doh to avoid going catatonic later. Being able to account for future hiccups while fitting the square peg needs of the project into the round hole of the company — well, that’s just beauty to behold.

Or, if you prefer the chaotic, banging your head against a wall does burn about 150 calories an hour, and beer is about 75 calories per glass, so even if you have to go out drinking and stressing about your job, you’ll still lose weight!