Eat the Frog is a memorable, if rather gross, metaphor that means choosing the most important thing you must do today and doing that first.

It derives from a variant of a quote that Mark Twain never said, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."
— Not Mark Twain

Another way to think about it is that if you first Eat the Frog, everything else will be easier for the rest of the day. And won't that feel nice?

The Eat the Frog time management technique was popularised in Brian Tracy's productivity book Eat That Frog! Get More of the Important Things Done - Today!

Many tools in Tracy's book are based on the general premise that there will always be more to do than you can do. So, find the things that will have the most impact and do those first. The others will drift on by.

I once saw someone ask for advice on getting motivated to clean the house. One person answered: "Write a book."

Sometimes, our most significant and impactful goals are those on which we so readily procrastinate. Often, these will be in the important, not urgent, bucket.

You have a lot of things that need to be done or that you want to do

One of the nice things about eating the frog first thing is that getting it done feels really good. It helps build momentum for the rest of the day with a nice endorphin rush of ticking off something significant.

Decide on your Most Important Task (MIT) to tackle, ideally the night before. If it's too big and you can't finish it in one sitting, divide it into manageable chunks. Then start on the first chunk and leave everything else.

And sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to start. So consider doing just 5 minutes. Once you've started, very often, keeping going becomes easy.

Questions that come up regularly in Tracy's book "Eat That Frog", including for the Eating the Frog principle, are variations of:

What is the most important thing you could be doing?

If you weren't already doing this, would you start doing this?

What skills will take you furthest in your career?

What are you able to do best that others can't?

It all looks pretty straightforward when I read questions like these. But I have found that answering them is usually much harder.

Our goals are often interrelated. For example, earning more may require you to increase your skills first. And getting clear on what your most important goals are first is a prerequisite and also not always straightforward.

Then, what activities are the most important or will have the most impact can be unclear. And, sometimes, small actions such as an unexpected event or connection may have out-sized benefits. Or neglecting a seemingly minor task could lead to losing a significant client. But does it still make sense to try to work on the most important task first thing in the morning? Yes.

Like a child leaving a brussel sprout at the side of the plate to get cold while they eat the roast, it's easy to leave our most impactful and daunting tasks until after the easier stuff is done. But it doesn't usually help to wait.

As the saying goes, if you have to eat a live frog, it doesn't pay to look at it for long.

Face it, you'll never get caught up, so perhaps think about Oliver Burkeman's Rivers not Buckets

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Eat the Frog is a fantastic example of putting the principles of making your idea Sticky into action

Another quote "from" Mark Twain appears in Big Ideas Little Pictures: "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

The always excellent Quote Investigator describes the source of the Eat the Frog family of quotes from the French writer Nicolas Chamfort, who said, more or less, that eating a toad first thing would help steel you against the rest of the day as nothing worse will happen to you.

Eat the frog

Leading from Any Chair is the idea that we all have the opportunity to influence the action even when we're not standing at the front. It's a principle for effective leadership and teaching yourself and others to lead.

In their inspiring book, The Art of Possibility, Benjamin and Rosamund Zander relate a story from renowned violist Eugene Lehner, who played in the Kolish Quartet and Boston Symphony Orchestra. One day, in an interpretation class led by Zander with Lehner as a guest coach, Ben Zander asked him, "How can you bear to play day after day in an orchestra led by conductors, many of whom must know so much less than you?"

Lehner said he was playing in a rehearsal in his first year in the orchestra when the conductor, Koussevitsky, struggled to lead the orchestra as he wanted through a tricky Bach piece. A friend of Koussevitsky and fellow conductor, Nadia Boulanger, was sitting in on the session. Koussevitsky stopped and asked if Nadia would conduct the passage so he could hear what it sounded like from the back of the hall. Nadia conducted the passage without a hitch, and the rehearsal continued. But the episode left Lehner ever wondering and waiting for the moment when a conductor might say to him, "Lehner, you come up here and conduct. I want to go to the back of the hall and hear how it sounds."

"It's now 43 years since that happened," said Lehner, "and it is less and less likely that I will be asked. However, in the meantime, I haven't had a single dull moment in a rehearsal as I sit wondering, 'What would I say to the orchestra, should I suddenly be called upon to lead?'"

There are many occasions when I have personally grappled with whether now is the moment to step up and lead. Sometimes, I have taken them. Other times, I feel ashamed that I sat back and let events unfold without contributing.

It's the easy path to defer to whoever's leading and consider that there may be better times to influence or say what you think needs to be said. Or you can take the view that we're all responsible in some way for what we're experiencing, and we all have the opportunity to influence for the better.

You don't have to be the captain on the field to influence your fellow players.

A typical example I've experienced is seeing a presenter struggle in a meeting, perhaps with technical difficulties or audience confusion. It may take only a little to try and help with the tech or to ask the presenter to explain a point that you see needs to be clarified for people. Or, as an audience member, you can sit back and consider it not your problem.

Once, in the middle of a performance at a wedding, the music suddenly clicked off for the performer. Immediately picking up on the problem, the wedding photographer started singing the melody, picking up where the music left off. Getting the idea, all the guests joined in, continuing the music to the end. This quick intervention undoubtedly led to a better show for everyone, including the performer.

When you choose to step up, it's an opportunity to learn to lead. You may discover that there's more to leading than it seems and gain empathy for the leaders around you.

By constantly asking myself, "What would I say should I suddenly be called upon to lead?" I am mentally rehearsing for when I am needed, for when I am in the position of a leader. It speeds up my learning and keeps me always ready for action.

It's one reason why always thinking of questions at a talk or conference is valuable. It forces you to engage with the material, and when the opportunity arises, you're ready to step up and ask about what matters to you or what everyone is thinking.

Identifying passion and the leaders in front of you

As a leader, if you believe you are superior, for example, as the conductor who doesn't consider the orchestra members to have anything to contribute to the interpretation of the music, then you are likely to suppress the voices of the very people you need to deliver.

People want to contribute—that's why they attended the class, joined the company, or trained in their discipline. Rosamund Zander advises that, as a leader, we can train ourselves to spot the passion of the people in our teams. We can actively look for occasions to allow team members to lead. And if we don't see the passion, we can ask ourselves, "Who am I being that they are not shining?"

We can learn to lead at any time. So the next time you're just one in a crowd, consider that you can lead from any chair. Ask yourself, "What would I say if I were suddenly called upon to lead?"

In case it wasn't clear, I highly recommend The Art of Possibility, which I listened to as an audiobook read by Benjamin and Rosamund. And I always recommend finding 20 mins to watch Benjamin Zander's classic TED talk, The Transformative Power of Classical Music. Left-buttock playing is a sketch I've been planning for a long time.

The Responsibility Poem: Whose job is it?

What drives us: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose

This is the last time I plan to draw an orchestra. I now know a little of what it must feel like to draw Where's Wally?

Leading from Any Chair

Normalisation of deviance is the process where what was unacceptable gradually becomes acceptable over time in the absence of failures. So, the longer a period without incidents, a requirement to wear a hard hat may start to be taken less seriously and later ignored. The unacceptable becomes the norm, no longer seen as deviant.

The term was used by Diane Vaughan when discussing the culture and events leading to the Challenger disaster. However, it’s easy to recognise it in much more mundane examples.

Classic workplace examples where deviance may start to become normalised include:

Normalisation of deviance can be particularly tricky to avoid when failures are rare yet severe or with known but distant dangers, such as smoking.

The Normalisation of Deviance

There’s an old short story called “Whose job is it?” that goes like this:

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.

Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job.

Everybody thought Anybody could do it but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

It used to be up on the wall in my secondary school many years ago. Its message of taking ownership and responsibility and not assuming others will do what you don’t want to do has stuck with me ever since.

It’s rather like the famous advice to be the change you wish to see happen. Litter doesn’t clean itself up. Broken things don’t fix themselves. It might be up to you. (see the Bystander effect)

The story seems to be a condensed version of a longer piece by Charles Osgood called "The Responsibility Poem," though I couldn't find an original source anywhere.

Also see: For want of a nail, the story spine, the Accountability Ladder, RACI

Whose job is it?

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.

The VUCA framework is a reminder to consider how to lead and adapt to the challenges of living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen provides counterpoints to each that leaders can use:

We live in a VUCA world, but we can handle it.

The VUCA framework originated in the US Army War College.

VUCA is an acronym, as opposed to an initialism. Also see OODA Loop.

VUCA

Saying "no" isn't easy. But there are different ways to say "no" to someone's requests without feeling like you've let them down while being realistic and constructive and ensuring the requester feels heard.

I really like this framework of three types of "no" from Judd Antin:

With the Yes No, you say "yes" to the need and "no" to the specific ask. 

So, a child asking for an ice cream may indeed need something to eat even though they might not get an ice cream. Or the request to make the sign-up button larger might well indicate that it's easy to miss, though a better solution may be to change its colour or the layout of the page.

With the Material No, you are saying yes to the request if you have the time/budget/people/tools to do it.

So, you would love to get the kite out of the tree if you had the tools to reach it. Or the request to make an additional change might be possible on the basis that you can push back the launch date or add another person to the team.

With the Priority No, you are saying yes, we can do it as long as we're happy to drop something less important.

So, you can take the extra cuddly bear in the car if we can choose a different one to leave behind. Or that you can do that project on the basis that we postpone another we had planned.

In each type of "no", the intent is to support and meet the needs of the person requesting while clearly explaining the reasoning for what you'd need to get it done. In each case, the "no" leads to valuable discussions of larger issues of what the real need is, what's required to get a job done, and what's really important.

Read Judd Antin's article, How to Say No, in his series One Big Thought.

Here's a version with all three types of "no" in one image and individually The Yes No, The Material No, The Priority No.

Three Types of "No"

The bus factor is how exposed you are if key people, perhaps with critical knowledge or skills, were hit by a bus.

Examples might include the only people able to keep a company running, restore a server from a backup, or someone who held the only key to unlock crypto assets of its customers. As a result, many places are set up with, or required to have by investors or insurers, some redundancy — say two experienced developers with knowledge of how a service works — to minimise the risk of a tragic accident also being a severe problem for a company or its customers.

As a metaphor, the bus factor may be helpful to consider without the need for people to actually be hit by a bus. It may be worth thinking through how you might operate if someone was late, missed their flight, was ill on the day, or simply quit. In operational roles, this will often lead to a minimum of two people for each key position if nothing else to allow one to take a break from time to time.

An alternative framing, with fewer fatalities, is 'what if we all won the lottery?' and so decided to go do something else.

Bus factor

Groupthink arises from the desire of a group to maintain harmony and consensus. Groupthink can reduce the diversity of ideas and opinions — people can seek to avoid conflict, or avoid expressing unpopular views, and end up thinking down the same path. When psychological safety is low and people feel they may experience disapproval, particularly from people with higher ranking or status within the group, groupthink can get worse.

It can be uncomfortable to express opinions different from a group. Perhaps you remember that feeling when a teacher asked a question in class and if everyone raised their hand to one answer it wasn't always easy to be the only hand up for a different one.

Fortunately, there are some solid ways to minimise the tendency to groupthink. These include:

Generating ideas separately before coming together — can be effective remotely too

Increasing psychological safety so everyone feels comfortable expressing contrarian views

Establishing the norm of a shared work product rather than individual credit/blame

Groupthink

Being clear is not just being helpful. It's actually being kind.

Being unclear about expectations, fuzzy on what you really need, or skirting around an issue, is actually unkind — it sets people up to fail and creates problems in the future.

If you don't give clear feedback, you're holding that person back from improving.

If you say two weeks, but you're really expecting one week, you'll resent it when it's not done in time.

If you say it's really fine when it's not, you'll continue to be upset about how things are going.

Clear is kind is a simple reminder, though by no means always easy, of how being clear in your communication is the generous, brave, helpful, and kind thing to do.

I learned clear is kind, and unclear is unkind from Brené Brown in Dare to Lead. She said she first heard it in a 12-step meeting. I borrowed the dancing emphasis from the always excellent Eva-Lotta Lamm.

Clear is kind

Extrinsic motivation is the carrot or the stick — when the motivation for doing something is an IF/THEN reward or punishment. We use extrinsic motivation all the time like paying people to come into work, or issuing speeding fines to make people slow down. It can work well for simple problems, basic compliance, and short-term results.

However, when you need long-term behaviour change, when creativity is needed, or you're tackling complex problems, external rewards and the threat of punishments can even decrease performance and productivity. Rewards only go so far if you want to inspire a hit album, create the next Oscar-winning film, or create a breakthrough product. That is, for most of the important work we do in our lives, including I believe parenting, using extrinsic motivators of rewards or punishments is likely to be far less effective than tapping into intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from inside ourselves.

I like Dan Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose framework for intrinsic motivation. His TED talk on the Puzzle of Motivation is also a fun and interesting watch.

Extrinsic motivation

I've read that Steve Jobs used to tell a story to new VPs about a janitor and a CEO. If you were the janitor and were asked to clean an office, it's reasonable to have not cleaned it if you found the door was locked and you didn't have the key. However, somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, the reasons or excuses for why something happened or couldn't be done stop mattering. It probably isn't your fault that the system went down, or that you didn't have access to the office, but as a leader it's your responsibility to make things happen and mistakes are now your responsibility too.

The sketch is not meant to downplay the role or attitude of janitors in any way or say that this is the difference between janitors and CEOs. Here's more on how Steve explains it.

The story is a nice example of the accountability ladder.

I learned this from the excellent Julie Zhou.

Reasons stop mattering

Bosses push information up to authority. Leaders push authority down to information.

This little gem is from ex-submarine captain turned leadership guru, David Marquet. Pretty much any talk by him is great, but here's an entertaining and thought-provoking talk by him I enjoyed.

See his book Turn the ship around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders

Push authority to information

A manager or leader can be an umbrella or a funnel.

An umbrella shields the team from distractions, last-minute changes, and conflicting priorities, creating a protective space where they can focus and thrive. This umbrella management style ensures the team has the clarity and autonomy needed to do their work.

A funnel, however, allows every request, deadline, and distraction to pour straight through, leaving the team overwhelmed and struggling to keep up.

As organisations grow, the demands on a team often increase dramatically—especially in areas like product management at tech companies. Left unchecked, these demands can drain a team’s time, energy, and ability to focus on what really matters.

Todd Jackson, former product manager of Gmail, captured this perfectly with the umbrella and funnel analogy: great managers act as umbrellas, shielding their teams and enabling progress. Poor managers, by contrast, become funnels that overload their teams.

All of us want autonomy to choose our own actions, but none of us want to be overwhelmed.

Manager time, maker time (or Manager's Schedule, Maker's Schedule)

Umbrellas and funnels

Manager Time and Maker Time explain how managers or makers need to manage time differently.

In Manager Time, a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time, a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making.

Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour, are ideal for making progress on hard problems and tackling something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long, meaningful chunk into two, making it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at the cost of getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker, you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done, you need to do it on the weekend or an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

This observation is from Paul Graham's excellent article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

Umbrella management and funnel management

Manager time, maker time

This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix —  with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn’t have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this:

Responsible
Who will actually be responsible for doing the task.

Accountable
Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals.

Consulted
Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won’t be doing it themselves.

Informed
Who doesn’t get a say in the task, but will be kept informed of how it’s going.

RACI

The more transparent your workplace the less transparent your employees. In an age of trackers, wearables, online monitoring, workplace chat and always-on devices it turns out that not only does a more transparent workplace actually drive people to more secretive behaviours, but that adding a little more privacy actually may improve productivity also.

Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

See Harvard prof Ethan Bernstein’s The Transparency Paradox study (pdf) or I learned about it from the Freakonomics podcast: Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be.

The transparency paradox

The Peter Principle is that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

The logic of the Peter Principle of management

Someone good at their job is likely to get promoted. However, the promoted position will likely require different skills. If they’re good, they may get promoted again, but if not, they will stay. At some point, each employee in an organisation will be incompetent in their position.

The Peter Principle was an observation originally meant as satire. Laurence Peter later wrote a book called The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong.

I like this short take on the Peter Principle by Tim Harford.

We discussed the Peter Principle in the Sketchplanations podcast. During the podcast, I learned about a counterpoint to the Peter Principle called the Paula Principle.

In his book, The Paula Principle: why women lose out at work ― and what needs to be done about it, Tom Shuller explains that the Paula Principle is "most women work below their level of competence."

Tom explains that the Paula Principle is caused by at least five factors: Discrimination, Caring responsibilities, Self-confidence, Lack of vertical networks, and what Tom calls Positive choice. Read more about the Gender, competence and the Paula Principle in the workplace.

The Peter Principle is a specific case, the case of people, of the Generalised Peter Principle which states that "Anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging situations until it fails." See rule number 1 of indoor games.

Keeping the Peter Principle in mind might help be more tolerant of mistakes from higher-ups—they may be out of their depth.

The Peter Principle is different from the Peter Parker Principle, which is: "With great power comes great responsibility." Though Spider-Man popularized this wise proverb, many precursors of the sentiment exist.

The Peter Principle

Named after the brilliant Clay Shirky his principle broadly states that:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Sometimes this may manifest itself as blindness towards new or different ways of doing things, other times it’s the challenge of and innate resistance to making oneself obsolete. Examples include there being more money in life-long illnesses than cures, traditional newspapers’ resistance to alternative online news forms, planned obsolescence of products, committees requiring the presence of committees, or resistance to self-checkouts at a supermarket.

Some exceptions include Vitality health insurance in the UK that  rewards a healthy lifestyle, and the lightbulb industry, in its move towards ultra long-lasting and efficient LED lights, boldly eliminating the need to replace most of its products for a lifetime. I’m still waiting for a breakdown service to reward people for taking care of their cars rather than focusing on fixing the breakdowns.

The Shirky Principle

The accountability ladder is a framework for taking accountability for a situation in which we can move from a powerless victim mindset to a powerful, accountable mindset.

When something doesn’t go right or something needs doing, there are lots of ways to respond. If you choose a victim mentality, it’s easy to ignore the situation, blame others for it, declare your powerlessness, or just wait and hope. Or you can choose to consider yourself accountable and take a mentality of power where you acknowledge the situation, own it, look for solutions, and take action to do your best.

Bruce Gordon explains the accountability ladder (grainy, slightly odd video) with a fun story about him and his son in which they realise his son has homework due tomorrow that’s not done.

I think most of us have more power over our situations and more potential for impact than we usually give ourselves credit — be that with our jobs, our friends, the environment or local issues. Perhaps considering your position on the accountability ladder is a good place to start.

I love this quote from Erling Kagge, the first person to walk to the triple Poles:

"Most people underestimate the possibilities you have in life. And that’s a bit sad…But don’t underestimate yourself. Also, like I said: Get up in the morning."
— Erling Kagge

There are many versions of the accountability ladder. I couldn’t find a definitive source. If you know, please get in touch.

The accountability ladder

We know it intuitively: we trust each person we meet to varying degrees. The trust battery is a metaphor that helps you think about and visualise these trust levels.

The concept is from Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify. He explains, for example, that when a new colleague joins your company the trust battery between the two of you may start out at around 50%. Each time the new colleague acts in a way that earns your trust that level increases, and if they let you down the trust battery level goes down. It can be long and slow to fill up the trust battery yet quick to drain. Each time we interact with someone we are subconsciously considering the level of their trust battery and that level affects how we respond to people.

Lütke says at Shopify they found it a useful way to surface and talk about trust in reviews without it feeling too personal.

I learned about it from the excellent book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work

The trust battery: A handy metaphor to think about trust

The Abiliene paradox is the paradox of how groups of people can take actions that no one in the group actually thinks is a good idea.

Though individually, we each may think that an idea is a bad one, we may go along with the group decision thinking that it’s just us that disagree when, in fact, no one thinks it’s a good idea.

It was coined by Jerry Harvey, a management professor, who illustrated the phenomenon with a fictional story of a family who ended up on a rubbish day out to Abilene that no one wanted to do.

On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene (53 miles north) for dinner. The wife says, “Sounds like a great idea.” The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says, “Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it?” The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they decided to take a trip that none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.

Harvey, J. B. (1974). “The Abilene paradox: the management of agreement”. Organizational Dynamics. 3: 63–80. Excerpt as quoted from Wikipedia :) 

This is not to diss Abilene. I’m sure it’s a neat place.

The Abilene paradox

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North Star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

Conway's law is, paraphrased, that the structure of software will mirror the structure of the organisation that built it.

Conway was mostly observing software development, but I would think it has some application to any large project: cruise ship design, car design, space shuttle design, and maybe even governments and law.

Law is kind of a strong word for an observation, but in any case, here are some other "laws":

Conway’s Law

Smaller software releases generally means fewer bugs, and bugs that are easier to fix. The number of bugs created typically increases with the complexity of interactions of code, which in turn increases with the size of release. This means that a number of smaller releases can hopefully get you to a large change in a safer way with less bugs, and less problematic bugs, created along the way than a single release with the whole lot. There’s probably a somewhat more general relationship with amount of unexpected problems created and the size of any change.

Bugs and releases

A way of helping decide what to do next based on Must do, Should do, Could do and Would do.

Strangely, so many of the things you’d really like to do when put in this organisation end up in the Would bucket.

Management sketches