Chapter 39. The Exodus
It’s a day like any other. The regular flow of morning mails from the highly caffeinated. Two morning meetings with nothing unusual. The usual lunch followed by your staff meeting where...Andy shows up late. Andy is never ever late for anything. Odd...well, whatever.
Staff finishes, still nothing notable, except Andy says nothing the entire time, which is also odd. You’re now officially wondering what is up with Andy, so you grab him and pull him to the closest office.
You: “Dude, what’s up?”
Andy: “I’m leaving.”
In a fraction of an instant, you are able to do all the political and social math regarding Andy’s departure. You can see the complete set of unchangeable reasons he’s leaving, you can predict who is going to follow, and you know that there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
This is the Moment, and in that moment, you can see how it’s all going to come crumbling down.
This Sucks
At some point of your career, hopefully through no fault of your own, an organization will start collapsing around you. It’s a horrific experience that I hope you can avoid, but one you nonetheless need to understand.
Sorry about the collapse. That sucks. Everything that follows is a dispassionate and judgment-free review of the awful things that are going to occur, but before I start I’d like to point out the singular upside to this collapse: you’re going to learn to see it coming.
Having been through three of these organizational disasters, you’d think I would have learned my lesson. Well, I have. I’ve learned that often there is no preventing organizational fuckups of this magnitude, and sometimes the best you can do is either get the hell out or find a comfortable place to hide.
Second, nothing in this chapter is going to help you prevent this cataclysm. In fact, this chapter assumes your disaster is in progress, guaranteed to be as bad as possible, and you’re in it for the whole thing. Again, sorry.
Two Threads
To understand how this exodus begins, you need to understand how information moves around your company. There are always two ongoing types of conversations in the building. One is tactical, and one is strategic. Each of these conversations or threads drives a specific part of your company and, consequently, drives a specific part of your organizational collapse.
Let’s talk about the tactical first.
Tactical
This is the daily conversation of the company. It includes the thoughts and opinions of everyone on the team. Content varies wildly by team and by group, but these are the public topics associated with the work that the team produces. We all care about our local scenery and whatever might eventually affect that scenery.
When everything is normal in the group, the tactical thread is kind of boring, but as we’ll see, it changes when the sky is falling.
Strategic
The easiest way to start thinking about the strategic conversation is, “This is what managers are talking about all day,” and when I say managers, I mean from your boss all the way up to the CEO. The strategic conversation is the constantly evolving plan of action for the company. How are we doing? What’s next? What’s not working? How can we do better? Who is screwing up?
If you’re reading that paragraph and filling with inner rage about the secrecy of managers and not being included in this conversation, I want to remind you that the fucking sky is falling and you need to chill out so you can figure out what to do next. Your being included in these strategic conversations very well might have prevented this worst-case scenario; you knowing might have given you insight that may have changed your course of action. But the collapse is happening, and all we’re doing here is understanding how it might play out.
Whatever the underlying reasons are for this organizational collapse, they will first travel the strategic thread, as this is where early detection and triage will occur. These participants in the strategic thread are usually those who comprise the first wave of folks walking out the door. If you’re viewing the tactical thread as content provided by a bunch of docile sheep waiting to see when the next wolf will show up, you’re a manager and you’re judging. Remind yourself of the world where your daily work was blissfully ignorant of the strategic shenanigans of the management caste.
The First Wave
The first wave of departures consists of folks privy to the strategic conversational thread. They’ve heard what’s coming, and they’ve done the political and social math, so they’re out. A few things to pay attention to here.
Where does this exodus begin?
Without a single conversation, you can infer a lot simply from the starting location of the exodus. If sales is bleeding people, one might assume something is wrong in sales, and if sales are bad, well, everything’s bad. A mass departure from engineering says the same thing: something is wrong in engineering, which means something is wrong with the product, which means you may not have anything to sell.
Why are they leaving?
Now is a good time to figure out why. There’s going to be a well-crafted message traveling the hallways that explains these departures, but the message has been created to spin whatever it is that this wave of departures is fleeing. You need the truth.
If you want to understand why a bright strategic person is gone, you need to get them behind a door in a safe place where you can ask: “OK, WTF?” This is how you’re going to get the real story.
Why are they letting them go?
In any exodus, there’s a lynchpin departure in the first wave. This is the person perceived in the group or organization as absolutely essential to the business. If they leave, we’re dead.
And they’re leaving.
The troubling part of the lynchpin departure is that everyone knows this person is essential. Worse, everyone who’s in on the strategic conversation knows this and they know the reasons why this person wants to leave and this person is still leaving.
If this person is essential, that means everything has been done to retain them and they’re still merrily getting the hell out of the building. Whether you’ve successfully uncovered the root cause of the exodus or not, the lynchpin departure is a good leading indicator of what’s about to happen: the second wave.
The Second Wave
If the first wave is the departure of strategic resources, the second wave is tactical, and for each person in this wave it starts with the Moment.
While randomness is part of doing business on planet Earth, most folks spend a lot of time insulating themselves from this randomness. They go to school to learn what randomness might occur so they can try to predict it, they get married to reduce randomness of the heart, and they get a job so their day is full of predictable things to do.
Injections of randomness freak people out. They see these events as assaults on the foundation they’ve built against the randomness, and in this attack there are two typical responses: fight or flight. This is the Moment. It’s the instant recognition that your world has been forever changed by the uncontrollable random, and there’s likely not a damned thing you can do about it, so you either decide to dig in or make a run for it.
Now, the first wave is already in progress, so why am I talking about the Moment relative to the second wave? The Moment occurs for everyone in the first wave, too, but the Moment has much more potential for organizational damage in the second wave.
It’s the tactical conversation thread that drives the second wave, and once the exodus has begun, the tactical thread mutates from the daily dish to the formidable grapevine. See, in an absence of actual information, people make shit up (think back to Chapter 15). The scary potential of the second wave is that the legitimate strategic reasons behind the first wave transform into crazy conspiracy theories based on people’s core discomfort with a random world.
The one thing to pay attention to in your role as observer of this hypothetical disaster is: “What is being done to inform the second wave?” Management has two approaches.
Approach #1: Wait it out
Remember, we’re in the middle of the first wave and the beginning of the second wave. The time to prevent this disaster has passed, and now we’re into damage control. The question is, when do they start? I’m presupposing your management team has already screwed up by not reacting during the first wave because I’m assuming a worst-case scenario. It’s the second wave now—are they still waiting?
Management sees acknowledgement of the disaster as a disaster in itself. They believe that if the world knows this disaster was allowed to occur there would be significant downstream impact, which is ironic because the downstream impact is already happening and they’re making it worse by ignoring it.
Sigh.
Approach #2: Stem the tide
Hopefully, at some point, a conversation will begin. Someone is going to stand up in front of the room and project a list of bullet items that are directly targeted at explaining this disaster. This will be a well-shaped message geared to answer one question: “What are we doing to stop this random shit from happening?”
The good news is that management has decided to do something. Given the incredibly bizarre theories that are traveling the tactical channel, any message is better than the destructive silence.
The specific managerial repairs that need to be made are a function of the disaster, and I don’t know what disaster that is, but if you do know the true nature of the disaster, my questions are: Do they actually talk about it? Are they doing something to stem the tide, or are these crafted messages just different versions of waiting it out?
Never underestimate the ability of a management team to interpret reality to their benefit. Managers at all levels are incentivized to observe and report on a world that supports a business’s view of progress. These reports vary from subtle adjustments to the truth to outright lies.
As an aside and in defense of managers who are doing their best, this optimization for the self is natural human behavior. It’s not that you believe that the world revolves around you; it’s just from where you’re sitting, it seems like it might. The problem with this self-optimization relative to management is that they have the unique responsibility to optimize both for themselves and for you, and there are situations where those separate goals are in conflict. Think of it like this. Your manager is going to have their world-altering Moment just like you, and the question is: are they going to look out for their interests or yours?
The second wave is when things just get weird. Half-true stories are being told in the hallways, and personalities have altered as people are shoved out of their comfort zones. The normal workday is full of drama and intrigue, and that’s the other problem with the second wave: its existence is a reason to leave.
Whether they’re doing something about it or not, management’s hope is a quick end to the second wave because they’re under the false impression that the completion of the second wave is the end of the exodus.
Again, wrong.
The Third Wave
In this hypothetical disaster, you’re still here. You needed front row seats so you could fully understand the mechanics of the exodus, and you’ve got one more wave.
The third wave is the devious wave.
The first wave is gone, the second is gone or about to be gone, and one morning you have a brief glimpse of normality. No one walks into your office with their Moment on their face. No one has resigned in a couple of days. It almost feels normal.
And you want it to be normal. All of this wave bullshit has been exhausting, and during all of these waves, productivity is shot along with morale, so when a day has just a glimmer of normality, you mentally leap on it: hey, do I actually get to work today?
Not so fast.
What’s happened during the first two waves is that a pile of people has been cast to the wind. Maybe they landed inside of the company, maybe they landed elsewhere. One of things they took with them is an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of your group. This means that every talented person who hasn’t left in the first two waves is going to be recruited by these annoying, happy former coworkers who dangle just one thing: you know where I am there’s no disaster, right?
The folks who have survived the multiple wave exoduses are tired, demoralized, and adrift, so the moment a familiar face shows up with good news about a bright future, they are susceptible. If they’re talented and situationally aware, I’ve no idea what they’re still doing on the sinking ship, but they’re still there...for now.
The third wave isn’t of the same magnitude as the first two waves. It’s aftershocks, but anyone who has been through a natural disaster knows it’s the aftershocks that drive you crazy. The third wave wears on the folks who have weathered the storm; the third wave might be the reason they choose to leave.
Which Wave?
This wave model I’ve described is inevitable. Horrible news leads to leading departures. Leading departures lead to larger departures. All those departures lead to even more departures. It’s how groups of people react when their formerly safe home becomes professionally treacherous.
I’m sorry to have hypothetically kept you in the building for this entire event, but knowing how it’s going to play out gives you context so you can figure out your move. Are you the first one out? Or are you going to wait for your friends to throw you a lifesaver?
Here’s the good news: you’ve just been through hell. You’ve just acquired years of professional experience watching the intricacies of your organization slowly collapse around you. You’ve made three new lifelong friends with now former coworkers who took you aside before they left and said, “The best part of working on this project was working with you.” And unless this disaster kills your company, this rapid restructuring of your group will result in opportunities you would have never seen.
Surviving the collapse of an organization is like surfing big waves. You only know the wave is big when it gets close, surfing it scares the hell out of you, screwing up during the ride results in an additional beatdown, but when you’re done, you’re better equipped to handle the next wave.