It sounds topsy-turvy, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. The amount of work you have to do, especially if you are the leader of an organization, can expand indefinitely—it’s simply not possible to do it all. Atchity hit the point perfectly in his book A Writer’s Time:

If your work is successful, it generates more work; as a result, the concept of “finishing your work” is a contradiction in terms so blatant and so dangerous that it can lead to nervous breakdowns—because it puts the pressure on the wrong places in your mind and habits.

There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

When an organization confronts a large number of novel problems, a top-down structure is likely to be a choke point. As issues get escalated, problems pile up on the doorstep of senior leaders who often lack the experience and bandwidth to make smart, speedy decisions. Over time, the backlog grows and the pace of decision making decelerates. Stratification is the enemy of speed.

As the damage caused by excessive speed ripples throughout an organization, it can turn into a vicious downward spiral that, once it gains momentum, is hard for leaders to reverse. As harried leaders make bad decisions and errors that create more pressing problems that are left unsolved, and one overwhelmed member after another burns out, turns selfish and nasty, makes more flawed decisions, and becomes less creative, everyone tangled up with the organization suffers.

As individual teams kept racing ahead, Uber’s overall “organizational velocity” kept getting slower. There were three signs that the company was stalling. First, engineers were spending more time “wrestling with fixing things or dealing with mundane maintenance issues” and less time writing new code. Second, more teams had trouble implementing new features because they needed help from other teams, but weren’t getting it. Or were blocked by other teams that were opposed to the new feature. Third, software outages were on the upswing. “Engineers and developers were responsible for their own code and on call for their services. That meant one proxy for technical debt was sleep debt.” The sleep debt kept getting worse. Skilled engineers “mired” in such “grunt work” kept leaving for companies such as Google, because they didn’t like being “woken up in the middle of the night fifteen times a week.” As Thuan explained, this “technical debt” resulted from a structure that was too decentralized and norms that encouraged people to charge ahead without collaborating and coordinating with other teams—so more and more employees engaged in firefighting to make temporary and local repairs that kept the system running but didn’t fix root causes. Thuan added that further organizational debt was created because, as the company raced to scale fast, it hired and promoted too many inexperienced managers. These inexperienced managers were too focused on racing ahead and achieving short-term wins and were not focused (or skilled) enough to understand when to slow down and do things right and to coordinate their work with other teams.