Years ago I lived in Seattle. I lived a few blocks from the KeyArena where the Seattle Sonics - the local basketball team - played. Despite never having previously shown any interest in sports I suddenly discovered an interest in basketball. My friends and family were bemused.
Of course, American sport is more than just sport; the entertainment between each quarter is just as important. One of my favourite acts was a plate spinner. There was a distinct Dr Seuss feel as a tall bean-like figure spun plates on sticks on elbows, heads, noses, knees, other plates. I kid you not - I remember being amazed. Of course they had to work up gradually - a plate here, another there. One by one until, inevitably, there was a loud crash and everything fell to the ground.
Handling interrupts
Back in 1995 I read "Debugging the Development Process" by Steve Maguire. One piece of advice he gave has stuck with me over the following decades: team leads and managers should enable their team to "work on the product without constantly being pulled off to write reports, attend meetings and deal with processes that won’t improve the product."
He was talking about the cost of interruptions. With any complex knowledge task building context takes time - it takes time to get the plates spinning. And a badly timed interruption can cause it to all come crashing down. A seemingly innocuous question can easily take an hour to recover from.
This is not a new insight. But it is not always remembered. In the early part of my career meetings were minimal and held at the start or end of the day to avoid breaking flow. The office had good sound deadening. Small open-plan wings; big enough to be with your team, yet small enough to avoid noise from other teams.
But as organisations grow they often seem to forget the lessons of the past…
The last company I worked for built a swanky new HQ. It had an open central atrium spanning five floors. Massive open plan wings. Hard floor and concrete ceilings with exposed ducting. It was achingly modern.
And it was a terrible design for knowledge work. Conversations bounced off the hard floors and ceilings. Noise travelled throughout the building; I remember being disturbed by someone hoovering in reception - three floors below and at the opposite side of the building.
It was almost as if someone had deliberately tried to build as noisy an office as possible.
Then there was the meeting culture. There were lots of them. And usually at times that suited managers, not engineers. Meetings at 3pm are not good for keeping engineers in the flow.
And into this environment we add AI.
AI
At first blush it’s not clear whether AI would help or hinder. One school of thought says AI helps in this kind of interrupt driven, noisy environment - you fire and forget and let the agent do the remembering.
But my experience is the real gains from AI come from parallelising. Suddenly it becomes possible to work on multiple features in parallel. Multiple products. Managing tens of different agents on different tracks is possible.
But this requires focus; you are spinning plates on your elbows and your nose. The plates will eventually crash to the floor. And I’ve been there oh too many times. The horrible feeling of returning to an agent and realising you have no idea what it was doing. The couple of days it takes to get back up to speed after two days away. And best not talk about the cost of a week’s holiday.
And so?
AI helps both the interrupt ridden engineer and the one who can focus. But it’s the latter who reaps the bigger rewards. They get the speed-up of AI on multiple tasks; the gap opens.
Speaking of opening gaps, OpenAI recently published a chart showing the gap in token usage between frontier and typical firms. Which has more than tripled since January.
My guess is many frontier firms are small and focussed. They haven’t had the time to grow an interrupt laden culture. We’re like that. Could this be why some firms are able to exploit AI and others struggle?
What I do know is that right now learning to spin more plates is the way to scale. Getting the agents to manage other agents. Automating whole parts of your org (we’re currently standing up what is effectively a system test org, but entirely staffed by AI). Agents, not people, are how to grow. If we are successful we may never need to find an office that is both swanky and quiet.
But for now I’ll keep smashing plates; I’m getting used to sweeping up the mess.
OpenAI in “generating AI FOMO” shocker.
Doing anything well requires focus!