Driving vs participating require orders of magnitude different amounts of energy in a workstream.
- Driving vs participating require orders of magnitude different amounts of energy in a workstream.
- If you're participating you're only obliged to do work if there's an action assigned to you.
- If you're driving you're the owner.
- There's always an action assigned to you implicitly which is "move the ball down the field by making sure an effective execution task is owned by someone (or you) and if there isn't one, come up with one."
- "And if things aren't converging to a good enough outcome by a good enough date, then escalate."
- How much energy being an owner takes scales with how far from default diverging to default converging the workstream is.
- If it's extremely default diverging (none of the participants are aligned with participating) then it takes infinite energy to be an owner.
- Then as you get incrementally more alignment it takes logarithmically less effort until you get to the singularity where it flips to default-converging.
- Past default-converging, it starts moving forward on its own, and the driver is only responsible for steering.
- After that point, the workstream produces net energy, rather than taking energy.