“Throughout my life, I’ve been able to see what was in front of me while noticing most people couldn’t. In time, I realized that if the crowd followed something, it was likely wrong, yet, even when this was pointed out, most people would continue to seek safety in mirroring their peers (whereas roughly 10% of people instead were self-directed and were much less susceptible to external pressures or the crowd dictating their actions).”
Seeing Truth in the Age of Information Overload, A Midwestern Doctor, Jan 11, 2026.

Most organizations I helped to improve practiced a very simple “Theory X” approach to managing people. Keep in mind they were continually managing projects that didn’t deliver on time and were always of iffy quality. They were absolutely sure that close supervision and micromanagement of people were the only real ways to show that they were actively managing a continually bad situation. Could anyone imagine that backing off and managing people less would suddenly fix things?

In one particular organization, early in my U.S. Air Force career, I took charge of a project and one thing I didn’t do was constantly check on my team members. I did something that was unique to this organization in that I gave my programmers areas of code responsibility rather than assigning them specific coding tasks. If something needed changing or went wrong in a particular area of the code, one particular programmer was responsible for fixing the situation. Boy, was there an uproar when people outside of my project heard about this. My team members loved the approach.

This was one of many things I was told I was doing wrong. This was not the way it was done at this organization and they way it had been done was the only logical way to do it. This project, which was something we did annually, was certain to be an even bigger disaster they insisted than how these same annual projects performed in the past.

This was not the only thing I did differently at this organization. I also told the programmers to ignore the schedule (heresy!) and focus on getting the code to work well and as expected. Everyone outside our project was sure that nothing would ever be delivered on time, for an annual project that had never delivered on time.

We delivered one month early. In the six months following code acceptance by our customers, not a single defect report was submitted. It was more normal for us to get dozens of defect reports and continue to “fix the fix to the fix” until we wore down the customer and they then finally, begrudgingly, accepted it. I don’t know what happened after that first six months, as I had moved on to my next assignment in the United States Air Force, to sunny Hawaii after Colorado.

Success often follows only after a lot of push-back that insists we are doing everything wrong because we are not doing it the way it had been done in the past. The project, it was insisted, would be even worse than they had been if we continued on with what we were doing.

Luckily, I guess, it never happened that way for me or my projects throughout my career. Observing the situation without the bias of “this is the way it is done and this is the way to do it to get rewarded” was the shortest path to helping a team, project, or organization dramatically improve on-time delivery and quality.

What do you see that needs to be changed to help your project get better, and are you ready to endure the push-back to making that change?