Management by Screams

Move fast and break things...

Photo by Aleksandra Dementeva on Unsplash

Management by Screams

Move fast and break things.

The American people are getting an eyeful of the “move fast and break things” management philosophy. Under the banner of eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse,” something completely different is taking place. Of course, no one sees themselves as “waste, fraud and abuse,” which is why the Department of Government Efficiency sounded so appealing to certain voters. But it is a slur propagandizing the American public into accepting the abstract of what they abhor in reality.

Let’s look at social media. When the platform you are building isn’t really important, you can take a risk on breaking things. Are you creating a way to talk to people you barely know? Impressing them with photos of your restaurant meals? Pretending to vacation in Alpha Centauri or Fiji? Go ahead, move fast and break things. You can do that if no one really cares if you fail.

When you’ve got a simple system, like Twitter, major adjustments can be made with an even guess as to its effects.

Listening for the Screams

If you are responsible for every antenna and cable on a roof, and a new one appears one day and you know nothing about it, cutting that cable will quickly let you know who put it there – by the screams.

Let’s take, on the other hand, a very complicated system. A system that effects every life in America. Maybe not in a direct way, but in a way that pulls at multiple strands, hundreds of them, intertwined and doubled-back, even once or twice. If people’s lives depend on something working, there needs to be another approach other than “move fast and break things.” When what’s being broken are American lives, international leadership and alliances, breaking things become very expensive, as wars generally are.

Cutting a mystery cable on a roof reminds me of DOGE’s approach to government efficiency, but applied more broadly.

The reason this administration seemingly cares so little about the damage caused by its “cuts” is that they don’t expect for all of them to last. They are only going to restore spending for programs that elicit the loudest screams of protest from people they care about or the screams of pain from those they dislike.

It is Management By Screams.

Do We Care?

The second part of Management By Screams approach is: do we care about the people affected by what we have done?