"When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
– Tao Te Ching, Chapter 44 (Stephen Mitchell translation)
Every Tech Lead has had to hit the ground running. New set up, new team, new challenges. And often great expectations from those around you. So how do you arrive well? Especially when you'd never have chosen to start from where you land?
Let me tell you my first story of arriving.
Story: The factory floor and the power of active surrender
This is a story about a team who suffered a serious software failure. Failure that closed a whole factory floor for days. They were building software to assist processing precious materials, supporting operation of a factory floor that used bespoke machinery.
Testing software for a factory floor is quite different from what we are often used to. Pretend product were walked through a fake floor (with real-enough devices), set up at the side of the team room. Step by step by step, each feature flow was checked. Every test-cycle starting from the same point, no matter what path was important. It was physical, manual, and slow.
At first this was fine. The product was simple, there were few flows to verify, and so the speed of testing fitted the time available. But as the software footprint grew, the manual testing got longer. You know what happens next. It's why we love automated testing, but here, that was hard.
Complexity kept growing. Test routes exploded. Pressure to deliver at pace was always present. Flows needed to be skipped. Bugs were found late. Batch size grew. You will have little surprise that one day, the factory floor crashed. Key feedback loops had taken too much damage.
The floor was closed for days. And until the team could assure quality, a ban on releases.
Vibe Check: a loss of reputation and confidence to the team. and a lot of anger and frustration across the business.
This isn't a story about a bad team. This is a story about a team whose spirit eroded not from carelessness, but from the quiet drift of reasonable decisions compounding over time.
Arrival
I was dropped in to solve this problem — half of a pair of lead consultants. The other lead took on business damage-control whilst I focused on getting quality to where it needed to be. Metaphorical seat-belt on, I prepared myself for a bumpy landing.
The team was unhappy. The pile of consequences bubbled up into arguments. They did not want to be where they were.
And this was reasonable. Given the choice: I wouldn't start from there. Five years of shipping swiftly were dug into the quality of the code, the practices, and in the expectations of what could be delivered. It was not a great place to start from.
I caught myself joining in the wishing the team was doing. I did not want to start from here.
The trap, and how to avoid it
And that's the trap. The wishing was costing me. I lost the ability to see what was possible from where I was. I wanted to be angry with the choices that had been made. I framed them as bad, irresponsible. You might have too, as I told my story.
I could write here about compassion, and reframing, but there is something more important.
To succeed I needed to let go.
I wasn't here to make judgements. I was here to heal, repair. To bring the team and software back to a place of value and trust. And to do that I needed to surrender. Surrender to what the situation actually was, so I could clearly see it.
With new clarity, I could look at what we had and what was needed. I asked the team: what would it be like if we were able to move the manual testing faster? What did we have that might contribute to that? I could sift through the noise, the feelings, the frustration and see both a way forward and existing materials that would help.
We needed a way to fast-forward through the routes on the floor, jumping to the sections that needed attention. And we had code that could help. We identified code, buried in the unit-test fixtures, that could support this.
Building a new console, we were able to bring new tools to the QA process. Manual testing could begin by generating options and positions to start from. These first steps took just a few weeks once we had clear options forward. The team had a way out and could escape their pit of despair. They were ready to begin again.
Principle: "Start Where You Are. Use What You Have"
When I get trapped wishing; wanting to begin somewhere else; I remind myself to "Start Where you are" and orient myself around that.
Forget wishing. What is the situation? What's missing? What way is better? What are the key things that need to change for success to become likely?
I then ask: "What do I have that will help us?"
I'm rarely entering an empty space. And 9 times out of 10, key pieces of the solution are there. The team and org might have answers; I might have solved this problem before; Someone somewhere would have solved this problem before. I need things that will get us moving, but they don't need to be new, it would likely be better if they weren't. Regular and boring is good.
Reject the labels that blind us
Chuang Tzu (A Taoist philosopher) told stories about how trying to force or control reality leads to disruption. He wrote that letting go of labelling allows us to see the real shape of things. He also wrote lovely parables about trees and Oxen.
Fighting where you are is exhausting. And it achieves nothing. Accepting where you are; not as resignation but as clarity, is when you can actually start moving. That's active surrender. Not giving up, but giving in. It helps find the flow, or 'wu wei' forward.
Try it and you'll notice this in your own work. The moment you stop wishing you were somewhere else, is the moment you start seeing what's actually available to you.
Sometimes it's something buried in the codebase. Sometimes it's a team member who's been underestimated. A relationship, or a shared frustration.
Stop wishing. See where you are.