The Three Ways
Three principles for high-performing IT:
- First Way (Flow) — Optimize the whole system, not local work centers
- Second Way (Feedback) — Fast, peer-to-peer feedback along the value stream
- Third Way (Learning) — Continual improvement through experimentation and failure
The First Way establishes left-to-right flow. The Second Way adds right-to-left feedback. The Third Way creates conditions for improvement. Without flow, chaos. Without feedback, no course correction. Without learning, stagnation.
The First Way: Flow
Optimize work movement through the entire system — Dev through Ops to customer.
Local optimizations destroy system throughput. A faster upstream just builds bigger queues at the bottleneck. “Important” means business value, not what IT finds technically interesting.
Never pass defects downstream. Stopping to fix at the source is faster than letting problems propagate. It feels slower. It isn’t.
The Second Way: Feedback
Information flowing right to left so upstream learns consequences.
The emphasis: fast, direct feedback between work centers. Not via management noticing patterns. This is Toyota’s andon cord — worker sees defect, pulls cord, production stops. Local actors, immediate response.
Feedback value is inversely proportional to delay. Finding out your code breaks production three weeks later is useless — context is gone. Finding out in minutes lets you fix it while you still remember what you did.
The Third Way: Learning
Creating conditions where improvement happens.
Two forms: experimentation (trying things, accepting some will fail) and failure practice (incident response, blameless post-mortems, building resilience).
Both require time and safety. Time because improvement work needs protected capacity. Safety because people won’t surface problems or try risky ideas if failure means punishment.
The goal isn’t a system that never fails. It’s a system that learns faster than the competition.
The Brent Problem
When Brent takes on work “only Brent can do,” Brent gets smarter and everyone else misses an opportunity to catch up.
Every time the expert takes on work:
- Expert gets better (more context, deeper understanding)
- Everyone else stays where they are
The gap widens. More work flows to the expert. They become more irreplaceable. More work flows to them. Vicious cycle.
“Only Brent can do this” usually means “Brent can do this fastest right now.” The question: optimizing for this week or this year?
Breaking the cycle means letting others struggle. Slower throughput now for higher capacity later. Treating knowledge transfer as real work, not overhead.
Man, Machine, Method, Metric
The 4 Ms — what’s necessary for any work center to function:
- Man — Person with right skills and availability
- Machine — Tools and resources needed
- Method — Documented process
- Metric — How you measure and track
When work isn’t flowing: Do we have someone? Do they have tools? Is there a clear process? Can we measure what’s happening?
People assume the constraint is the person. Often it’s process or tooling.