We (and by we I often mean 'me' 🙃) spend LOTS of time talking about how to improve our work. LinkedIn-fluencers (even the crappy AI-bot ones) talk about optimizing and improving and making things better all the time. It's great to have goals like this: self-improvement is admirable, and I fully believe that the best people at any given task (software engineering, plumbing, music, you name it) are the ones who are always working to improve what they do.

To absolutely no one's surprise, though, we don't often see the organizational improvements we advocate for (or maybe some of us are surprised by this? idk, let me know in the comments!). Working with people is a messy business: sometimes they're politically or financially incentivized to follow "The Old Way", and no amount of logic will change their minds. Sometimes we do a crappy job of stating our case and they don't understand the change we want to make. Sometimes "this is suboptimal, but I don't have to put in additional effort" wins out over a better idea that requires a little sweat equity. We might give the needle a small nudge, but often we put in a lot of effort and glean relatively little progress from it. It can be maddening at times.

Fever Dream Fantasy: The Thought Experiment

There's an amazing dude named John Cutler over at DotWork who, at the end of 2025, proposed a really intriguing thought experiment. As I'm drafting this almost two full months later, I've had some time to think about what he suggested for a while now...

Here's a link to his original post, but if for some reason LinkedIn decides to eat that, I've copied the text below for posterity:

Here’s a fun little thought exercise. Suddenly everyone in your company is 30% more capable, more competent, more skilled, more experienced.

What would actually happen?

That kind of outcome feels too good to be true. (Which is probably why it's a thought experiment!) I mean, imagine showing up on Monday morning and EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE COMPANY is leveled up like that! Wouldn't it be great? We'd be SO profitable and SO efficient and we'd absolutely CRUSH it every day, wouldn't we?

...wouldn't we?

The Answer Lies in What DIDN'T Improve

Our 30% improvements were in:

• Capability
• Competency
• Skill
• Experience

But think about what isn't in that list:

• Incentives
• Priorities
• Decision-making latency
• Trust levels
• Clarity of ownership
• How work flows
• How conflict is handled
• How failure is punished

Oh, sure, you've increased the Talent. But you've left them in a broken system. Think about it like this: your engineer is 30% better at shipping things, but if you still have problems with prioritization, they're shipping the wrong thing 30% faster.

Did you really gain anything by that?

What if your approval process takes weeks, or even months? Making the engineers work faster doesn't really help. (BTW: This is a concept codified forty years ago, called the Theory of Constraints. Nothing new!)

What if your team struggles with psychological safety? Even if you increase their skill overnight... they're still not going to contribute more when it isn't safe to speak up.

Leadership Always Falls for The "Get Better People" Trap

Listen to senior leadership discussions, and you'll realize that many (most? maybe all?) have fallen for it:

• "I only want A players on my team."
• "We need more Senior/Staff/Principal Engineers."
• "We need higher standards in the organization."
• "We're going to outsource {some competency} because it will be more efficient than investing in our teams developing the skill."

It's tantalizing to think this way:

"Oh, well Bob isn't working out for us - he's competent, but he's just too slow. Let's cut him and hire one of those 10x guys I keep hearing about."

This kind of thinking feels natural to us. If you grew up playing TECMO Bowl, you remember Bo Jackson. He was that 10x Running Back that you and your siblings always fought over - because whoever had him was going to win.

On the surface, managers and directors think like this because it feels like meritocracy. "We gave Bob a chance, he couldn't hack it here." It's tangible - something they can see and do, so they feel like they're hands-on "managing" their team. But I think they're actively destroying their team by doing this.

Wanna know why?

• The revolving door "Bob couldn't hack it" approach is easier than doing the culture work that fixes what actually kept Bob from succeeding.
• Bob gets the blame that rightly belongs to the leadership system... and every other engineer sees that management will cut people instead of admitting a fault.

Here are some "translations" you might want to consider:

For Senior Leadership, it can be psychologically safer to blame their people than to honestly assess the management system.

Environment Shapes Your Team's Productivity

If you've ever read anything on the Adventures of Blink, you know I firmly believe that good Developer Experience is the foundation of your engineering team's ability to increase revenue... but judging from what I observe around me, there aren't many in senior leadership roles who've made that connection.

Let's consider it like a simple equation:

Impact = Talent × Environment

So if everyone were 30% more talented, 1.3x talent seems pretty exciting, doesn't it?

Set your environment to 0.5, and even your extra-talented team underdelivers.

Now let's look at it a different way: If you provide a great environment, even your average talent looks incredible!

Why we can trust the equation

Blink, you just made that formula up. Well... you're right about that... but I think it works anyway! Here's why:

Clear priorities → Fewer wasted cycles

Strong trust → Faster decisions

Tight feedback loops → Rapid improvement

Psychological safety → Better idea-sharing

Good DevEx → Skill converts to output

Providing a safe, empowering, collaborative environment clearly acts as a force multiplier across all these dimensions.

The Right Questions

The easy question for leadership is "How do we get better people?" It's an alluring question because people in management fantasize that the answer is found in hiring practices, in clever interview questions, in asserting themselves as "high-performance leaders" who go and get things done.

But the right question to ask looks a little different:

What would need to change for our current people to operate at 130%?

That's a tough pill to swallow because it reframes the responsibility.

In order to answer that question, you can start by looking for the answers to these:

Where do good ideas go to die?

You might actually have lots of great ideas coming from your staff... but they get strangled before they're realized. Find out why that is, and fix it.

Where does energy leak?

I've watched a highly motivated team absolutely burn out because they spent as much time fighting the system as they did innovating.

Where does friction accumulate?

You didn't wake up one morning and say "hey let's implement a painful cumbersome process" (well, at least I hope you didn't!). It's been compounding in the shadows for a while. Ask the team where it is, and listen carefully. They'll show you.

What behaviors are we quietly (and/or accidentally) rewarding?

I once knew a manager who obsessed over his team's compliance scores. If a finding came out for his team, he insisted on dropping ALL planned work to deal with it.

Governance and Compliance learned that if they needed something from him, they could rattle the Findings saber and instantly move to the front of the line.

His team learned that their innovation wasn't as important as their Compliance scores.

Think about how that affected everyone's choices.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...

If 30% more capable people wouldn’t radically transform your company, that’s not a talent problem; it’s a system problem.

The fantasy is that better people will fix the system.
The reality is that the system shapes what people can become.

Wrapping Up

I get it: managers want to manager. They see a quick path to "fixing the problems" and it tempts them with their own agency:

"You can fix this broken team, just get rid of the low performers and get some rockstars in there".

I've felt like that before. And it's hard to tell the difference between a B+ player who's been hamstrung by a bad environment and a C- player that's genuinely a bad fit. All I'm saying is that maybe we need that trigger-finger to be a little less itchy, and apply a little introspection first.