Leading indicators: Lessons from the potato field

Beyond the lagging indicator: Why 'no incidents' is like 'no harvest'

How do we know that our efforts are taking us in the right direction? What data do we leverage to point the way, enable us to course correct, and learn as we go?

I recently participated in an onboarding session with 7 new employees for one of my clients. There were engineers, product folks, people operations - essentially people from across the organization and in this particular session we were discussing the 5 elements to map out a successful onboarding. One of them being data & metrics. Do you know what you must do in your role to influence your team’s dashboard and exactly how you and they are tracking towards success. Even better - can you tie it to the broader company goals clearly.

The Application Security team (a team responsible for security of the product this organization is building) remarked this was where they had the lowest level of confidence in their team. We know we are doing a good job when there are no security incidents…right?

This is a sentiment I’ve heard many times over in security and platform engineering across many companies. If there is no incident they’ve done good. If the team delivered on a project on time and on budget, they’ve done good. All of these ‘metrics’ are lagging indicators - they are the score after the game, they say nothing about the efforts leading up to the end game.

The beauty of being on the farm is that is shows you truth every day whether you like it or not. There is no room for denial - only the reality of the consequences in the immediate of your actions, and the lessons you can learn. Hopefully that lesson is learned as you’re progressing but sometimes it’s only after it’s done and there’s no more ‘fixing’ for a better outcome.

photograph sources: cobrahead blog and garden know how

Last year, my potatoes turned out quite small and the yield was very low. Some of that result was in my control and some outside - the weather - particularly how much rain we get to irrigate those fields, was well beyond my control. What was in my control were two critical errors I made as the season began, and I knew it. I did not manage to hill the potatoes shortly after planting. Then I gave up, or gave in as I watched my failure unfold and let the weeds ‘win’.

Potatoes grow best in soft soil (soil that has no rocks or other obstacles to get in its way) and in a kind of hilled long mound. When you plant them you want to dig a long trench about 8-10” down, and place each potato roughly 8” apart (depending on the variety). Then you use two circular discs to create a hill or mound all along the trench which adds another 4-6” to the growing depth. This gives the potato much more room to grow (it won’t punch down into the earth like a carrot or parsnip) and it decreases the weeds (because of the hill) and makes it easier to pull them as they mostly end up in between the mounds.

When I planted my potato rows I did the trenching right but I forgot how to do the mound properly, I used the wrong implements on the tractor and so my mounds weren’t tall enough. I knew it but I had so much else going on - this being my first year on my own - I made the decision to let it be and see what happened, knowing full well I was taking a big risk. This is where my psychology kicked in - as the season progressed I saw the certainty of my failure and I gave up. I let the weeds proliferate exacerbating the impact on the yield - the tall weeds chocked out the sun and gave the dreaded Colorado beetle more room to wreak havoc.

There is profound truth in nature, paying attention shows us the way through. It requires work and when we lean in, it is rewarded.

This year I know better and so I will do better. I am better prepared in many ways and I’ll be able to set up the growth for much higher probability of success. Whether the weather cooperates is entirely up to God and the universe.

That is the final, humbling truth of both farming and engineering. You can have the perfect hilling strategy, the best tractor implements, and the cleanest rows, and a week of relentless hail can still turn your hard work into a salad. Similarly, you can have the most robust security protocols and still face a zero-day exploit that was birthed in a basement halfway across the world.

As leaders, we have to hold two conflicting ideas at once:

1. We must be obsessive about the inputs we can control (the hilling) - the leading indicators.

2. We must have a sense of humor about the “weather” we can’t control.

Last year, I learned that giving up because of a bad start is a choice, not a fate. This year, I’m putting in the work and then I’m going to do the only thing a sensible farmer can do: Stare at the sky, drink a coffee, and hope the North Atlantic oscillations are feeling generous. Because at the end of the day, leadership is 50% strategy, 40% hilling the mounds, and 10% faith that the Colorado Potato Beetles haven’t organized a union while I was sleeping.

If the sun shines, we feast. If it pours, we learn how to grow rice. But we never, ever stop hilling the rows.

xoxo

Mic