A few years ago, I was in one of my ruts. Everything I was working on seemed to be bogged down or low-leverage. What was so frustrating was that this had come on the heels of a few amazingly productive months, where I had gotten a lot done. Worse yet, this seemed to happen cyclically: periods of productivity and a sense of accomplishment were followed by periods of delays and a sense of frustration.
Coincidentally, around the same time, I had just heard of the Peter Principle, which goes something like this:
“Every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence”
Laurence J. Peter, THE Peter Principle (1969)
It’s brought up often in organization theory as an explanation for why there are so many ineffective managers and executives. “Employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.”
Basically, the idea is that advancement within an organization is an unstable system that eventually stabilizes in a deteriorated state where most people have been promoted to jobs they can’t perform.
That’s when I realized something: that same sense of an unstable system stabilizing in a deteriorated state perfectly described these cyclical ruts I would find myself in. My backlog of work was getting peter-principled!1This may not be a particularly deep insight, but I found that when I framed it in terms of the Peter Principle, it stuck with me and has become a useful shorthand.
Here’s what happens:
Let’s say you start out with 10 projects in your queue. You’ll tackle several of them and knock them out right away: either because they lent themselves to easy solutions or they were in your sweet spot of capability.
But as these projects are completed, all that remains are the tasks that either are really hard, or aren’t things you ever wanted to do in the first place. New projects get added, but just contribute to this situation, as the ones that are easy flow in and out of your backlog rapidly, and the ones that are bad continue to accumulate.
Your backlog continues to worsen, day after day, until you wake up one morning and find that every single project you have on your list is horrible. Every project portfolio becomes filled with useless, crappy projects.
The Solution: Creative Destruction
Some amount of creative destruction is essential to counteract this: periodically, you have to look at your list of tasks and acknowledge that some of them just won’t get done by you. You either need to take them off your list, or if they have to get done, pass them on someone who can finish them.
Something else I noticed is that taking a long vacation often cleaned out my queue in an organic way. I think that explains (to a large degree) why vacations are often followed by a period of hyper productivity – more than can be explained simply by “feeling more refreshed.” The nature of the work had changed. So this is another great way to un-peter-principle yourself.
This Applies to a Lot of Backlogs and Other Things!
The mechanic that the peter principle describes actually helps describe a lot of “groups that have things flowing through them”: product backlogs, initiatives, committees, etc. Curious if you’ve noticed this in any systems you’ve observed!2 I just came across another real life example of this a couple weeks after writing this article, this time involving our kid’s sippy cups. We have three or four duplicates of these, and generally if we find one on the ground in an obvious place, we replenish it into our stockpile. But slowly, each one disappears, so that in 3 to 4 weeks all of them get lost. And when they get lost, they get lost in very peculiar places we would not normally look! A cleansing begins to find all of them, and surprises and hilarity ensues.35/13/22 came across another example of generalized Peter principle in a Robert Sedgwick lecture on binary heaps. He compares the swim operation on a max-based binary tree to the Peter Principle.