W27 - Three Insights on Educating People

1. Enduring hardship is a means; achieving results is the goal. I recently came across the LEAD model, which offers a useful methodological guide. Relating it to recent architectural work: L, E, A, D stand for four things. Listen — clarify exactly what the boss wants, identify what matters most, and list all relevant key information. Throughout history, many who deserved recognition failed at this step. Experience — connect your own experience and skills, and survey others’ best practices for similar problems. Analysis — evaluate all possible approaches, set a strategy, find leverage points, and select the solution best suited to your context. Do — action is required to make things happen; the general rule is to break big tasks into small steps, iterate as you go, and avoid sitting on a single grand move.

2. Keep responsibility with its rightful owner. Don’t let other people’s ‘monkeys’ crawl onto you and leave you overwhelmed while preventing others from growing.

3. Turn yourself into a coach, not a task doer. For delegated work, it’s tempting for efficiency or short-term cost reasons to handle difficult issues personally. That robs others of the experience and skills needed to do the job well, erodes their confidence and judgment, and creates dependency that undermines competence. This is a classic burden-shifting mistake: when a problem is hard to solve at its root, people resort to quick short-term fixes.