I just got back from VSLive Las Vegas where Angela Dugan and I co-presented our full-day "Mastering Human Factors in Engineering" workshop. It went really well, and I wanted to share my slides.
This post covers Module 1: The Leadership Shift.
The Problem Nobody Warns You About
There's an arc to technical careers that most people don't see coming. You start as an individual contributor — you write code, you solve problems, you get good at it. Then you become the senior person. Then the lead. Then suddenly you're managing people and process and strategy, and the thing that made you successful at every prior stage — being the person who could do the thing — is now actively working against you.
I call this the Han Solo Problem. Han Solo is amazing. He's a hero. He does incredible individual things. But heroes don't scale. When he's not in the room, nothing works.
Picard is... kind of boring. He asks questions instead of giving answers. But boring scales. The Enterprise still functions when he's not on the bridge.
The Real Subject of This Module
The deeper thread running through this module is the generative vs. extractive lens. After 25 years of compounding crises — 9/11, the 2008 crash, the pandemic, AI anxiety — most organizations have drifted toward extractive thinking without realizing it. The metrics all look fine. The soul of the place is dead. People show up, they do the work, they go home. Nobody raises their hand anymore.
This module is about naming that pattern and giving leaders three things they actually need: fluency (so leadership is ambient, not performed), awareness (so you notice which mode you're in), and new common sense (so people want to follow you instead of waiting to be told).
We get into Theory of Constraints, the wait time formula (going from 90% busy to 99% busy isn't a little worse — it's 11x worse), the four types of work, and why your current metrics probably stink. The punchline: if you can't tell whether your team is building something or just protecting something, you've already answered the question.
Download the Slides
If you want to go deeper on the generative vs. extractive framework, start with Generative vs. Extractive Thinking: Yes, And... and AI: The Most Powerful Extractive Tool Ever Built.
If any of this sounds familiar and you'd like to talk about what's happening on your team, let's talk.
—Ben
