The Systems That Hold

Marathon pacers have always seemed a little insane to me. Come on, it's weird; I'm glad they do it, but come on.

These volunteers have apparently finished a marathon at least one time and then thought to themselves: you know what would improve this? Having to carry a stick in the air for everyone else for the entire course.

Don't their arms hate it after a few miles? And who exactly volunteers for this? A marathon already contains more than enough hardship. Why not add your own hardship stick on top of everything else?

But there one goes: 3:30. Another one: 4:00. Uh oh: 4:15. 4:30.

You are surrounded by strange people who choose to do this, and one of the most strange is someone you spend hours developing extremely strong feelings about despite exchangin only a few words.

But to them, you are just one of many. They carry their stick, are just running. This is their Sunday, while you fight for your life against the road and sunscreen in your eyes and your overall reasons for doing this.

For me it's always around mile 19 when the volunteer carrying the sign I care about becomes personally offensive despite having done absolutely nothing to me. And what's worse is that they still look basically the same; there's that same little sign bobbing along, and meanwhile I've developed a weird ankle problem and am engaged in some (hard) internal bargaining about whether walking through and beyond the next aid station counts as walking. Just a little walking.

That pacer isn't immune to the hills and bad stretches. They just have to also care about carrying that little sign for the rest of us.

Running a marathon is pretty overused in work speech/writing ("marathon, not sprint" etc.), but when I think deeply on one work experience that bothered me for so long, my mind reaches for those marathon sign holders.

A few years into my first operations role with real teeth, I solved the same forecasting problem for like the third time in six months. It returned in different disguises, different paperwork: first like a modeling issue, second like a data issue. By the third time I remember thinking: okay, we keep fixing the wrong thing.

The model, data, etc., was fine, but there was no discipline around the definition of one major unit that underpinned it.

Depending on who was talking, the same word meant slightly different things, and basically every version was fine enough in a vacuum. But you can't really compare this quarter's pineapples to last quarter's mangos. Every time the difference surfaced we found some way to reconcile and keep going. Then enough time passed that the reconciliation itself became part of the landscape.

Looking back, what we needed was someone to hold a stupid little sign and pace us.

At work, this idea can be pretty annoying in both directions.

Everyone always has a reason why this particular case is different, and often the reason is good. And the cliches flow: change is pretty much the only universal part of life, so of course things shift around, and we all have to meet the moment, etc., etc. And yet...somebody has to sit there and say something like: yes, understood, but what does the word mean? Can we please decide what the word means before we change it again? Do we all agree that the word means exactly this?

Is this nitpicking, hair-splitting, useless pedantry? When everybody else is trying to get somewhere?

I used to think so. I'd see it as bureaucratic fussiness. But now? After running several races and having slight mental breakdowns as those signs disappear ahead of me, I think some people are just holding the sign.

All those things trying to move the sign, trying to get the pacer to abandon it on the side of the road, all of those are almost never obviously stupid. “Close enough” usually has a point. Or this quarter is strange, really, or that definition misses something and anyway let's get going, or this model is directionally right.

Not every mile/kilometer has to split evenly; the important thing is getting where you're going, on time.

At work, you have to get a group of people to know whether you're changing the pace because of the course, or because you're tired of carrying the stick.

Some people, at least on the surface, seem a lot better at this than others. They have the right temperament: maybe they are more Zen, or they're fine being annoying. They remember precisely what the sign said before everyone started having good and bad reasons for moving it, or why xyz definition was chosen, or what the number looked like three years ago, or that this particular exception was supposed to be a one-time exception.^[1]

That sign holder isn't fully going for it. They're there to help a weird little pod around them go for it.^[2] And sometimes the runner should be heading for the next stick up because it's time to step on the gas.

But most miles, the explanations are all good, and the little sign is still the thing telling you whether you're actually going to arrive when you said you would.

For most of the race, though, somebody still has to carry the stupid thing.