Splash Damage
Nov 22, 2024
"Splash damage" is a behavior where a person, in the course of solving a problem, create a bunch of unnecessary work for others. This balloons the total cost of the problem to the company. An example might be when a person’s work requires so many revisions from their peers. Or another example might be that someone creates a massive "10-person committee" for a simple task that takes one person one day.
I believe “splash damage” is low performance. It can also be difficult to spot unless you're looking for it. And, in some company cultures, it can be contagious. From experience, this has been because:
The company incentivizes people to do work that involves a lot of people, or incentivizes loud individuals.
"This project involved 15 people, therefore it must be a super complex project, and should be rewarded with a promotion."
"Leader/CEO keeps hearing about XYZ, therefore it must be important and high-impact."The company hires people who don't do a lot of deep, high-IQ thinking on their own; and these people end up outsourcing this deep work to others.
The company doesn't sufficiently test for high-agency individuals in the interview panel, or doesn't quickly performance manage low-agency individuals.
It’s not always easy to identify “splash damage”. It requires judgment, context, and domain understanding. Some are obvious and have objective impact, while others are not. Some examples include:
A person’s code reviews always require 4+ revisions to get right, thereby increasing the burden on code reviewers. This 4x+’s the burden of code review on the team.
A person’s changes consistently cause incidents.
A person’s designs are consistently too far off the mark of the actual idealized design, requiring deep design review every time.
A leader leans too much on consensus-building: creating processes, committees, and meetings for every decision.
A product manager escalates every product decision to the CPO, increasing decisionmaking time and unnecessary stakeholders.
A person tends to create too many "big working groups" for simple tasks.
When I see this happening, or when someone tells me something "splashy" is happening, I think about doing the following:
Try to understand what this person is trying to achieve. What are their goals?
Pull the person aside, and ask:
Why did they choose this way of solving this problem?
What do they think their responsibilities are?
Is this the best way to solve the problem? Is there a simpler, faster way of solving the problem?
If there is a simpler, faster way of solving the problem -- what's the impact of making it more complicated on yourself? On others?
Sometimes there isn't a better way, and this individual truly was thoughtful about their approach. But in most other cases, people quickly realize the footprint of their actions, and pretty quickly correct course.
Psychological safety plays an important role. Employees may be scared to escalate if they fear creating unnecessary work. Real examples of “splash damage” are about consistent, repetitive behavior; occasional one-offs are rarely an issue, and employees should understand if they are beginning to show a pattern, or if it is truly occasional.
The best managers are, of course, technical and domain experts that can identify when splash damage is happening. Bad managers may also inadvertently assume work that is valuable is actually “splash damage”.
At the scope of small teams/companies, it is easier to identify, because people can see the impact directly. This ballooning of work becomes very difficult to identify at large scale.
Once I began explaining the concept of splash damage, I noticed many of my respected peers immediately named a few individuals and situations. Great people tend to have an allergic reaction for this bad behavior (they simply want to get things done effectively). So, they just need a name for the concept to properly escalate it when they see it. By giving this behavior a name to the team and encouraging my coworkers to escalate and raise it, it helped build a culture of accountability and intolerance towards "splash damage".