alt Hacker NewsLove the idea of the transparent shit umbrella.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
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> But they need to FEEL the weather
You mean they need to smell it!
To your point about dysfunctional orgs:
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.