From the “if you know, you know” files, my kids are going through an Encanto phase.
For those who don’t know, Wikipedia has a plot summary. The short version of it, the Madrigal family has magic powers granted by a candle. That magic came to light after an armed force killed the main character’s grandfather, Pedro. It also built a magical house named Casita for the family
Since that dark day, a village formed and is doing pretty well, in large part because the Madrigals use their gifts to aid the town. Those gifts have always manifested in the Madrigal children when they turn 5, but for the main character Mirabel, that never happened, and now she’s 15.
Needless to say, this hurts her. She feels different and as if she doesn’t belong. At a point in the movie she sings the song “Waiting On a Miracle,” which has these lines:
I can’t move the mountains
I can’t make the flowers bloom
I can’t take another night up in my room
Waiting on a miracleI can’t heal what’s broken
Can’t control the morning rain or a hurricane
Can’t keep down the unspoken invisible pain
Always waiting on a miracle, a miracle
It’s a lovely song. The movie is full of them.
Driving the plot is that Mirabel starts to see signs that the Casita is falling apart. And if Casita falls apart, what happens to the family’s powers? Will the village meet the same fate as Mirabel’s grandfather?
Do you ever feel like Mirabel as you lead your software development organization? Things started out so well, but as you’ve tried to scale, the cracks are appearing. You used to deliver so steadily, but now simple things take six times longer than they ought to. You’ve tried hiring more people, but that only made things go slower. And you find yourself waiting on a miracle or some figure to emerge and deliver your organization.
That’s the problem.
Miracles and heroes don’t scale, and they don’t keep schedules that align with your organization’s needs. They are fickle. They make for great fairy tales, but I assume your organization exists in the real world.
Are you too late for a miracle? What if it didn’t matter? What if you had systems of work that kept going even when your heroes were on vacation?
