We build things, you and I. We, like sculptors or masons or carpenters or architects, build and design and create. We do it with as much wisdom as we have, making such decisions as we are able to based on who we are at the time, and the resulting infrastructure is a reflection of ourselves, as much as it is a system. We built it in our image, whether we meant to or not.

In small infrastructures such as I’m used to, I built lots of things. I wasn’t just responsible for the proverbial town church, it was the church and the stables, the meeting hall and the inn. I built it all, and I left my signature wide and bright for anyone who could read it. I built things the way that I thought they should be as often as I could, and while they weren’t perfect, they were mine, and I was prideful of them, in my own way.

When I left, the search for my replacement took a long time. Much longer than I’d have preferred, and to an eventually unsatisfactory conclusion for everyone involved, I believe. I contented myself with the knowledge that my skill set was sufficiently wide in breadth and complex in nature that I was hard to replace. I used this to buoy my ego. Although I had sympathy for the people I was leaving, and the one I left in my stead, it felt good to be needed and wanted, and I was proud that I could fill that role like no one else we’d found.

Such is the folly of the unwise, I’m afraid.

My friend Shawn asked me today how things were different being in an educational institution versus being in a small business. We talked about different aspects of the environment, many of which I’ve discussed here on my blog.

One of the things that came up was the concept of silos, or a division of labor where each person has a few distinct areas that they concentrate on.This kind of specialization is common in organizations with more resources than small businesses, and it has several profound consequences, many of which aren’t obvious at first glance.

The first of which is the deep domain knowledge that one can obtain (and in many cases, needs to obtain). The analogy that I use most frequently is as follows: Imagine yourself sitting on the floor in an infinitely large room, filled with infinitely many buckets. Each hour, you are given a golf ball to place into a bucket. What do you do?

Some people would start immediately filling the bucket closest to them. Every hour, they’d place their golf ball in that bucket, and over time, it would get more and more full of golf balls.

I, as I suspect many of you, take a different approach. I spend my golf balls in as many buckets as I can. Some buckets get more than others, but there aren’t many empty buckets within the reach of my throw. Over the years, a lot of the buckets have gotten relatively deep. Those are my favorite buckets, and even though they’re deep, they don’t come close to someone who picked that particular bucket to constantly deposit their golf balls. Remember that the next time you feel good about knowing more than someone. They just spent their golf balls differently than you.

So by spending our time doing a few specific things, we gain a much more thorough degree of knowledge in those specific arenas. We can afford to become experts because we’re going to be doing it anyway. We practice and learn and work and get better by throwing golf balls in that bucket, and the bucket gets more and more full.

By specializing, we get better at what we do, even though we do fewer things. Because we do fewer things.

With small infrastructures, we build the world around us according to our knowledge and experience — which buckets are more filled. In a large, specialized environment, we are changed to meet the needs of the environment. We fill the buckets that are related to our role, not the other way around.

Another outcome of this type of situation is that over time, two people filling the same buckets tend to arrive at the same place. That is not to say that there is one specific way to do things, but that the waypoints are the same and that there is a commonality in tools and knowledge. This leads to a situation where any person who has put a sufficient number of golf balls into that specific bucket can perform the tasks required by that position. The administrator largely has not altered the roles and responsibilities of that job, but the position has altered the admin (and as a consequence, dictated the form of those people who can take that position in the future).

Where I made the mistake of forming my infrastructures around me, specialized to my particular desires and skills, I found myself impossible to replace. If I would have known better from the start, I could have crafted the infrastructure using a more common pattern. Hiring enough people to specialize was outside the realm of possibility for me, but there are certainly things I could have done to make it easier to find a replacement. I bricked myself in. I was Montresor and Fortunato at the same time.

The advice that I’ve wanted to give for two years, but didn’t know how to say it until now, is that the infrastructure should be the mold, not the sculpture.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.