Drones and Cowboys

Everything that gets done is either done by a system or by a person. Systems are operated by drones. Cowboys get shit done in spite of systems.

Systems involve people, but no single person has a view over the entire goal. If you want to get a new passport, it’s almost certain that a system does this for you. Each person does some tiny part, the entire process is probably much longer and more frustrating than it needs to be, but it probably eventually works. Systems optimize for consistency and long-term reliability (no single person can damage the system, either by doing the wrong thing, or by leaving).

By contrast, a dedicated and smart person can often seem to achieve the same thing at a much lower cost (time, money, frustration, everything). They are usually a maverick who doesn’t like playing by the rules, or prefers to operate in places with very few rules.

Many people respect only cowboys or only drones. Cowboys don’t like drones because they have no creativity, they follow rules and process even when it flies completely in the face of common sense, and they probably don’t care about their job that much. Drones hate cowboys because they generally cause problems when they need a system to do something for them and try to get the system to do something outside the bounds of the system. If cowboys become part of a system they probably disrupt it when they join and when they leave.

If you own a business, you probably manage a team. In the beginning, everything acts in a beautiful grey area between cowboy and drone. You have small and neat systems, and everything makes sense, because there’s only process for stuff that is obviously improved by having process. If exceptions need to be made, they get made. If someone isn’t sure about whether to make an exception you can easily all have a conversation about it and figure it out.

As you grow, it’s tempting to fix every issue using the ‘cowboy’ method. It’s fast. It’s efficient. It leads to good results. But the number of things that need a cowboy fix grow exponentially, and cowboy fixes only ever fix that one thing, while system fixes fix future issues too. As you adapt from cowboy to drone, it’s easy to skew too much to one side or the other. No matter how good your systems are, sometimes stuff just needs to get done pronto. But sometimes you need to take a step back and trust that the system you built will do its job, and trying to jump in to speed things up will only make everything worse.

When faced with a specific problem, there’s no easy way to decide when to choose a system fix or a cowboy fix. Too much of the former and you’ll drown in your own bureaucracy; too much of the latter and you’ll never be able to scale. But if you think you’re a person who respects one way of operating more than the other, then probably try to bias your decisions a bit more towards the side that you have less respect for.