Joe’s Adventures

I had a software developer named Joe who worked for me at one of my software startups. Joe was one of the best developers I have ever worked with. However, Joe had one annoying habit; he arrived late to work every day and missed the first 10 to 15 minutes of our daily 30-minute call. And to make matters worse, he explained why he was always late. 'You wouldn't believe what happened to me today,' he would say. With Joe's lateness and his regaling of the experience, we would lose, on average, 20 minutes out of every 30-minute morning meeting. For him, every morning was a special event that he couldn't control. Lecturing Joe didn't help. Joe's firing was out of the question; he was too valuable to the team.

The following is an example of misunderstanding variation, which I didn't realize at the time. Joe was consistently 10 to 15 minutes late every morning. It was his first time living in New York City. He didn't realize that he took an additional 10 to 15 minutes to get to work every day, regardless of what happened. Crazy things happen all the time in the big city; it's just part of the process. What Joe believed to be special cause variation every day was actually common cause variation. In retrospect, if I knew then what I know now, I would have pushed the meeting back 15 minutes every day.