Unlocking the 10X Professional
Aaron Hurst
LinkedIn Top Voice, CEO, Bestselling Author, & Social Entrepreneur. Founder Taproot Foundation, Imperative, Board.Dev & Shared Purpose.
Two developers with the same resume and pedigree can have as much as a 10X difference in productivity. Their cost is the same but their value is radically different.
I learned this first hand during my five years in Silicon Valley working in venture-backed start-ups. When developers are the critical path to get a product to market and to profitability, a 10X developer is exponentially more valuable but also extremely rare. The more common opportunity was to hire a 6X over a 4X - still a major difference.
Zelidrag Hornung (pictured below) is one of these super stars. He would in one day do what other developers on the team would take two weeks to complete. It also took him a fraction of the time to brief up front saving me time. He got what we were trying to do quickly and then jumped into action.
After working in start-up companies for over five years, I started the Taproot Foundation to leverage the millions of business, design and engineering professionals in the country to help nonprofits scale. We worked with amazing professionals from around the nation and at varying levels of experience and backgrounds.
What I came to realize was that this phenomenon wasn't isolated to technology and developers. There are 10X designers, MBAs and human resources managers. It is easier to spot in developers but they exist in every profession.
In his new book The Sports Gene, David Epstein explores the source of exceptional athletes and references the seminal study done by William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon on “chunking theory”. It is the key to unlocking the 10X professional.
Chess masters and elite athletes alike "chunk" information on the board or the field. In other words, rather than grappling with a large number of individual pieces, experts unconsciously group information into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on patterns they have seen before.
A grandmaster has a mental database of millions of arrangements of pieces that are broken down into at least 300,000 meaningful chunks, which are in turn grouped into mental "templates": large arrangements of pieces (or players, in the case of athletes) within which some pieces can be moved around without rendering the entire arrangement unrecognizable.
Studies that track the eye movements of experienced performers, whether chess players, pianists, surgeons or athletes, have found that as they gain experience, they are quicker to sift through visual information and separate the wheat from the chaff.
This is exactly what I have seen over and over again with the highest performing professionals from developers to strategists. They are chunkers. They see patterns and are able to move quickly while remaining highly accurate. And, like great athletes, they remain very creative in their work and in many ways their ability to chunk frees them to be more creative and see possibilities others miss.
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Since posting this piece, several of you have posted comments about how to develop chunking skills. I commented a response below but wanted to add here given the interest.
I have found a few things that have accelerated my chunking ability. They were based on practicing chunking in different aspects of my life.
- When I was learning HTML, I began to look at everything in the world as an HTML table and trying to see the table lines in everything from a billboard to a chair to a person. If my girlfriend was an HTML table, how would she be structured? I would start to literally see the lines all around me and see patterns for how to creatively turn anything into an HTML table.
- Later as I did more marketing I practiced de-coding every commercial or website to try to reverse engineer the creative brief that was likely used to create that outcome. Even today when I watch TV I literally have a running conversation in my head of the creative team that created the ad while I am watching it. I see the code behind it if you well.
- More recently I have been focused on strategy and design thinking. As I walk around town and talk to people I try to figure out the design question and heuristic that was likely the genesis of the company or product. Again, patterns emerge.
This all helps me build chunking skills so that when I have an opportunity or challenge, I can quickly draw on the thousands of things I have chunked and find ones that fit and allow me to skip 10 steps.
Photo credits: fanpop & Zelidrag Hornung
Superior Workplaces
10yGreat analysis of an efficient and productive mind. 10X professionals exist in many realms. Within facilities, many are overwhelmed with troubleshooting. The best can immediately "chunk" thousands of parts into applicable subsystems, removing the distraction of noncontributing factors. For example, we see an air conditioner as condensing, metering, evaporating and air moving. Thousands of parts reduced to a few.
Software Architect
10yNice article.. all of us do chunking in our daily activity...The most effecient way of chunking is to include in "chunk of work" a little of tasks which you don't have any experience with. So if there are 1000 tasks out of which you don't have any experience on the 100, then each of your 10 chunks will have 90 experienced and 10 non-experienced tasks. One draw back with chunking this way is it allows to finish the tasks early than usual. But the risks are not attended at the first. (Risks attached to the in-experienced tasks are mostly hidden). One way to mitigate this is to do proof of concepts related to the inexperienced items in the 1st few chunks. Speed is nothing more than strategy, concentration and focus.
VP of Software Engineering at First Orion
10yChunking reminds me of the 10,000 hours talked about Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Our brain starts learning how to from faster more efficient neural networks as we focus on a particular task over time. I definitely agree with this article and being a developer, I completely agree that developers that use pattern recognition/matching almost on a subconscious level leave other developers in the dust.
Aaron, I just started following your posts and they are great! Thank you...you are contributing something of true value here. Comments from the perspective of my own profession: I am often asked this type of question--In developing a reasonable rationale for "reasonable" pay in non-profits (IRS standard--IRC 53.4958 Intermediate Sanctions, applicable for compliance). In doing this for more than a couple of decades, I see that successful non-profits must find and keep very unusual and highly valuable people. Interestingly, unusual and valuable people often know what they are worth and can assess this in a broader marketplace. So, valuation of talent becomes a very important task in any organization, particularly a non-profit (due to scarce resources). But, for a variety of reasons, so few organizations invest the time and money to do this properly. It carries both a cost (cost of unwanted turnover) and can reduce the impact and mission success of the non-profit (missed entrepreneurial opportunities, lost fundraising, inability to award or receive grants). My suggestions are that non-profits consider the following actions: 1) define your philosophy on talent and compensation, 2) ensure you have a proper governance structure and independence of outside directors for oversight, 3) measure the market regularly and assess key positions and people, 4) clearly value the skills, knowledge and impact of the unusual people noted here, 4) document the rationale for higher than market pay and inform your board (for Disqualified Persons and Highly Compensated people (most of the 10X people do not make median pay:), 5) if needed and congruent, develop "properly matching" incentive and recognition plans for your best people (note that other research indicates that achievers wish to be recognized for accomplishment and value), 6) repeat...
Chunking - interesting word. I like it. Reflects my decades of experience in strategic management. This applies in spades to music. I play jazz piano and patterns of chord progressions, keyboard visualization, etc. all play a major part in performance. One can scan a lead sheet or a fully written-score and recognize patterns or chunks that immediately trigger the fingers. My guess is that all great players excel at musical chunking!