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WORKING WORDLE
The Skunk Works Works
Sometimes GSD has to happen
After solving today’s Wordle, I’m thinking about Skunkworks.
If you don’t know what Skunkworks is, it’s a term that originated in WWII with a Lockheed Martin project to develop the P-80. It was a secretive project as are most in wartime, and it was carried out in a circus tent. It was the smell of the circuit tent and a reference to a popular comic strip that originated the name.
The thing that made Skunkworks work is that it was just a bunch of very smart people working together to accomplish a big task in a short amount of time. There was minimal oversight, no extra inspections, and if you were on the team, you were expected to pull your weight.
The term has come to mean small groups of loosely structured people who research and develop a project favoring autonomy and trust rather than oversight and micromanagement. It works if you have good people and you trust them.
Before becoming a teacher, I worked on and led groups in small companies that operated like that. We called it “Getting Shit Done”. If something needed to be done, you just did it. You were hired because of an expected amount of knowledge and were trusted to know what to do and how to do it. Occasionally mistakes were made, but that was part of…
