Most of us are addicted to over-delivering. We think adding more features, more slides, more planning, and more process makes our projects safer and our leadership more effective. We were taught in school that doing more gets you the A+.
But what if your obsession with doing “more” is actually the exact thing holding your team back?
The Source: Jon Kern on Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership
In the latest episode of our podcast, I sat down with Jon Kern, an aerospace engineer turned software architect and one of the original co-authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Jon didn’t help create Agile because he loved corporate frameworks. He helped create it as a pragmatic, lightweight defense mechanism against bureaucratic lunacy. Early in his career testing jet engines for the Defense Department, he realized that rigid, heavyweight processes (like trying to predict a year of R&D in advance) were worse than useless: they were actively destructive.
The Reframe: The Strategic Value of “Laziness”
We typically view laziness as apathy or a lack of drive. But Jon advocates for a different kind of laziness: Strategic Laziness.
In development and leadership, being “lazy” means finding the smartest, smallest possible thing to build (or do) to get immediate feedback. It is a rebellion against doing too much work, too far in advance.
When we over-prepare, we usually do it out of anxiety. We build massive plans to soothe our fear of the unknown. The signal hidden inside the urge to over-engineer is that we are afraid to test our assumptions against reality. Strategic laziness forces you to stop hiding behind bloated plans and start treating your requirements as hypotheses.
The Leadership Application: Purpose vs. Process
You cannot ask your team to be “lazy” and agile if they don’t know what they are actually trying to achieve.
If a team doesn’t understand their core business purpose, they become mere order-takers. And order-takers will just blindly build every feature, tick every box, and follow every process, no matter how bloated it gets.
Jon’s rule is simple: Start with a clear, 25-word purpose.
When your team has a razor-sharp flag in the distance, they are empowered to exercise micro-judgments. They can look at a massive project requirement and say, “To achieve our purpose, we don’t actually need to build all of this yet. Let’s just do this tiny piece and see what the customer thinks.”
Even in the modern frontier of AI and “Vibe Coding”, which Jon actively uses to automate rigorous testing and compliance, this discipline holds true. You can use AI to do the heavy lifting, but you still must “coerce” the tools into following sound engineering fundamentals. Agility requires a clear purpose and relentless consistency.
The Practical Takeaway
Mantra: “I can out-small anyone.”
Whenever you are faced with a massive, ambiguous project, do not ask, “How do we get all of this done?” Ask, “What is the smallest, embarrassingly tiny piece of value we can deliver right now to get real-world feedback?”
The Coaching Prompt
Grab a notebook or bring these to your next 1:1. Answer honestly:
- The 25-Word Test: Can you clearly articulate your team or project’s core purpose in 25 words or less?
- The Bloat Audit: Where are you currently doing too much work, to too great a depth, too far in advance of actual feedback?
- The Next Small Step: What is the tiniest, smartest thing you could test or build this week to prove (or disprove) a major assumption?
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