An Amazon leadership idiom: good intentions don’t scale, mechanisms do. If you want a behavior to happen consistently, build a process that makes it the default path — don’t send a memo asking people to remember or care enough.
A memo says “please keep the regression suite current.” A mechanism folds suite-currency into the exit-criteria checklist so a story isn’t done until the tests moved with it. Same goal; only one of them still works when everyone is busy, new people join, and the original author leaves.
The test for whether you have a mechanism or a memo: what happens when nobody is paying attention? If the behavior degrades, it was a memo.
Two cautions I want to hold onto:
- A mechanism nobody believes in becomes compliance theater — the checklist gets ticked without the work behind it. Mechanisms need psychological safety underneath them, or people optimize for passing the check rather than surfacing the truth.
- Mechanisms encode today’s understanding. Every one needs an owner and a review trigger, or it outlives its reason and becomes bureaucracy with tenure.
Related:
- Build quality in — built-in quality is essentially a portfolio of mechanisms
- Measure outcomes, not activity — the outcome data tells you whether the mechanism works or just runs