Engineering encourages continuous improvement. We refactor code, review incidents, plan the next quarter, and measure whether a system is getting better. It is easy to apply the same model to a person until every day becomes preparation for a future version of oneself.

An Alan Watts talk made me question that transfer. This is my response to the talk, not a transcript or an attempt to turn it into management doctrine.

A role is useful, but it is still a role

“Engineering leader” comes with an interface: make decisions, explain trade-offs, mentor people, and take responsibility when the plan fails. The role helps a team know what to expect. Trouble starts when protecting the identity becomes more important than doing the work.

That can look like defending a decision after the evidence changes, pretending to have an answer, or treating disagreement as a challenge to status. Remembering that the role is not the whole person makes it easier to say “I was wrong” without experiencing the correction as a collapse.

Deadlines are coordinates, not a place to live

Roadmaps and two-week iterations are useful coordination devices. They are poor measures of whether the day in front of us has value.

The work still happens in the present: reading the unfamiliar code, listening to the person who found a risk, or staying with a difficult problem long enough to understand it. A team that talks only about the next milestone can miss the quality of the process producing it.

Past incidents create a similar trap when they become permanent identities. A failed release should change controls and judgment. It should not become proof that the team is incapable of shipping.

Improvement without permanent inadequacy

There is a difference between learning and treating oneself as a defect backlog. The first opens possibilities. The second makes completion impossible because each improvement only reveals another reason not to be satisfied.

For leadership, this changes the question from “How do I fix this person?” to “What is preventing this person from doing the work they are already capable of doing?” Sometimes the answer is missing skill, and training helps. Sometimes it is unclear authority, fear, or a system that rewards the wrong behaviour.

Projects have finish lines; a working life does not. I still plan, review, and improve. The talk was a reminder not to postpone participation until some imagined final version of myself arrives.