where is the maze?

In his recent article critiquing Google’s current ailments, Praveen Seshadri said of the organization: “As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that ‘the maze is in the mouse.’”

In this analogy: we (people or the institutions comprised of them) are mice, the value or meaning that we all seek is the cheese, and the maze is whatever must be navigated to get that cheese.

When the mouse is in the maze, it is the world it must navigate in order to find cheese.

When the maze is in the mouse, it is something within it that it may or may not be aware of that it must navigate first if it wants to even have the ability to find cheese.

Seshadri, who spent the last three years at Google after the company he co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud, presented a rather dizzying list of processes and frameworks that constitute the worrisome maze he’d come to discover: “approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs.”

All this complexity — largely unquestioned, heavily drilled in, and persistently maintained — slowly but surely muddied the pursuit of value (of cheese!) to the point where it wasn’t obvious what was being pursued.

Regardless of who you are seeking value for — whether it’s your organization, your team, or you — it seems appropriate to ask early on: where is the maze?

Is what must be navigated fundamentally internal, external…or both?

Deeper questions must be asked to understand this: why are we working on the problems that we’re working on, should we still be working on them, what are we doing that may be inadvertently working against us, is the goal post still where we think it is or has it clearly moved, why are we doing what we’re doing?

This level of scrutiny is no doubt exhausting and will likely wound some egos (including yours at times).

It is, however, infinitely better than the rather terrifying alternative: doing unhelpful things under the illusion that they are helpful, and remaining stuck without realizing it as a result.