Alright, so today I wanted to share a bit about my run-in with this thing they called ‘ty cline’. Sounds kinda fancy, or maybe just made up, who knows. We were supposed to implement it, you know, as part of this ‘big push’ for ‘efficiency’. That’s what they always say, right? Promises of making everything smoother, faster, better. I was, let’s say, cautiously optimistic, but mostly just bracing myself.
So, I dove in. I really did. I started trying to figure out the ins and outs of this ‘ty cline’ process. First off, the documentation, if you could even call it that, was a complete mess. It was like someone had a thesaurus of business jargon and just threw it at a page. I spent days, man, just trying to get a basic workflow going. We had meetings, endless meetings, about ‘aligning’ with ‘ty cline principles’. Felt more like we were trying to align stars that didn’t exist, or at least weren’t visible to us mere mortals on the ground.
What did we actually do with ‘ty cline’? Well, we ended up building a bunch of custom workarounds. Seriously. We had to bend and twist our existing processes, the ones that actually worked, mind you, just to make them kinda, sorta, look like we were following ‘ty cline’. The whole thing was supposed to streamline, but it just added layers of complexity. It was like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, and then when it didn’t fit, someone would say we weren’t hammering hard enough or that the peg was ‘resistant to synergy’.
This whole ‘ty cline’ fiasco got me thinking. It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like this. Far from it, unfortunately. It seems like every few years, there’s a new buzzword, a new methodology that promises to be the silver bullet.
It really reminds me of this gig I had a few years back. A super enthusiastic company, full of people who loved the sound of their own ideas. They were always chasing the next shiny object. One month it was ‘Dynamic Synergy Flow’, the next it was some other guru’s ‘revolutionary framework for paradigm shifting’. We never actually finished anything properly because we were always re-learning how to work, or attending workshops on the new ‘essential’ tool that would be forgotten by next quarter.
I was working on this project, a pretty important one for them. We had a solid plan, a good team that actually knew how to get stuff done. Then, halfway through, management comes in, all excited. ‘Great news! We’re switching to the “Maxi-Flex” approach!’ they announced. A complete overhaul of everything. Nobody asked us, the people actually doing the work, if this made sense. Just, boom, new system dropped on us. It was chaos. We spent more time in ‘re-training’ and ‘re-tooling our mindsets’ than actually developing the product. The deadline, of course, didn’t budge. Classic.
What happened? The project completely tanked. Big surprise to absolutely no one on the actual team. And who got the blame? Not the brilliant ‘Maxi-Flex’ approach, oh no. It was us, the ‘inflexible’ team, the ones who ‘didn’t embrace change’. I distinctly remember sitting in this awful review meeting, getting lectured about ‘resistance to innovative disruption’. All I wanted to do was build good stuff, you know? Not play corporate buzzword bingo.
It’s just like this ‘ty cline’ thing. People get so wrapped up in the idea of something new and improved that they forget to ask if it actually is an improvement for their specific situation. Or if it even makes a lick of sense for what they’re trying to achieve. They just want to say they’re using the latest and greatest, probably to put on a slide for their own bosses.
So, my ‘practice’ with ‘ty cline’? Yeah, I practiced alright. I practiced keeping a straight face. I practiced nodding along in meetings that went absolutely nowhere. I practiced trying to make sense of utter nonsense. And in the end, ‘ty cline’ just sort of… faded away. Like all the other fads before it. It left behind a trail of wasted time, frayed nerves, and a general sense of ‘here we go again’. We quietly went back to doing things the way that actually worked, just with a bit more cynicism, I guess.
That’s the real takeaway from these kinds of ‘practices’, isn’t it? You learn more about organizational quirks and human nature than about the actual ‘method’ itself. And you definitely get better at spotting the next ‘ty cline’ from a mile away. You just sigh, grab your coffee, and get ready for the ride.
