So, I was thinking about this thing, the “three batter rule” from baseball. Sounds kinda specific, right? But man, it got me thinking about stuff way beyond the ballpark. It’s this idea that a new pitcher has to face at least three batters before they can be pulled out of the game. You can’t just yank someone after one bad pitch or one hit. They gotta have a fair shot.
It really reminded me of this one place I used to work. We were trying to roll out this new internal communication platform. Big investment, lots of talk about how it was going to streamline everything, make us all super-efficient. We spent weeks, literally weeks, getting it set up, migrating some old stuff, getting the initial trainings done. You know the drill.
And then we launched it. Of course, first week? It wasn’t perfect. Some folks found it confusing, others were just resistant to changing their old ways. The usual grumbling you get with anything new. A few loud voices complained that it was “slowing them down” because they hadn’t bothered to really learn it. Instead of, say, offering more support or giving it a real chance to settle in, what did management do? Pulled the plug. Just like that. After maybe, MAYBE, two weeks of it being live. Not even a full month.
The excuse was something like “it’s causing too much disruption” or “we need immediate results.” So, boom, back to the old chaotic system of scattered emails and shared drives that everyone agreed was a mess to begin with. All that time, all that money for the new platform? Down the drain. And the morale? Took a nosedive. People were like, “Why bother trying anything new if they’re just going to ditch it at the first hiccup?” It was classic.
I remember thinking, man, if they’d just applied something like that “three batter rule.” Let the system face its first few “batters” – maybe the first full quarter. Let people get used to it, work through the kinks, see if the promised benefits actually started to show. But no, they yanked the pitcher before he even had a chance to warm up properly. It felt like they were just scared of any kind of struggle, any period where things weren’t instantly perfect.
That whole episode was pretty telling about how things ran there, to be honest. Lots of quick fixes, not a lot of patience for things to actually develop. It’s funny, because later on, I was working on a project there, a pretty complex one. I made a mistake in an early phase, nothing catastrophic, but it caused a bit of a delay. And the pressure that came down? Intense. It felt like I was one pitch away from being benched permanently. There was no room to learn from mistakes, just this constant fear of not being perfect immediately.
I didn’t stick around there too much longer after a few more instances of that kind of short-term thinking. It just wasn’t an environment where you felt you could really build anything solid, or even grow, because everything was so reactive. You were always waiting for the hook.
Now, whenever I’m starting something new, whether it’s a new tool for myself, or a new project, or even trying to learn a new skill, I try to remember that. Give it those three batters. Give it a fair shot. Don’t just bail because the first attempt isn’t a home run. Sometimes the pitcher just needs a little time to find their groove. And sometimes, so do we.
