The Research Paper That Explained 5 Years of Unease I lived through founder-driven chaos without understanding why. Westrum's research explained it. Abrashoff's book showed me how to fix it. Now I help organizations escape.

If you feel unease at your company—founder bottleneck, chaos, no plan, failure punished—that's real.
And it can change.

insights.wa-systems.eu/the-research... #techLeadership #EngineeringLeadership

I reached out to M. Ron Westrum. He pointed me to "It's Your Ship" by Abrashoff.
That book changed everything. Not just language. But tools to actually fix it.

Read Westrum's research on culture types: pathological, bureaucratic, generative.
That startup was pathological.
The chill: pathological isn't rare. It's the default. Generative is rare.

I worked in a startup where the founder made every decision. No plan. Weekly pivots. Chaos.
I left after 2 years without understanding why.
Years later, I finally got it. I was living inside textbook organizational dysfunction.

Do you mean setting that number as quota ? "You can only do 3" ?

Don't Panic: Why Calm Beats Urgency Your company isn't in wartime. But it's acting like it. Panic isn't speed. Calm, structured organizations move faster and last longer. Consistency compounds. That's how you win.

The companies still scaling fast in 5 years aren't the ones that optimized for panic.
They're the ones that built calm, clear organizations.
Consistency compounds. Discipline wins.
You probably aren't in wartime. Stop performing it.
insights.wa-systems.eu/dont-panic-w... #EngineeringLeadership

Here's the paradox though:
Organizations with calm leadership and clear structure move faster than panicked ones.
They just don't look like it.
Panic feels active. Looks impressive. Makes you feel urgent.
But it prevents the things that actually make you fast: clarity, coordination, learning.

Your company has revenue. You have a market foothold. You have a team.
But you're acting like you're in wartime.
Everything feels urgent. Every decision needs approval. Every person is needed for everything.
You call it "moving fast."
You're actually moving frantically. #techLeadership

Now the practical part: Download the template and diagnose your actual org.
Have your CTO, VP Eng, Tech Leads fill it out separately. Compare notes. You'll see the gaps immediately.
That's where you start fixing.
Free template: wa-systems.eu/engineering-...

Engineering Leadership Responsibility Matrix Map where responsibilities should land in your engineering org. CTO owns strategy. VP Eng owns operations. Here's the matrix that separates healthy from broken.

I wrote this up: The responsibility matrix that shows the pattern.
14 work domains. 4 roles. Where should each one be spending time? Where are you probably out of balance?
Read it here: insights.wa-systems.eu/engineering-...

Your CTO is drowning in tactical work.
Your VP Eng is trying to set strategy.
Your Tech Lead is still coding.
Everyone's overloaded and nobody knows why.
Not because you're disorganized. Because no one has clarity on who actually owns what. #techLeadership #EngineeringLeadership

The Three Levels of Work Strategic, Operational, Tactical. Three levels of work. Most organizations blur them completely. Your CTO drowns. Your team stays dependent. Here's what separates healthy from broken.

I wrote the framework here: what each level is, why it breaks, and why it matters.
If you recognize the pattern—burnout despite stability—this is worth 5 minutes.
insights.wa-systems.eu/the-three-le...

#techLeadership #EngineeringLeadership

Strategy: "Where are we going?"
Operations: "How do we build the system?"
Tactical: "What ships this week?"
They should flow in sequence. Instead, they collapse into chaos. Someone (usually the CTO) has to hold it all.

Your CTO drowns in Slack. Revenue is stable. Not a crisis—a framework problem.
Strategic, Operational, Tactical work. Most orgs blur them completely. That's why they burn out.

So, are we moving the needle in the right direction? These six signals answer it. Not your gut. Not activity. Not hope. Signals.

Which signals do you monitor in your projects?

#techLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #FractionalVP

Is the related product metric moving in the expected direction?
Did it unblock or accelerate downstream work as expected?
Was the prioritization call correct? (Did it actually matter?)

All six together close the loop: execution + outcome validation.

These measure execution quality and team friction. But they don't tell you if you picked the right thing to build.

You need three more signals—these measure if the strategy was right.

3 signals tell you if the team is executing well:

How long did it take to go from idea to delivery? (velocity, friction)
How many rewrites & changes of plan did the team go through? (planning quality, requirement clarity)
Did the team manage to deliver in the allocated time? (estimation accuracy)

Your role as a lead? Ultimately to remove yourself from the Tactical part totally. Trust your team. To do that: you help set strategy, but also remove hurdles on the way.
But here's what's missing: how do you know you're moving the needle?

This one question draws together:

Vision: without it, "right direction" is uncertain and bound to change on a whim
Strategy: how are projects and choices putting us closer to the Vision's aim?
Operational: what comes first to get closer? Who is best suited?
Tactical: execution of the steps

As team lead, head of tech, or VP of Eng: keep asking yourself "are we moving the needle in the right direction?"

That's fractional leadership work. Helping teams and orgs remember that the turtle actually does win—but you have to stay in character when the hare is visibly moving.

The math works out though. Less planning = more chaotic shipping = slower long-term velocity. More intentional pace = better decisions = faster real delivery. But the second path requires believing in it when stakeholders get antsy.

What actually works requires sustained effort to resist the anxiety of appearing idle. You need planning cycles. You need time for debt paydown. You need time to think. None of these feel productive in the moment.

The pattern: leadership wants visible progress. Engineers want to ship. Both get anxious during planning time. So the cycle becomes: plan less, ship faster, accumulate debt, move slower. Then do it again.

The worst trap in engineering leadership isn't too little ambition—it's confusing activity with momentum. Looking busy and being effective feel the same in week one. By week twelve, they're completely different things.

Most teams optimize for the appearance of progress over actual progress. The cost: burnout, debt, and slower real delivery. Sustainable pace isn't lazy. It's how you actually finish the race. #techLeadership #agile

A journey: Odysseus Announcing Odysseus a small docker+ssh+caddy based deployment tool.

Odysseus is out: a Caddy+Docker+SSH cli tool (in Ruby) to deploy containers on VPS and baremetal hosts:
- zero downtime deploys
- supports managing DBs and other side containers
- automatic certificates
- secrets in encrypted file

insights.wa-systems.eu/a-journey-od... #OpenSource #docker #caddy

It's written mostly in Ruby, with tests (rspec).
Sharing this in case it helps someone else too. The README files already have enough to get started. Here is also a doc site: odysseus.wa-systems.eu

GitHub - WA-Systems-EU/odysseus: An ecosystem of tools to deploy containers on servers with SSH An ecosystem of tools to deploy containers on servers with SSH - WA-Systems-EU/odysseus

Using other tools as examples and basis, and iterating with AI tools, I managed to get all features I needed in a couple of sessions across 3 days.

So, here is Odysseus, a tool to deploy containerized apps on servers through SSH with Caddy as reverse proxy: github.com/WA-Systems-E...