The excellent IC's dilemma

Every excellent individual contributor (IC) building cutting edge technology with lots of unknown unknowns faces a continual dilemma. Stay with the collective vision or break off and take your own stab at things.

The great early internet companies were built on valuable datasets of human activity.

I've been on both sides of this dilemma, as an IC and collective (i.e. manager). It's extremely challenging to navigate.

As excellent ICs, we're always faced with the possibility of making something happen by ourselves (or with a small subset of the crew). These possibilities seem especially enticing when the collective strategy seems to differ from our own or seems hazy/unclear.

On the flip side, the nature of something extremely uncertain (like building cutting edge technology) is that any strategy is hazy. And we’d be able to go further together than alone. So responding immediately to the impulse to go on our own could miss something big that only the collective is privy to long term.

As the collective, we can always choose to not have much of a strategy or a vision. This has the pretty excellent advantage of giving every individual full autonomy and ownership of her work/direction. It allows ambition to flourish unfettered.

But it often comes at the cost of progress. Some collective direction that coheres the various individual ambitions of ICs can enable iteration. Continuous shots on goal that learn from one another.

Having too much imposition of strategy or any lack of clarity leads to the first problem, however. The excellent ICs will be looking to do things their own way.

As usual, I don't have a pithy conclusion here. But time and again find myself navigating these waters.