I was sitting in a daily stand-up on a Friday morning. There were more than ten people on the call: developers, testers, the team lead, and me. The meeting usually took fifteen or twenty minutes. That day it went past thirty.
Nothing was obviously wrong.
A tester was listing what she had tested the day before and what she planned to test that day. The work sounded careful and thorough. No issues, no blockers. And yet I felt a quiet discomfort forming — not irritation exactly, more like a question that wouldn’t quite surface. Why does this feel necessary? I kept thinking. What problem is this actually solving?
Later, the conversation drifted to a familiar topic. How do we show progress to management? Someone suggested demoing features that weren’t on the QA branch yet, because they hadn’t been tested. The suggestion made sense on its own. Still, it added to the same unease. We were spending effort to demonstrate that progress existed, rather than on the progress itself.
At the time, I couldn’t clearly explain why this bothered me. There was no single bad decision, no obvious dysfunction. Just a sense that, over time, something had shifted. Visibility seemed to matter more. Apparent progress became something people actively thought about, and its influence over decisions kept growing. Each step felt reasonable. And once taken, not taking the next step felt risky.
You could hear it in passing remarks: “Management asks me about progress every other day.” “We need to be able to show something at the end of the sprint.” These weren’t complaints. They were signals — hints that uncertainty existed somewhere upstream, and that it was beginning to shape behavior downstream.
That feeling was uncomfortably familiar.
When I first became a group lead, I was responsible for a large, high-stakes project while severely understaffed. The feasibility was uncertain, and I knew it. Above me, the pressure kept increasing. I was asked for updates frequently. The language grew heavier: this was important, leadership cared, the stakes were high.
I tried to absorb that pressure, but I couldn’t help bending under it. The more uncertainty I felt from above, the stronger the urge became to reduce it below. I started monitoring more closely. Asking for more updates. Looking for reassurance in visibility. Not because I distrusted the team — but because the weight had to go somewhere.
That shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened incrementally, in ways that all felt justified. I monitored some people too closely, others not closely enough. Both choices made sense at the time, and both had costs. There was no clean line between diligence and interference. Every attempt to gain clarity changed the system a little.
The project was ultimately a success. It earned us credit and became the foundation of future collaboration. But what stayed with me wasn’t the outcome. It was how familiar the pattern felt — how easily pressure turned into observation, and observation into behavior change.
When I looked back at that stand-up through this lens, the resemblance was hard to ignore. The same dynamics were present, just at a different scale. Uncertainty existed somewhere above the team. It couldn’t stay there. So it began to move.
At that point, it’s easy to read what’s happening as a leadership or process issue — a sense that control is being applied poorly or excessively. But control is not optional when outcomes matter.
We are talking about achieving a desired outcome under uncertainty. Intervening, nudging the system to help it stay on track, is part of the responsibility. To do that, we need information: reports, progress meetings, milestones, feedback loops. Some form of measurement is inevitable.
What’s easy to forget is that measurement is never neutral. Every way we observe a system changes it a little. If we don’t look often or deeply enough, we risk missing early signs that something is off. If we look too often or too deeply, we disturb the system too much — sometimes to the point where progress itself starts to reorganize around being observed. There is no universally correct level. The “right” amount of visibility depends on context: uncertainty, trust, experience, stakes. And because visibility affects behavior, the system is always adjusting to how it is measured.
Seen this way, the earlier discomfort takes on a different quality. What had felt like creeping bureaucracy or unnecessary ceremony wasn’t arbitrary. It was the system responding to pressure, translating uncertainty into visibility, and gradually pulling behavior in a particular direction. Each step still made sense on its own. The issue wasn’t any single decision — it was the accumulation.
Understanding this doesn’t remove the pull. Deadlines still matter. Accountability still exists. Measurement is still required. But the discomfort changes character. It stops being a vague irritation and becomes information — a signal that something is influencing the system, and that this influence has consequences.
Once you can see that, orientation returns. You may still decide the trade-off is worth it. Or you may decide it isn’t. But the choice becomes conscious rather than reactive. What had felt like an inevitable drift becomes something you can at least question.
What can be questioned can also be judged and reasoned about, doing the ground work for the necessary decision.