Strategies for Growth and Resilience in Engineering

Reading Books, Troika Consulting, and the Bus Factor

TLDR: This newsletter issue delves into creating positive feedback loops for personal habits, introduces the Troika Consulting method for more effective meetings, and highlights the critical but often overlooked 'bus factor' risk in software development teams.

Summary: The author reflects on how integrating a book club into his work created a powerful flywheel for personal and professional growth. The simple act of reading for the club provided accountability, generated content for his newsletter, and even improved his personal relationships. The key insight is that struggling habits can be reinforced by finding ways to create synergistic value. By connecting a single activity to multiple positive outcomes—learning, community engagement, writing material, and family connection—it becomes a high-leverage endeavor. This approach suggests that if you're trying to adopt a new habit, you should actively seek ways to embed it into other parts of your life to create a self-reinforcing loop.

A particularly interesting technique for improving meeting dynamics, called Troika Consulting, is explored. In this structured format, one person (the “client”) presents a challenge, and then silently observes as others (the “consultants”) discuss it. This simple role-playing setup can disrupt typical power dynamics, giving quieter or neurodivergent team members a clear structure to contribute and preventing more dominant personalities from steering the conversation. For engineering managers, this is a practical tool to foster psychological safety and unlock ideas that might otherwise remain unspoken. By enforcing a period of silent listening, it forces the “client” to absorb different perspectives without immediately reacting, leading to more valuable insights.

The discussion then shifts to the critical concept of the “bus factor”—the number of team members who can leave a project before the codebase becomes unmaintainable. Drawing on research from Adam Tornhill, the author reveals that for a typical team of 50 developers, the bus factor is often a shockingly low two or three people. This creates a massive, often invisible, risk. To mitigate this, the suggested approach involves a three-part analysis: identifying the code areas most dependent on key individuals, checking if those areas are frequently changing “hotspots,” and assessing their overall code health. When a high-risk area is identified, the recommended solution is not just documentation, but collaborative refactoring. Pairing the knowledge-holder with other engineers to work on the code serves the dual purpose of distributing knowledge and actively improving the quality of the at-risk asset. For architects, this is a call to move beyond simple code metrics and analyze the human-centric risks within their systems.

Key takeaways:

• Create flywheels for new habits by connecting them to multiple sources of value.
• Use structured meeting formats like Troika Consulting to disrupt power dynamics and encourage diverse participation.
• The 'bus factor' is a critical, measurable risk in most software projects.
• Mitigate knowledge silos by combining code analysis with targeted, collaborative refactoring sessions.
• Proactively identify and address single points of failure, both in code and in people.

Link: Reading books, Troika consulting, and the bus factor 💡