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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

7/7 One pattern like this every Friday: Patterns in Practice, link in the first comment.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

6/7 What mattered came back, carried by a person.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

5/7 When leaders tell me this couldn't work for them, I ask how many emails from their last vacation changed an outcome. It's almost always fewer than ten, out of hundreds, and finding them took two days.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

4/7 What came back was four or five things. Someone walked over and said, this happened, we need you. Those mattered. The rest was a record of problems already handled without me.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

3/7 The first time, people thought I was joking. By the third, it was how it worked.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

2/7 I'd told my team before I left: I won't check anything, and when I return I'm deleting all of it. If something still needs me, bring it to me fresh.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 11h

Last vacation I took, I deleted everything when I got back. Every email, every Slack thread. Didn't skim. Didn't sort. Selected all, deleted. 🧵

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

17/17 ➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social ). I help non-technical leaders get what they know into the systems that need it.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

16/17 She had seventeen years of it. And she almost didn't say anything.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

15/17 If your team is building something with AI and you left the room after the kickoff, it may be worth asking what you know that nothing in the system does.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

14/17 I don't know how her tool holds up a year from now. The rules she gave it describe the business as it runs today, and the business will change. Somebody has to keep telling it.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

13/17 So the knowledge has to be in the room, where it can do the checking and also be checked.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

12/17 Domain knowledge isn't an oracle, and I don't want to oversell it. I worked with an owner whose twenty years of instinct turned out to be right about most of his business and wrong about the part that mattered most. It took his own data to show him.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

11/17 This was the other half. Until she spoke up, the tool was multiplying what the engineers knew about logistics, which was not much. Then it started multiplying what she knew.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

10/17 I say this line a lot: AI is a multiplier. Multipliers don't care what they multiply. I usually mean it as a warning, about messy data and broken processes.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

9/17 The error rate fell to under 3 percent in a couple of weeks. The model hadn't changed. Somebody had finally told it what correct looks like in her business.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

8/17 When she did walk the engineers through the edge cases, something shifted. Every correction, every exception, every "that's not how it works out there" became a rule the system could check itself against.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

7/17 She almost didn't say anything. For a decade the advice to founders like her has been the same: stay out of the technical decisions, hire smart people, trust the process. She'd taken it. Anything that felt technical, she deferred.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

6/17 Always in ways the engineers couldn't see. A route that looks efficient on paper can cost you a client in practice, and nothing in the data said so.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

5/17 It was wrong about 20 percent of the time.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

4/17 Her team was building an AI tool to recommend routes. Smart engineers, a good model, a clean interface. The output looked great.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

3/17 She knows which carriers won't run certain lanes in the Southeast. She knows how volume shifts every March. She knows which clients need handling that never made it into any system, because "everyone just knows."

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

2/17 A founder I advise runs a specialty logistics company. Seventeen years in the industry.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

She could look at a routing recommendation and know at a glance it was wrong. She'd also spent years being told that wasn't her department. 🧵

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

20/20 ➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social ). I write about the friction leaders add without meaning to, starting with my own.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

19/20 The green bar was never about the deployment.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

18/20 If you have a dashboard open in another tab right now, it's worth asking who it's for.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

17/20 It looks like caring. From the inside it feels like responsibility.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

16/20 Most leaders I know have a version of this. Rereading every email the team sends a client. Rewriting a report someone already finished. Sitting in a meeting they delegated, just to make sure.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

15/20 To be fair to the habit, sometimes watching is the job. A new team. A release that could hurt customers. A system nobody has rolled back before. The tell is whether there's anything for you to do if the bar turns red.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

14/20 What I found where the green bar had been was time I'd forgotten I had. I can't measure what those hours produced. I know what they stopped costing.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

12/20 The night I closed the laptop was harder than it should have been. The green bar was my comfort object. Closing it meant being responsible for a system without personally confirming it was fine.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

11/20 I was auditing, and calling it leadership.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

10/20 It was also telling a good team, every night, that their work needed a witness.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

9/20 Twenty years later the same loop was still running, and everything around it had changed. I was a VP. My vigilance was eating the hours I owed to the problems only I could work on.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

8/20 I know when it started. Early in my career I stayed up through a deploy that went sideways, caught a config issue, and saved the team a bad morning. My manager praised me. The organization rewarded the grip, so I gripped harder.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

7/20 It was for me. My anxiety needed the green bar. My habit of control had dressed itself as diligence so well that I couldn't tell the difference.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

6/20 The team didn't need me watching. The system didn't care whether I was awake.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

5/20 I was watching a green bar fill because I couldn't stop. And lying there, with the phone lighting up the ceiling, I finally asked the question I'd been avoiding. Who is this for?

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

4/20 I'd like to say it was a risky deploy. It was a routine release, the kind that shipped three times a week. My team had been handling them for months.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

2/20 The automated checks had passed. A senior engineer was monitoring it. The rollback criteria were written down. There was nothing for me to do except close the laptop.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

11:14 PM. Lying in bed. Refreshing a deployment dashboard for a deployment I wasn't running. 🧵

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

8/8 The Salvage Call has two ends. He's the one holding the invoice.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

7/8 That was never a technical question. It was his.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

6/8 His last senior engineers left, the agents were faster, and he didn't replace them. "Who will be able to read this in four years?" wasn't on the slide.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

5/8 He'll want to know how it came to this, and the answer will be a decision he made in 2027. It was a reasonable one.

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Phillip R. Kennedy @prokennedy.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

4/8 So he's paying a retired engineer to sit with it for a week before she touches anything.

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