Okay, let’s talk about this Vince Brown phase we went through. It feels like ages ago now, but I remember it pretty clearly because, well, it was kind of a mess for a while there.
It all kicked off when management came back from some conference all hyped up. They kept dropping the name “Vince Brown” and talking about his revolutionary approach to team dynamics or project flow, something like that. Honestly, it sounded like a lot of buzzwords at first.
So, the next thing I know, I’m tasked with trying to figure out how to actually use his methods in our daily grind. They handed me this thick binder and a bunch of seminar notes. First step was just reading through it all. Lots of diagrams that looked like spaghetti, lots of talk about ‘synergistic alignment’ and ‘paradigm shifts’. Felt pretty disconnected from getting actual code written or designs finalized.
Trying to Make it Work
I spent a good week just trying to translate the Vince Brown stuff into something actionable for my team. I held a couple of initial meetings to explain the concepts. You could see the eyes glazing over. People were polite, but skeptical. We were already busy, you know? This felt like extra homework.
We tried implementing one of his core ideas – this super complex daily check-in process. It wasn’t just ‘what did you do, what will you do’, it involved rating your ‘synergy level’ and identifying ‘blockers’ in a very specific format Vince Brown laid out.
- First day: Total confusion. Took twice as long as our old stand-up.
- Second day: People started half-joking about their ‘synergy levels’.
- By the end of the week: Everyone just wanted to go back to the old way. It felt forced.
I had to report back upstairs. I tried to be diplomatic, saying we were ‘adapting’ the process. Truth is, we were struggling. It felt like we were spending more time talking about work in the Vince Brown way than actually doing the work.
The Pushback and the Pivot
Things kinda came to a head during a particularly stressful project phase. We hit a major snag, and trying to explain it using the Vince Brown terminology during a review meeting was just painful. My manager, thankfully, saw it too. He was getting pressure from his bosses who were still high on the Vince Brown kool-aid, but he could see his team was drowning in jargon.
We had a frank chat. I showed him the feedback, the time wasted. I argued that while some ideas might have merit in theory, the rigid structure wasn’t working for us, right now. We needed flexibility, not more rules.
So, we kind of quietly… phased it out. We didn’t make a big announcement. We just stopped using the weird check-in format. We stopped referencing the spaghetti diagrams. We went back to what worked, maybe keeping one or two small things, like a slightly better way of tracking dependencies that we pulled from the mess, but we stripped away all the Vince Brown branding.
Looking back, it was a weird detour. A lesson in how sometimes chasing the ‘next big thing’ from some guru can distract you from just getting the job done. No hard feelings towards Vince Brown himself, whoever he is or wherever he got his ideas. But his system, for us? Yeah, that was a practice I was happy to leave behind. It mostly just reminds me of that binder collecting dust on a shelf before someone finally tossed it. We got back on track eventually. Just took a bit of navigating through the buzzwords.
