We keep 10 chickens, well 9, because one has run off to hide somewhere and we only see her every couple of weeks. But they taught me something I keep dragging into work conversations where it does not obviously belong. We have raised a batch from eggs, got some chickens from neighbours, some migrated our way. It’s a blast to be honest. Then a neighbour offered us a few grown hens, point-of-lay, the kind that come straight out of a barn system. Gratis af te halen, which on a farm is a phrase that should always make you a little suspicious (I have written about the free stuff never really being free, so I will not do it again here). We put them all out on the same grass on the same morning.
The ones we raised were digging for worms inside the hour. They knew where to scratch, what a suspicious shadow could mean, which corner of the yard has the most food. The bought hens just stood there. Lovely birds, perfectly healthy, and completely lost. Nobody had ever taught them how to be a chicken outside in our garden. Which is totally free range, ask the one that now lives at our neighbour’s house.
That more or less is the build-versus-buy decision.
The barn hen problem
I wrote a week ago about what you inherit when you buy a whole company, and that the understanding quietly walks out the door with or without a retention bonus. This is the smaller version of it. Build it or buy it. Write the integration or license a platform. Grow and nurture a team that can run this thing, or rent the vendor who already can.
Every build-versus-buy deck I have ever seen compares two scenarios with two prices. Total cost of ownership, time to value, maybe a risk column if someone is feeling thorough. And I think that is fine, as far as it goes. My current worry is that the deck never has a line for the capability you are quietly retiring by choosing to buy.
A muscle you stop using does not hold its size, it shrinks. I don’t go as regular to the gym as i once did. Skills work the same way. I have repeated about this from the coding side before (Fool’s Gold, and the slow death of the developer who knows why things work). If your people never write the hard thing, they slowly lose the ability to write it at all. Buy enough and you are not just outsourcing the work, you are outsourcing the knowing and perhaps even the thinking! Every buy is a quiet loan and thus increase of debt against your own future ability. And I strongly believe that the knowing was always the expensive part.
Value or Cost?
So the buy option wins on Value today. It looks cheaper, it looks faster, thank the demo gods, but the demo works and the reference customer seems happy on the call. What it costs you is not on the page, and it lands in Cost, years later, when you finally need to change the thing and nobody knows how. You became somewhat like the barn hens we bought. Perfectly healthy, standing on the grass, no idea where to scratch or how to integrate with current flock.
Now, I am not saying build everything. That way lies madness and a lot of lovingly hand-rolled systems that should have been bought years ago. Buy the commodity, buy the thing that is somebody else’s core business and your plumbing. My point is that you should know, out loud, which capability you have just decided your organisation will never have to grow. Sometimes that is exactly the right call, and sometimes it is decided by accident, in a spreadsheet on a Tuesday, that your organisation will never again be able to build something it will absolutely need.
Resiliency
Another great book by Taleb
I have to say that Taleb’s idea here is not quite “resilience means being aware that decisions make you fragile” It’s the other way: you cannot forecast which shock is coming, so stop trying to predict it and instead go hunting for the fragility you can already see and remove. In my mind that links it to “name the capability out loud” move. You do not need to know that the vendor will pivot in 3 years. You only need to notice that buying out your ability to build is a fragilizing decision, today, on the slide.
The org that only ever buys is fine right up until the vendor pivots, or triples the price, or gets bought by someone with very different plans (it happens, ask anyone who has lived through a platform’s difficult second act). At that point you need to move, and moving needs the exact muscle you traded away for a crtain number a couple of years ago. You cannot rush a capability into being any more than you can rush a barn hen into foraging. It grows on its own clock or it does not grow.
Capability is not a purchase
It is a thing you keep alive by using it. The same with my deadlift numbers.
So when the next build-versus-buy deck lands on your desk, read past the two prices to the muscle you are quietly deciding to let go of. Sometimes letting go is the smart move. And sometimes you are signing away the one thing you will need most.
More then forty eggs that have been left in summer heat for months
Our chickens are out in the field this morning, doing okay-ish. They got there in the end, to be fair. Took them the better part of a summer. You do not always get a summer. Or find the coop. This one prefers the Volvo, great taste in cars.
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