Knowledge

"All I know is that I don't know nothing"

I have no formal training in IT management. None.

My degree is in Technical Writing. Everything I know about managing people I learned by being managed—sometimes well, sometimes poorly, usually inconsistently—and by reading voraciously, by leading Scout camping trips, by organizing Perl conferences, and by making mistakes in real time with actual humans who deserved better than my learning curve.

Operation Ivy's line sums it up: "All I know is that I don't know nothing."

The Inventory

Here's what I've done instead of getting an MBA or a Scrum certification:

I've read. A lot. When I moved into management the first time, I went deep. The Manager's Path, An Elegant Puzzle, The Staff Engineer's Path. Lopp's The Art of Leadership. Kim Scott on radical candor, Michael Bungay Stanier on staying curious. I read The First 90 Days before starting this job and I'm still not sure how it applies to me. I went deep on Goldratt—The Goal, Critical Chain, Beyond the Goal, basically the complete works—because Theory of Constraints felt like it might actually explain something. Donella Meadows on systems thinking. Annie Duke on decisions. I read The Art of Gathering because of my background in event planning, but it turns out running meetings is half the job and nobody teaches you how.

That's just the audiobooks. There's a whole other shelf on the Kindle.

This is my second tour as a manager. I did all that reading during the first one. And I'm still not sure if I learned the right things.

I've watched. Twenty-five years of watching managers succeed and fail. Noticing what made me want to do good work versus what made me update my resume. Building a mental catalog of "do this" and "never do this" that I'm not sure I can even articulate.

I've taken one formal leadership training course: Woodbadge, through Scouts. A week-long leadership intensive followed by an eighteen-month practicum where you apply it. I learned more about running teams from volunteer scouting than from anything labeled "professional development." How to coordinate people who aren't being paid. How to build consensus when you can't pull rank. How to keep a group functional when someone's kid is melting down and the weather just changed your plans.

And I was lucky. I had a Pack that encouraged it, a job that let me take the time, a life situation where a week away was possible. Most people in my position—twenty-five years in, managing teams, figuring it out as they go—don't get that. The one piece of formal training that actually helped me? Most people never get the chance to take it.

I've been part of communities. The Perl community taught me how to maintain infrastructure nobody asked me to maintain, how to organize conferences, how to keep a project alive across years and continents. None of that shows up on a resume the way "MBA" does.

Is that enough? Is it the right stuff? I genuinely don't know.

The Contrast

Mark, you have the credentials. MBA in IT Management. Scrum certifications. You did the work—the academic framework, the formal training, the letters after the name.

And I've watched you wrestle with the same questions I have.

You still don't know if the transformation will stick. You still watch initiatives get absorbed and neutralized. You still wonder if the frameworks and ceremonies are just providing cover.

So what are the credentials for?

Are they signaling? You get the MBA so you get the interview. You get the Scrum certification so the client trusts you.

Are they scaffolding? The degree forces you to read the boring-but-important stuff you'd skip if you were self-directing.

Are they community? Cohort-based learning, people to argue with, a network that persists after graduation.

I don't know which, if any, of these is true, or justify the cost. I never seriously considered going back for a management degree.

The Problem With Self-Education

The problem is confirmation bias.

When you assemble your own curriculum, you pick what sounds right. You read the authors who match your existing intuitions. You skip the stuff that challenges your priors because it's uncomfortable and nobody's making you engage with it.

I think sprints are an excuse for self-flagellation. So when I read #NoEstimates and nod along, what if I'm wrong? What if there's a rigorous case for estimation that I've never encountered because I never had a professor assign it?

Management books contradict each other. Radical Candor says be direct, say the hard thing, don't hide behind politeness. The Advice Trap says stay curious, stop telling people what to do, ask questions instead of giving answers. Both are bestsellers. Both have research behind them. Both can't be fully right in the same moment with the same person.

The thought leaders disagree. The certification bodies have financial incentives. The people on LinkedIn have personal brands to build. Who do I trust? How do I know the books are teaching me the right things versus just teaching me things?

The Stakes

This is DIY education applied to a domain where getting it wrong hurts people.

That's different from learning guitar badly. Nobody suffers if I can't play barre chords. But if I manage badly—if I create an environment where people dread Mondays, where they don't feel safe raising concerns, where their careers stall because I didn't know how to advocate for them—that's real damage to real humans.

My team has had four bosses in a year. They've already absorbed plenty of learning curves. Mine is just the latest.

Right now I'm choosing restraint. Watching more than acting. Trying not to add my churn to their churn. But is that wisdom or is it just a fancy justification for not knowing what to do?

For Mark

You did the work. MBA, certifications, the whole credentialed path. You've also been inside organizations long enough to see what actually changes behavior versus what just changes the vocabulary.

If you could go back—was it worth it? Not the signaling, not the career doors it opened, but the actual learning. Did the MBA teach you things I'm missing? Did the frameworks give you something real to stand on?

Or are we both just figuring it out, and you paid more tuition?

"All I know is that I don't know nothing."

They followed it with "and that's fine." But is it? I'm still working on that part.