Bursts of Color - The Power of Brown M&Ms
1980s rock band Van Halen famously used Brown M&Ms as a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine for concert safety. As front man David Lee Roth describes:
We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear. And there were many, many technical errors, whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say Article number 126, in the middle of nowhere: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So I would walk backstage, if I saw brown M&M’s in that bowl… well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
I've always liked this Brown M&M story, both in specific and as a metaphor for all of us in overseeing other people, vendors and now even AI. Management — and life in general — is complicated. So it's nice to have a few simple heuristics that we can use as warning signs to figure out where further attention is needed.
The right Brown M&M clause will vary with the person or project in question. Here are some examples I've used before:
Spreadsheets: Row & column sub-totals don’t match or add to 100%.
Data sets: Spot check of a data point I know personally is inaccurate.
Due dates: Interim deliverables not submitted by the agreed time.
Responsiveness: >24 hour response to email requests from client or manager.
Attendance: Regularly MIA from desk or Slack at, say, 10 am.
Org Charts: People managers with I-formations of 1 or 2 direct reports.
Revenue Forecasts: Assumed monthly growth rates rather than bottoms-up builds.
LinkedIn: Mutual connections talk trash or don’t know who the person is.
Of course, as with any other heuristic, a Brown M&M test isn’t conclusive. Sometimes a brown one got through, but the bigger production is in great shape. Other times, the candy bowl is pristine, but in fact there are real problems out on the stage.
It's still nice to have these indicators as a starting point.