I’ll use all caps in work settings when I want to really emphasize something I believe we are collectively misunderstanding or aren’t considering from the right perspective. That we need to pause and REALLY THINK ABOUT.

I’d learned the importance of narrative interruption in the Navy, but hadn’t consciously brought it to management. Then I was in an incident conversation with infra engineers at Linden back in 2004. We were starting to enter our aggressive growth phase. Unfortunately, we kept stumbling. Users were generating so much content, we kept filling up disks on various machines and taking down parts of the world. We were discussing mitigation strategies, why it kept happening, and what our options were. The engineers were deep in the details, wrestling with complexities, risks, and long-term fixes.

They were really struggling with how much time our latest band-aid was buying us, how safe we were to keep letting new users in while we worked on big changes. It made all the rest of conversation somewhat garbage-in, garbage-out. I’d tried and failed to pull the discussion up a level, but finally asked

You know how to do math, right?

Cue record scratch

They paused for a moment, thought about it, and then built a quick approximation of the nonlinear growth we were experiencing. It confirmed we had time for the real fix and where to set future triggers so we would always catch similar issues. The team delivered some really cool improvements and we didn’t hit those problems again.

Smart people get in ruts, especially brilliant people working deep in the hardest problems. As leaders and managers, it’s not enough to hold and share the vision and big picture, you also have to be able to effectively — and efficiently — get your team off the local maxima and out of the ruts.

I like all caps for that.

It’s not because it’s yelling — oh, those innocent online days of yore — but I do want to convey a certain amount of pounding on the keyboard. How could we be thinking this? What choices have us blind to this?

We recently found a truly hilarious amount of cross-availability zone traffic in AWS. The kind of number that first has you checking your metrics, then your sanity, then your ability to do division. The kind of number that is very important to have engineers thinking about reducing by orders of magnitude, not percentages. It was a perfect all caps moment.

Not because anyone was in trouble, not because anyone was dumb. But because we owed it to each other to immediately get our shit together and really stop and think about what was going on. Which we did.

Y’all better get off my lawn

I say all this recognizing it couldn’t possibly be more stereotypical. In my defense, I was using all caps for this kind of emphasis long before I was this old and long before it became a tool of electoral politics. A colleague of mine who’d long used all caps themselves for a similar purpose has intentionally relaxed their use of the shift key in our current political climate. But I’m not GIVING ON THIS ONE.

Particularly in fast moving projects and teams, we all need ways to signal a moment to pause and reconsider, to — stealing a nice turn of phrase from Emi — disrupt the current decibel level of the conversation. That we’re missing something and that it’s important to spend a moment understanding why we’re missing it.