I have an M.Sc. in civil engineering. And then I switched paths, and have been a Be developer and manager for 20 years, before becoming a devops engineer group lead. While giving an enrichment session on concrete at work, I suddenly noticed that there are takeaways that can be taken from concrete’s behaviour, to challenge managerial concepts. You need to water the concrete during the drying process - which means going against basic logic or intuition to get something better at the end. Concrete’s tensile strength is only a 10th of it’s compression strength, showing that when we insist on challenging someone who is extremely proficient in a specific area, “outside of their comfort zone”, we might get very disappointing results. In addition there are more examples - we use steel to stengthen concrete as they have the same thermic coefficient of expansion, so they both contract and expand the same way in relation to the weather, we need teams to have priorities aligned or the group won’t hold the pressure… We use steel to strengththen concrete as both oncrete and steel contract and expand the same way when temperatures change - the same way you want your team to have priorities aligned so that things work. In addition, 2 more concepts, of cutting out concrete “below the fold” (I and T beams) to reduce material which not only doesn’t help support the beam but also increases the load to carry (=team members who don’t do there part and we think “at least they cause no harm”), and pre stressed concrete.