People often make assumptions about behaviour, and those assumptions often turn out to be wrong. Something I’m guilty of as much as anybody else.
I use two prompts a lot to get over this. Anybody who has worked with me will have heard them way too many times. Because they’re so darned useful. First:
“What other possible explanations could there be?”
Asking this helps break out of having a single explanation for a behaviour. Keep prompting until there are at least three different explanations.
(I’ve found a minimum of three to be a good number to get people, including myself, to think a bit and break away from the obvious.)
Follow this up with:
“How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?”
To prevent jumping on another explanation immediately without evidence.
Note: We are not saying which of them is true — because they all might be wrong!
For example: a client of mine — let’s call them Mary — was having problems getting time with her CEO to talk strategy issues.
Mary knew why this was. The technical-founder CEO had a direction in mind for the company’s primary product, had a list of features that he was pushing through to get built by certain dates, and didn’t want to listen to anybody who was bringing news about that approach not working.
(Spoiler alert: the approach wasn’t working!)
Which was naturally very frustrating for Mary. Somebody who had been hired for her strategic expertise by the COO.
“What other possible explanations could there be for the CEO avoiding a strategy conversation?”
With very little prompting we came up with a ton of options including:
- CEO thinks the strategy is working (Mary’s working assumption)
- CEO has more important things on his calendar we don’t know about
- CEO doesn’t understand the impact of not doing the strategy work
- CEO had information we didn’t have on the success of this strategy
- CEO already having strategy conversations with somebody else
- CEO doesn’t see strategy as something he should talk about with Mary
- CEO knows about clients relying on these features Mary didn’t know about
- CEO doesn’t respect Mary or her skills
Which led us to the next question:
“How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?”
Which led to… conversations. Lots of them. Mary started reaching out to various folk in the company to try and eliminate some of these options. Which eventually led to a conversation with the CEO & COO about why the CEO wasn’t finding time for this work.
Which led Mary to rapidly discover that the fundamental issue was the CEO didn’t really have a framework for having a strategy discussion, and was desperately trying to come up to speed with that kind of work in the background via reading and conversations with peers in other organisations (who were mostly folk with a very similar background, so didn’t have a lot new to bring.)
He knew the current approach wasn’t working. He was getting a stack of pressure from the board about the current lack of progress in various markets.
But he hadn’t really connected those problems with the things Mary could help with. He was used to being the person who had to solve these problems — because that had always been the way things worked before. He thought he had to have the scope of these problems defined before he talked about it with Mary. Rather than seeing Mary as somebody with the expertise to solve the problem with him.
Getting past that did take a bunch of work – but once Mary identified the actual problem that work became vastly easier. Which took getting past her initial assumption about intent.
Lesson learned.
As with most things — I learned this approach after fouling up badly myself.
More than a few years back a team I was working with had hit quality issues that we believed were being exacerbated by the foolish number of hours worked. Typical startup nonsense.
We made a team agreement to work an 8 hour day. Which we followed through on — and things got a lot better.
Apart from this one guy.
He carried on working long hours. Arrived before everybody else, working late into the night. Which annoyed the heck out of me — since the team was fighting a company culture of long hours, and was getting organisational push back on leaving “early” despite showing increased productivity and better quality.
And he was making mistakes. Lots of them. Mistakes the rest of the team was having to spend time cleaning up. Which was, understandably, causing friction.
So one night I stayed late so I could talk privately with him about how his actions were hurting the team.
My perception of this guy was that he was more than competent, but of the macho brogrammer school of developer idiocy. His reactions to feedback in team contexts were basically “I’ll work how I want to work.” — and I was expecting more of the same.
What I got instead was him breaking down in tears.
Because while I’d been assuming this guy was a bit of an idiot for the last few weeks, what was actually happening was that he was spending as many hours at work as possible because home wasn’t a safe place for him for various reasons.
One of the lessons I learned was what a terrible job I’d been doing addressing problems as soon as they started (Why hadn’t I had a 1-1 chat with him much earlier? Because I’d been avoiding imaginary conflict.)
The biggest lesson was, of course, “don’t make assumptions” — which led to me resolving to find three different explanations for somebody’s behaviour before I think about taking any sort of action.
Again — once we had the actual problem identified we could start working to make things better. I only wish I could have doing that without being a bit of an asshole first.
I prefer these prompts to the sometimes overused advice of “Assume Positive Intent”. Which is a good general rule of thumb, but has some bad failure modes.
Because always assuming a positive intent is absolutely terrible at dealing with Schrodinger’s Asshole and similar bad actors.
Schrodinger’s Asshole: the guy who says awful shit, and decides if he was “only kidding” depending on your reaction.
For me assuming good intent means I’m less likely to probe around alternate explanations. Which means it’s very, very easy for “assume positive intent” to become “find a plausible excuse for the asshole”.
Asshole are well aware of this failure mode and exploit it to the max.
Asking “What other options could there be?” however lets me keep the option of this person being an asshole on the board. Which makes spotting patterns of bad behaviour much, much easier.
TL;DR: Asking “What other possible explanations could there be?” followed up by “How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?” is a better approach than “assume positive intent”.
ttfn.
