Public vs. Private

I am a big Ted Lasso fan. I didn't want to be at first, I thought it was going to be a goofy sports based show. I could not have been more wrong and found myself laughing harder than I had in a long while. Over the last few months I have been reminded of this episode where Roy Kent gives an example of not knowing what is going on each other's lives.

[...] And none of us know what is going on in each other's lives. So for Isaac to do what he did today, even though it was wrong... I give him love. And as for why he did what he did... that's none of my f?cking business. [...]

If you don't know this one, please check out the link above with this scene. It's a great story.

Recently I found myself thinking about this - we don't know what is going on in each other's lives. I think the way this manifests is when observing another's behavior we fill in their story with our own story about what must be going on for that person. Like most stories, we tend to create them from our past experiences; many times assuming the worst.

I bet you have created a story to explain someone else's behavior; parents, colleagues, friends, direct reports, strangers. And how many times was the story a "negative" one? As much as I try not to, I know I have. This is where another Ted Lasso lesson pops for me. When Ted is playing darts with Rupert (Mannion not Giles) and shares "Be curios, not judgmental" as part of a story he is relating. My experience is that my stories are often close my judgement and therefore short circuit my curiosity. It's just about treating others as people, with respect and compassion. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't hold them accountable. But it may change the way you hold them accountable or whether you hold them accountable at all. 

I like to write these down as something for myself to continue to be mindful of as opposed to expecting anyone else to benefit from them. If you do, then great, love that.

The Easy Fallacy

I was talking to one of the younger engineers at work recently and he said that he appreciated my experience. After I realized that it wasn't one of those - your so old moments. I laughed and told him that is probably more true than he realized. For instance, we were talking about an a fix that he labeled as "easy". I told him that in my experience easy changes can be a fallacy. I could see in his expression that he knew what I saying but he didn't know what I was saying.

I can't count the number of times when me, my colleagues, and/or team fell for this one. It looks something like - the change is a small one, often innocuous - like a configuration change. If you're nodding you're head right now, then you too have fallen or been witness to this one.

This happened recently a couple of times. One looked like a change that when merged to to the main branch, inadvertently picked up an unrelated change. This change was not something that was caught until it was promoted to production and resulted in a performance impact. As a result we had a week delay two weeks before the larger launch because we had to do even more work to earn trust that it would not happen a second time.

A contributor to falling for this fallacy is that making simple changes in a complex system isn't about how small the change is - it's about everything else after the change.

Which begs the question, how do you not fall for this one? I feel like this one hurts the most when your under a time crunch and your belief in the fallacy convinces you that you should make "easy" last minute changes. Ouch. Or that you let your guard down on the "easy" change and miss something. The answer for these two is - don't do this. I am sure you have your version of this.