Revolutionaries at the Workplace

I like this framing. My previous framing came from `Loonshots`, where Bahcall frames this as "Artists" (Revolutionaries) and "Soldiers" (Evolutionary). I felt that, in the context of engineering, Artist/Soldier felt dismissive against the soldier. Revolutionary/Evolutionary avoids that for the better.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863447-loonshots

I'm not sure how useful of a description for revolutionaries this is. They are not necessarily lonely wolfs as I interpret the article, they might deeply care or not about things like diversity and they are certainly able to do a lot of politicking. Unless you want to completely redefine the term.

For me the difference comes more down to, as with the conflicts within lots of political groups in history: reformists vs non-reformists. The former advocating the reform of an existing system or institution whereas the others believe the right approach is abolition and replacement. You could also add reactionaries, those that want to go back how things used to be.

Neither of which is universally true I think, more often than not it is a mix. But I don't think you get very far trying to mix the extremes from either side.

It’s an interesting framing overall, but I’m not really convinced that the R/E distinction is as clear in real life.

The key attribute that both R and E types here seem to share is _caring_ and a commitment to a larger team goal/outcome.

The care/don’t care distinction seems clearer to me and much more recognizable. Within _cares_ people, there may be a further divide in styles, between progressive idealist and tactical/strategic (corresponding to R and E). But the thing about caring, is if you care, you’ll notice if your approach isn’t working or you need to change your style to suit the environment.

The implication of this framing is that leaders really need to make sure there is a clear vision/goal/outcome/mission for the _cares_ people to organize around. They also may need to recognize that most people unfortunately don’t care about their work or their contribution to society beyond raising their children and consuming, and that’s fine/not likely to change.

For people who care, then, the task is to recruit/organize the people in the organization to help avoid counterproductive work, and nudge things in the right direction.

(And of course, like nearly all categorizations of complex human systems into binary, my categorization is just a concept to organize thought, not an assertion of truth; people are fluid and drift between and sit on a spectrum between those categories)

This is just pseudoscience. No studies, no test, just a guy opinion.

Stop clarifying people this way. It's not useful, it's not insightfully. I have seen coworkers fighting for one thing but not another. One fights against bad work ethics, another for good tech and another one for their own right too be with his family. People is complex, everything comes in gradients and that changes as people grows and they learn and their lives change.

If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.

> Their goal is to get to the right answer, not to look good

I've noticed that there's a group that wouldn't have a question but would phrase their monologue to seem like a question.