The TED talk referred to in the article is quite interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-moW9jvvMr4
Don’t point out something wrong immediately
131–140 of 180 posts
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#132I can't agree with that. If there is something wrong, it must be dealt with as soon as possible. We engineers must learn to be professional and not let our ego get in the way. Maybe it is a cultural thing ? I worked once in Germany and thought at first that the error pointing was brutal. But you get used to it and learn not to involve your self esteem. And retrospectively I found it to be a fair and effective work en…
It depends on the context. Just yesterday I was doing a data centre audit with a colleague, who is many years my junior, and I am her manager, and she has hardly been in a data centre. She’s also amazing by the way. So when I see her doing a few things that I wouldn’t have done, I could have just reacted and pointed it out and told her how it should be done. For sure I wanted to, I’m an engineer! Or I can have a bit…
Yes, when possible it is better to give people time to figure out things by themselves. That's how you learn.
The question is why pointing out something wrong would have automatically damaged your relationship with her ?
Everyone can agree that making mistake is natural. Can't people learn not to get upset when being told they made one ?
One way is by exposure in an environment where the feedback is factual and without drama.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern. That doesn't mean you cannot correct people making errors, you definitely should. But if you're hurting people's feelings regularly you are bad at providing feedback. I notice the only "softening" of the message you suggest is to allow pushback if you happen to be wrong. It seems you are more likely to cause persistent fixes by treating people as people…
> Whether someone's feelings are hurt should be a primary concern No. Whether shit gets done is the primary concern, when the primary reason we get together, is to get shit done.
If you start hurting your peers' feelings often enough you'll find out your ability to get shit done gets severely hampered.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#134This is the hardest lesson I had to learn in my consulting work. It is is especially important if you are not familiar with the full context - which is almost never the case. The main insight for me was that yes, things can be "wrong" due to lack of knowledge or incompetence. Sometimes. But more often than not there is a good reason. Like: * we know this is stupid, but we had immense time pressure and this was the on…
> we never got the time to fix it The older I get the more convinced I become that this is Learned Helplessness. "We didn't have time." is essentially the same dodge as "C'est le guerre" was in France. "We don't have time" is a conversation killer. "We are working on that bit by bit" is essentially the same statement once you've subtracted the helplessness. Nobody is ever gonna schedule time for you to have integrity…
Sometimes you just don't have enough time.
If you don't have enough time frequently, it's time to reflect.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#135Chesterton's Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood
What's the difference between this and "don't change things you don't understand". It would make it clearer that this is a type of approach rather than a law. Sometimes, that legacy system or class is replaced without fully understanding it, because it's cheaper to reimplement it's interface than fix it.
What happens then though, is that the replacement take a lot longer than expected, because it turns out that the complexity in the old system had more motivation than expected and had a lot more problems it solved than was obvious. Fixing these issues then make the new system into almost as big of a problem as the old one, with the only difference in that now you at least have some people that understands it. For a while until enough people have left to again forget the workings of the system.
Sometimes the easiest way for a company to relearn about a problem space is to rewrite it though, so it is not necessarily a bad thing to do. It can also be that the market has shifted and some of the complexity in the old system was no longer necessary, so the new system ends up easier.
In any case, spending time understanding the existing system (including developers that point out corner cases and nonobvious cases) make the end result so much easier than adjusting a solution to handle a complication angle that wasn't part of the original plan.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you spot something "wrong", don't react immediately and don't interrupt. Let the other party finish. Make a note. Gather more information The problem is that people doing the " wrong" thing (with varying degrees of wrong, which I did too and still do) will think they are right, they will usually do a presentation of their solution to people that are less knowledgeable than they are to win the "this was the only…
I think it is most often wrong to use the word 'wrong'. That implies there is the right way and the wrong way. But in fact there are only better ways and worse ways, to do things. The "right way" somebody envisions to be THE right way can be worse than something even better. So instead of saying "Hey you are definitely doing it wrong" you can say "I can see an alternative way of doing this which might be better in so…
We just have a guy in the team (he's smart, but very abrasive) who instead of using the word "wrong" uses "antipattern" for everything. And usually those are mostly his unfounded opinions on something but taken as a gospel as it sounds authoritative.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#137Right, real freedom is the ability to pause between stimulus and response, and in that pause, choose.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you spot something "wrong", don't react immediately and don't interrupt. Let the other party finish. Make a note. Gather more information The problem is that people doing the " wrong" thing (with varying degrees of wrong, which I did too and still do) will think they are right, they will usually do a presentation of their solution to people that are less knowledgeable than they are to win the "this was the only…
I think it is most often wrong to use the word 'wrong'. That implies there is the right way and the wrong way. But in fact there are only better ways and worse ways, to do things. The "right way" somebody envisions to be THE right way can be worse than something even better. So instead of saying "Hey you are definitely doing it wrong" you can say "I can see an alternative way of doing this which might be better in so…
> I think it is most often wrong to use the word 'wrong'
agree, that's why the word "wrong" in in quotes in my post.
I usually say "I see a potential problem here" and explain why I think it could be.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#139I can't agree with that. If there is something wrong, it must be dealt with as soon as possible. We engineers must learn to be professional and not let our ego get in the way. Maybe it is a cultural thing ? I worked once in Germany and thought at first that the error pointing was brutal. But you get used to it and learn not to involve your self esteem. And retrospectively I found it to be a fair and effective work en…
German might be brutal in the way they say things, but from my experience, it's generally to hide their mistakes and not knowing much, so nobody would dare to confront an over-confident bullshitter, after all, they are damn convincing.
Re: Don’t point out something wrong immediately
#140I can't agree with that. If there is something wrong, it must be dealt with as soon as possible. We engineers must learn to be professional and not let our ego get in the way. Maybe it is a cultural thing ? I worked once in Germany and thought at first that the error pointing was brutal. But you get used to it and learn not to involve your self esteem. And retrospectively I found it to be a fair and effective work en…
I think the article could go a little bit more in depth, but overall I agree with the sentiment.
For starters, saying "this is wrong" is the least helpful way to present a problem. Of course it can work, but it's better to say what is your specific concern, why do you think it's important (and possible consequences) and a possible solution. That usually leads to better and more efficient discussions from the start.
Then there's the issue of you being wrong about being wrong. The good thing about starting the discussion in the way I said is that it helps you to actually form your thoughts and a lot of times that process leads you to the important questions, to the holes in your understanding and sometimes even the solutions.