Now I Don’t Know What to Think

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

➤ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

As we’ve seen earlier in the book, intuition is a powerful tool. It is the hallmark of experts. But your intuition can be dead wrong. As we’ve seen in this chapter, your thinking and rationality are fairly suspect as well. Our perspective is skewed all the way from our personal values to understanding our place in the cosmos, as Douglas Adams points out in this section’s opening epigraph. What we think of as “normal” isn’t necessarily so. You can be misled easily by your internal wiring, in addition to prejudices and biases of all sorts, and think everything is just fine.

So, where does that leave us?

Remember back in the discussion on learning, when I said you want to create an R-mode to L-mode flow? That is, you start off holistically and experientially and then shift to the more routine drills-and-skills to “productize” the learning.

In a similar vein, you want to lead with intuition, but follow up with provable, linear feedback.

For example, you might feel in your gut that a particular design or algorithm is the right way to go and that other suggestions aren’t as effective. Great.

Now prove it.

It could be your expert intuition at work, or maybe it’s just a cognitive bias or other bug. You need to get some feedback: create a prototype, run some unit tests, and chart some benchmarks. Do what you need to do to prove that your idea is a good one, because your intuition may have been wrong.^[94]

Feedback is the key to agile software development for precisely this reason: software development depends on people. And as we’ve seen here, people have bugs, too. In short, we’re all nuts—one way or another. Despite our best intentions, we need to double-check ourselves and each other.

You need unit tests for yourself, too.

Testing Yourself

When you are dead solid convinced of something, ask yourself why. You’re sure the boss is out to get you. How do you know? Everybody is using Java for this kind of application. Says who? You’re a great/awful developer. Compared to whom?

To help get a bigger picture perspective and test your understanding and mental model, ask yourself something like the following questions:^[95]

How do you know?

• How do you know?

• Says who?

• How specifically?

• How does what I’m doing cause you to…?

• Compared to what or whom?

• Does it always happen? Can you think of an exception?

• What would happen if you did (or didn’t)?

• What stops you from…?

Is there anything you can actually measure? Get hard numbers on? Any statistics?^[96] What happens when you talk this over with a colleague? How about a colleague who has a very different viewpoint from your own? Do they passively agree? Is that a danger sign? Do they violently oppose the idea? Does that give it credibility? Or not?

If you think you’ve defined something, try to also define its opposite. This can help avoid the nominal fallacy described earlier. If all you have is a label, it’s hard to pin down its opposite in any detail (and no, another label doesn’t count). Contrast a behavior, an observation, a theory with its exact opposite, in detail. This action forces you to dig a little deeper and look at your “definition” with a more critical and attentive eye.

Expectations create reality, or at least color it. If you expect the worst from people, technology, or an organization, then that’s what you’re primed to see. Just as with sense tuning (discussed in the paragraph here), you’ll suddenly see a lot of what you expect.

Expectations color reality.

For instance, certain faux news channels have focused on such sensational, Chicken Little-esque “news” coverage that you’d think the global apocalypse was scheduled for tomorrow (live coverage at 10 a.m. Eastern/7 a.m. Mountain and Pacific). It’s not, but given a steady diet of their careful selection of the most heinous crimes and outrageous events, you’d easily be primed to think it was true.

The same phenomenon applies on a more personal note. Your expectations of your teammates, boss, or clients will bias your perceptions. And others’ expectations of you will in turn color their perception.

Finally, to avoid the blindingly rosy glow of wishful thinking, remember that every decision is a trade-off. There ain’t no free lunches. There is always a flip side, and looking closely at the trade-offs—in detail, both positive and negative—helps make sure you’re evaluating the situation more fully.

It’s all a trade-off.

Next Actions

• When in conflict, consider basic personality types, generational values, your own biases, others’ biases, the context, and the environment. Is it easier to find a solution to the conflict with this additional awareness?

• Examine your own position carefully. How do you know what you know? What makes you think that?

It is by logic we prove; it is by intuition we discover.

➤ Henri Poincaré