Right here with you. At my last company, I tried to get the team comfortable “I don’t know,” “that didn’t pan out,” etc. I couldn’t get the lead on the other team to catch on. He’d bullshit an answer over a few minutes in a meeting, and Product and Management would eat that shit up.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Entirely agree. I’ve had trouble distilling this attribute or whatever into a specific quality. Maybe probabilistic thinking? But the bar for acknowledging when u don’t kno something should be pretty low.
> we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.
Yea this is a real problem. I wish stats and probability were more emphasized in high school. And it really doesn’t matter if people understand the math, the primary goal should be to get students at least familiar, and hopefully comfortable, with the concepts of chance and randomness. And having students internalize the concept of a confidence interval could help form a mental model of how to go about making assertions and the danger of overstating things.
The overstating things part is definitely ingrained in the American culture at least but I feel that this could really chip away at that
Any typical group of humans is still a young grub of an organism compared to the individual in those ways. So what you described can be a very hard ask for basically all of humanity, as seen through a team lens, at this point in history.
Sometimes it can help to continually plan and provide gentle interventions that expose the team to individual examples of what you are looking for. As long as that doesn't too severely overlap with what amounts to activities or embarrassing admissions that could torpedo a team member's career later on when you're gone. A very hard ask overall.
Probably the hardest part: If you can do it yourself, as an individual, congrats you get to feel like you could inspire people. But that's you as an individual. The group-organism experiences growth prompts as stress just like individuals do, but with far worse tools for coping. And one of the worst counter-pressures is the ever-present possibility of faking it for a bit and then just changing jobs to escape the awkward stuff, maybe getting a raise in the process.
Nothing changes much, you start looking for inner peace initially, get away from noise. The experience now lives with you as far as you are alive. A huge mark on your brain which you revisit each time you are about to make a new decision. If you become sick from rushing to create some value, you slow down, get more consistent, move slow and safe. Otherwise you keep same speed until you hit a wall, then the damage will be much higher compare to the previous ones.
That team was no better/worse at failure than anyone else, but apparently non-engineers can’t be bothered with the truth of humans: we’re failure machines looking for the right answers because we just can’t know everything.