Assume Positive Intent (2017)
rickmanelius.com
rickmanelius.com
Lol, I recently had a potential issue where I switched teams and the team lead was new to the company. We had a daily standup thread in Slack. I would make the key ideas bold so it is easy to skim. The manager reached out a few weeks later and was taken aback by my "attitude" in these threads. He/she was assuming the bold text for anger and impatience (despite happening with both positive and negative ideas) while the original intent was to just ease reading comprehension. Now "assume positive intent" is always part of my intro spiel when working with new people.
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#assume-positive-in...
Assuming positive intent works well outside of professional settings, too.
Bringing this mindset to relationships with significant others, family members, friends, and people in my community has proven to improve those relationships.
Particularly if someone is expressing a specific grievance, asking them to assume positive intent from the other party is dismissing their experience of what happened and how they should feel about it.
Sometimes people don't act with positive intent and sometimes you can fucking tell. You don't want to be telling, for example, a woman in tech who has had a coworker take credit for her work, that she should assume positive intent in that situation.
Good general guideline for self, but be careful when asking others to follow it imo.
I know that's not what the writer of this, or these policies, intends, and not what people here mean either.
But I have seen this, a lot, at places that have "assume positive intent" as an official company value.
If someone forgets to credit you for work done, reach out and let them know so they can correct it. There is a good chance that they just forgot. Now if this happens every time without fail, something is up and blindly assuming positive intent would just be naive.
> asking them to assume positive intent from the other party is dismissing their experience of what happened and how they should feel about it.
I'd disagree here. It isn't immediately dismissive but it is a chance to change their perspective. Should you let them stew in their anger because they think Bob hates them, or should you perhaps suggest that Bob's actions were a result of outside information unknown to them (obviously depends on each case)?
(they came into our project without understanding the challenges we had or the problem we were solving, tried to throw everything out, and then with upper management present, gave a "decision making" presentation that only led to their solution as being picked)
Trust someone will get something done on time when they say they will, but verify they actually did. Trust that someone is communicating something in a positive way, but verify if there's confusion. Etc.
It's not perfect, nothing is, but "assume positive intent" doesn't have any fallback for when bad actors start to take advantage of it.
> If you put your trust out there… if you give people the benefit of the doubt, see their best intentions… people will rise to the occasion.
(Okay I lied, it's not from a great philosopher, it's Paul Rudd playing Ned in 'Our Idiot Brother'.)
I would like to add one thing: doing the opposite is just too tiring, don't do it. Yes, some might try to take advantage of you, others might call you naive. As long as you have a functional brain, I bet you can avoid dramatic consequences. And you'll be happier and more relaxed.
But there is a certain momentum of "cause and effect" that needs to be transcended first.
1. Postulate positive intent. 2. Verify intent when outcomes are negative. 3. Don't ignore a pattern. 4. Intent stops being relevant and strength of desire becomes more import with repeated negative outcomes. 5. Outcomes have to be evaluated separately when a dark triad person is involved.
People are generally trying to be helpful and doing things that make things better. People can be embittered if they aren't treated with respect.
The faceless abstraction of a company is almost always set up to extract money from you. It's often set up to also provide something useful, since that's one of the most sustainable ways to get people to hand over money. Companies can't become embittered.
Assuming greedy intent is a way to be wise about making sure you get a fair trade for your money.
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#assume-positive-in...
See Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
A less qualified manager clones constantly being promoted over more qualified minorities/women/etc? "Assume positive intent!"
Coworkers taking credit for your work? "Assume positive intent!"
Promised raises never materialize? "Assume positive intent!"
Pushed untested code to production? "Assume positive intent!"
The way I try to see it is that I try to assume positive intent while also letting people know of the impact their (in)actions had on me. If a coworker takes credit for my work, I can assume that their intention wasn't to hurt me, however, I can also let people know that what they did hurt me.
So I wish there were a secondary policy of "and say how you feel," but this may be a lot more taboo in corporate environments than assuming positive intent.
Now I’m not saying doing above is easy. Even with best wordings, peeps might and will get offended. In that case, you may need to establish trust with them first.
Finally, I want to say that some people are not up to the task (e.g I am not up for being a pro golfer) or just don’t give a shit. The really hard part is knowing when that is the case so that you don’t burn out trying to foster trust in your relationship that’s going nowhere. But I’d say the best play to start is to assume good intention.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> There are con artists and sociopaths out there. Marth Stout claims 4% of the population falls into this category.
That's the general population. What do you think the proportions are at high-growth tech companies? What about the further and higher-up you get in your career? Sociopaths are attracted to places where they can wield power and domineer over others.
My general philosophy: start from a place of neutrality to mild positivity. As your interactions with a person increases, gather datapoints and weigh them based on their context and severity of the behavior. Build up a picture based on actions and evidence and then, for God's sake, remember it.
For example, someone may spend a full day cooking a meal that they believe is the perfect meal for me. I may go to eat it and find out it has an ingredient in it, say peanuts, to which I'm deathly allergic. The person may have had the best intentions in cooking that meal and yet that meal may have killed me. So in this, I still try to assume good intentions, so I don't accumulate bitterness and resentment towards the individual person, however, I also want to be very open and honest about how scared I feel when I think about eating that meal.
So I hear you in that "assume positive intent" may be another way for organizations to say "avoid conflict." So, even if their intentions with saying "assume positive intent" are positive, the effect of those behaviors may not be positive for everyone, and as I mentioned in another comment, I think "assume positive intent" should be followed with "and tell people how you feel."
One of the failure modes of the systems we build is when they provide leverage for bullies. Any system that wields power (which is basically all of them) needs oversight baked in from the beginning.
After that it's all "once bitten twice shy" all the way down.