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bombcar

99% of all leadership is making a decision and then asking for data to support that decision unfortunately.

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Like when my company's bosses decided:

- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.

- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

And always supported with "data".

Those are not contradictory.

Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.

I think the point was that they are contradictory, yet "data" was shown to indicate they were each sound decisions, implying an inherent dishonesty and willingness to bend data to support an already drawn conclusion.

No, I'm stating that those aren't contradictory. Perhaps they were inaccurate paraphrases of statements that were contradictory, I have no idea. But taking what's written at face value, they are not hard to reconcile. E.g., being productive doesn't necessarily imply innovating.

Not hard to reconcile _if you try in good faith to do so, with the necessary faculties, interest, time, and access_.

This caveat pretty much defines reality.

I... don't really follow.

COVID wfh was a weird time. The company I worked for was remote before COVID. Oddly, COVID was a boost to basically every metric, including the ones not tracked for productivity like even number of Slack messages sent or raw number of PRs. I think everyone was just closed off from their out of house obligations, especially families with kids who went to a lot of activities that got cancelled. So they worked instead or were just more rested and less exhausted from everything else in their lives.

The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of remote candidates with not so great intent: The overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack once a day or other people who generally just weren’t interested in actually doing work while remote. It started to add up over time. There were also the people who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason everything changed when everyone started WFH.

not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure from anything they had ever known.

This is also - disturbingly - how the human brain operates.

1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about what course of action is most beneficial for you.

2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally right thing to do.

3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing, and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!

I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you have to accept that well functioning human organizations don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they work.

This is not entirely true. Daniel Kahneman wrote about it if you want a source. Humans generally have two ways of thinking: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is fast, heuristic-based, and not always accurate. Arguably, that's why things like racism and bigotry take hold. Type 2 is slow, analytical, and what lets us do things like send men to the Moon or write large software applications.

The trouble is that you have to consciously shift to Type 2 thinking, it takes longer, and it's tiring. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has a great bit (paraphrasing here) about the purely Type 2 thinker in ancient days on the African savannah getting eaten by a lion. Because he or she sits there doing a complex analysis of "OK, felid, yellow fur, moving towards me, etc. etc." while the Type 1 thinker goes "Oh shit! Lion!" and runs away.

Type 1 thinking has a role. You just have to be mindful about when you're misusing it.

What I describe is a summary of the book "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life".

My take is that it's worse than you think, and Type 2 thinking is often used to justify or rationalize actions driven by Type 1 motives.

Link: https://amzn.to/3KqLzF7

I’ll settle for making decisions. Most leaders can’t even do that

I’ve literally never seen that happen. It’s always problem, initial hypothesis, request for data (then data is either unavailable or typically supports the hypothesis, occasionally the data doesn't and you go back to the drawing board.

Have you worked on a data team? I've seen that bs a number of times, it's how I mentally grade different managers and PM/POs.

Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big change, get told what devs are missing and need to instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too hard or impossible to check.

I’m sure it does happen but a number of times does not come close to all (99%)

"If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess to anything"

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