Unstuck yourself from the ideas that go nowhere - Candost Dagdeviren

This resource first appeared in issue #115 on 26 Mar 2022 and has tags Strategy: Making Decisions

Unstuck yourself from the ideas that go nowhere - Candost Dagdeviren
Falsify yourself - Jonas Lundberg

It’s really, really hard to let go of an idea you came up with. We built the entire scientific method around that fact!

And so outside of science and the rigour of hypothesis testing and unfriendly reviewers, it’s too easy to cling to ideas that clearly aren’t going anywhere. This is especially true in people or project management, where you lack the immediate feedback that comes with doing hands-on technical work. The resulting sensory deprivation can be disorienting, allowing you to believe all sorts of nonsense. (In new contexts where you haven’t experienced feedback yet, this can be true too: e.g. “it will be weird to interact with once-colleagues from the vendor side of the table”).

Dagdeviren reminds us that continually being curious, and asking open questions of others, can help us with this. Lundberg says that you don’t need to wait for others; you can try the scientific approach and attempt falsification yourself. That can involve probing and questioning your assumptions, trying “pre-mortem”s, listing tradeoffs, and trying to construct other possible solutions.