Scott Porad

What did I mean when I made this comment to Thiggy?

I made this comment after someone I work with (not Thiggy) said:

“Those reports are useless.”

Now, that might be true…the reports could be useless.  It’s possible that there is nobody on Earth who finds the reports valuable or useful.  Truthfully, I don’t know.

But, if you’re the type of person who goes around saying things in extremes—totally useless, completely sucks, the worst, and so on—then it becomes a syndrome of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf.  That is, there is no trust in those statements, even if they are true.

This is because statement doesn’t explain why it’s useless; it doesn’t convey any information about what’s wrong and how it could be better.  Here’s a way of phrasing that statement that would engender more trust:

“These reports are useless to me because they show X, Y and Z, but what I need is P, D and Q.”

“These reports are useless to our customers because they don’t sort by date.”

So, what we have here is a basic little framework for explaining why things are useless/sucky/awful/etc…and doing it with trust:

• What it is (“These reports”)
• How it’s the opposite of awesome (“useless”)
• To whom it is not great (“to me”, “to our customers”)
• And why—what it does (“show X, Y and Z” and what the person who doesn’t like it wants it to do (“P, D and Q”).

Ultimately, it’s the “to whom” and the “why” that make the world of difference.

One of the ways my worldview has changed over the last few years is a real, genuine internalization of the importance of personal relationships.

I used to think the world was a meritocracy and that the smartest people would have the most success.  But, I don’t think that’s true any more, as a result of two observations.

Job Seeking — as the economy tanked, and friends and acquaintances were looking for work, the value of a professional network became so obviously important.  Of course, this is cliché, but it’s also true.  Very smart people were looking for work while other complete knuckleheads had jobs.  In addition, I realized that that in order for the professional network to be effective it needed to be in place before it was needed.

Work Success — I used to think that if you got the best and smartest developers and designers in a room that you’d end up with the best product.  What I’ve learned over the past few years is that if these developers and designers don’t play nicely together, then that’s a counter-force to their intelligence.  These days, I would prefer a team of A- players who have solid relationships and work really well together over a team of A+ players who don’t.  (In either case, I would only choose to work with A players.)

These thoughts are why Kent Beck’s thoughts about “team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions” resonated with me last week.  I was reminded of them again by David Brooks’ New York Times column today.

Brooks discusses how life outcomes are influenced by different types of government and policy.  It turns out, not very much.  You can read the whole column for detail, but it boils to:

When you try to account for life outcome differences…you find yourself beyond narrow [government- and policy-influenced] economic incentives and in the murky world of social capital. What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.

As a result, Brooks goes on to argue that our government policies need to strengthen social bonds, provide basic security (because lack of security destroys trust, thereby destroying social bonds), and strengthen relationships.

This point of view jibes with my own experience about professional outcomes—that social bonds, trust and relationships are a greater factor in determining job seeking or work success than pure intelligence.  That’s not to say intelligence isn’t important, but rather it’s the relationships that open doors, and the smarts and experience that empowers you to walk through them.