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In my experience, people find something is going wrong then enter a temporal vortex where they only focus on fixing this problem. They will then emerge on a Fri

In my experience, people find something is going wrong then enter a temporal vortex where they only focus on fixing this problem. They will then emerge on a Friday at 4:30pm, to tell everyone. If you're a manager, then the reason they do that is because you intimidate them. They're afraid to tell you when something goes wrong. This is YOUR problem. plans that rely on trusting everyone to act in a certain unwritten way aren't very reliable. That's the only possible plan that can work, because you can't write everything down. At some point you have to trust.

true_religion 10y ago
If I were speaking as a manager, I would have already done something about the issue. But no, I'm talking about people that I have worked with, but not managed. And these aren't 'dysfunctional' teams by any objective measure. These teams were formed from reasonably competent individuals, typically turned in their work on time, and had comfortable social dynamics. Yet on the rare occasion that a problem cropped up.... ah we didn't always take the best approach to problem solving. ---- There's a story I heard about firefighters. They did a study on veterans to find out how people operated under pressure. The researchers thought in the face of a burning building, surely the fire-fighters wouldn't be able to do an in depth search of all possible solutions, so they'd just compare the top-two that they thought of. Seems reasonable. In reality, the they just went with the very first solution that they didn't imagine had fatal errors. That's how people are... under pressure, we go with the first thing that might possibly work, not the best thing. That's why we need to think about problem solving techniques, before problems actually occur.