Good dog

People and being “good”

The human need to be perceived as a “good person” is as much of a compulsion as a dog’s need to be perceived as a “good dog” — a concept that I first grokked when reading Terry Pratchett. I’ve always felt that dogs being bred into this need was, you know, unfair, a control mechanism.

It took me a long time to see we bred them in our image.

This need to be perceived as “good people” operates at the group level as well, with interesting side effects.

There a weird blindness here, a bias — Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people” even opens with a description. We’re unable to see that almost everyone is rationalizing their actions, no matter how heinous, so they can think of themselves as “a good person”.

The implications of this bias on life and work — relationships, strategy, negotiations, performance reviews to name a few — are immense. We assume that bad actors (from our PoV) are intentional villains. They aren’t. In their minds they’re good people. That changes everything.

Our default approach is to try to show perceived bad actors that we “caught them”. This is deeply counterproductive because the cognitive dissonance is immense. It’s even worse when the attempt is systemic; having been involved in designing performance mgmt systems, I can attest to this 1st hand.

Let me flip that around for greater effect — often our attempts to “catch bad actors” results in us becoming the bad actors to others. Since we’re biased to not think of ourselves as such, this creates a feedback loop that is a death spiral of eroded trust and rising paranoia.

A fascinating side-effect is when what @vgr calls “hero gods” take these steps. Such people get a far larger degree of forgiveness by those affected before being categorised as “bad actors”. The perception instead lands on those who represent them.

This is important for founders and senior execs to factor in when doing things like running perf reviews — a badly designed system may never give you bad feedback personally. Instead, you will hear from your people how your HR team, or your one-downs, are “breaking the culture.”

Because we’re incapable of seeing ourselves as bad actors, both upper mgmt and staff both end up demonising middle mgmt. Over time, this can create a deeply toxic and unproductive middle mgmt layer. (Keep in mind, middle management, like everyone, wants to be “good people” too!)