Are You Dumb?
The holiday season is knocking on the door, and — not to stand in the way of the festive moods and ebullience:)— I’m in a hurry to expose a couple more nasty “bugs” that poison communication in teams. The bug that I’m going to get at today is called “assuming dumbness”.
A case that I have at hand to show the origin of this implication comes from my many years of work with leads and customers. Anyone who’s worked in sales/marketing/customer support knows that customers/leads are inclined to want more and more new features from the software product they’re using, or just looking at. They keep asking, and if only about features. Customers also come with their troubles… and report bugs. It does require some real hard core to deal with the people who seem to be never satisfied with what they get and to maintain your psychological sanity. If customers keep asking for months, maybe even for years, and still don’t get what they want, then a nasty feeling of unfulfillment may creep at the sales/marketing/customer support people. Well, the reasons for what seems to be a never-ending “not available so far” response might be obvious to stakeholders/product managers who have their priorities and strategic considerations in mind. The “assuming dumbness” syndrome appears if these strategic considerations are poorly communicated to the colleagues who interact with the customers. Here’s what those folks-in-the trenches might think about the product people: “Are they dumb? How long can we go on living without this feature? Or, with this rotten bug, that still remains unfixed?” If people are left hanging alone with such questions in their minds, the team spirit is eroded. Customer-facing people deserve a monument for their mental toughness, and it would be much easier for them to be solid, if they were aware that the Big Brother cares. Luckily, in most cases, stakeholders and product managers do listen and care. They just have their own priorities for the product in mind, and it might be not so obvious that they do appreciate all the hard work that their support/marketing/sales colleagues put on the line.
The assumption of dumbness shows itself in a myriad other cases. Whenever your first thought is: “Why have they done this? Why haven’t they done that? Are they dumb?” this is an alarm bell. I don’t remember now where exactly have I heard that, but one of the principles for working in a group is to assume that all people perform to the best of their ability. However, we do have our bad days, and when we are in a bad mood, we are more likely to think of the colleagues who add more troubles to our daily work as dumbasses.
This syndrome can be cured quite easily. First, if you work in a team of competent professionals, they can never be dumb. They always have their reasons for acting the way they do, it’s just that they might not have shared those reasons with the others. Why have I written an error message for a screen the way I did? Believe me, I’ve given it enough consideration, and I’ve looked into the slightest implications and perspectives that this error message is supposed to bring. Just don’t forget to run it by me, will you. Why developers wouldn’t want to make this UI element dynamic? This would be all too easier for the users..! Developers have their own reasons, too. Might be it’d take too much time to make this small thing alluring. So developers are weighing their options, and, yes, they’re aware that a dynamic element would look better here. But they have their own reasons for not implementing it. Why marketing is so eager to make a new release public, are they dumb, it’s all too early? No, they are not dumb. They are just overly optimistic about the progress, and they’ve overlooked some technical considerations (that come first to the minds of those responsible for the infrastructure part). Things like that.
Come to think of it, assuming dumbness is nothing else but a judgement in disguise. So, we will want to keep our sensors tuned and practice our ability to empathize with the others. If something causes confusion, your first thought shouldn’t be: “Are they dumb?”, but rather: “They must have their own reasons for acting this way, so I’ll leave it at that, or, if I need to, I’ll find out more on what those reasons are”.
This story was updated and re-written from one of my earlier articles.
