There's a cognitive trick that our brains play on us when we have a hard decision to make or when we're asked a difficult question.
Interestingly, the pathways here are probably pretty similar.
If we're asked a difficult question,
We're essentially having to make a decision about what we believe about something.
So if we're asked a difficult question or if we're making a difficult decision, a lot of times those things will come out in a similar pattern for our brains because we are essentially taking a position, right?
Yeah.
And so this trick that our brain plays in both of these scenarios is usually done accidentally.
And in today's episode, I want to talk about doing it accidentally.
In an intentional way, in a way to take advantage of this essentially efficiency trick that our brain does automatically and sometimes to our detriment when we're not paying attention to it.
So this trick, we've talked about it on the show before.
This trick is the concept of substitution.
Our brains substitute something that's easier for the harder thing.
So for example, if you are asked, you know, how are you doing today, right?
That's a very common example.
How are you doing today?
Instead of going through the mental and emotional toil and difficulty maybe,
Of explaining truly all of your feelings and thoughts and your physical health state or whatever things might make up the real answer to this question,
Most people substitute with the question, is there anything really important that you need to get off your chest right now?
Or they might substitute with, you know, this is essentially somebody saying, hello, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you?
Right.
I'm fine.
How are you?
Is is essentially your substitute for hello back.
And so our brains do this very, very often.
This is another one of those heuristics that our brains use.
The heuristic is this substitution in this case.
And many times our brains, in physical spaces, these heuristics look like substitution of abstract shapes for objects.
Our brains are filling in the gaps.
More or less, we're compressing information.
Because the calculation, in the case of how are you, the calculation is, what is the downside to the substitution?
What is the likelihood that me substituting this is going to end poorly?
It's very low.
It's very low that I'm going to have a negative consequence from answering this with the substitute, the easier substitute question.
And this happens with much more difficult things.
A good example of this for software engineering is code review.
So if you get a big PR, MR, and a lot of complexity in that,
You may use a variety of substitute questions to determine if this PR or MR is good to go.
So, for example, you may say, well, was it tested?
Are there automated tests?
Was there manual testing?
What kinds of validation verification have occurred here?
Does it follow our best practices?
Does it follow linting rules?
Do I understand this thing well enough to glance and see anything obviously wrong?
Right.
And these are all substitutions for reviewing this line by line.
Because reviewing code line by line is most often not even necessary to ensure quality.
Because once again, going back to this calculation that our brains do, most of the time, these substitutes, these heuristics that we're talking about are sufficient.
Every once in a while, every once in a while, they'd service poorly, right?
We miss something.
We let a bug go out to production or we read a social situation incorrectly, right?
Um we you know we answer a question
A good example for managers
Another good example for managers how do you do your performance ratings
Well you may have a variety of frameworks
You may have a variety of measuring tools metrics that you use
You may use uh notes from the report
You may have input from a bunch of different sources
Maybe you're using
AI to summarize all of their contributions and confluence, whatever it is that you do, it's very likely.
And in fact, it's actually just true that you can't deterministically rate a person on a scale.
There's not a clear deterministic way to do this.
So everything that we do in performance evaluation is our best guess for a substitution for something that is immeasurable.
We're measuring a bunch of things, but what is actually the rating that we're trying to produce?
If you're doing a typical performance review, you're rating people on some scale.
And the ostensible rating scale is how much value does this person produce at the level that they're at?
And so there's a bunch of ways of identifying long-term and short-term value, risk mitigation versus generating net new value.
There's all of these things that we're trying to measure, but ultimately, they're a bunch of substitutions.
There's a bunch of substitutions for the more direct question of how well is this person doing in terms of value generation and what is their trajectory looking like going forward.
Okay, so we do this all the time.
We do it.
Sometimes we don't realize that we're substituting in the case of performance management.
Most people would say, well, no, it's a rubric, right?
Or it's, you know, we have methods for this.
Those methods are actually substitutes, right?
At least that's the argument I would make, is that those methods are actually substitutes for the real thing that you're trying to represent or the real question that you're trying to answer.
All right, so if this is something that we do naturally and very often automatically and sometimes to our detriment,
My proposal here is that you can take this and use it on purpose.
You can actually use this in order to make decision-making simpler.
And so the inspiration here is a lot of times people get paralyzed
By either analysis or deferral or risk mitigation, risk avoidance, I would say like loss aversion here.
There's a bunch of reasons why people may not do something.
They may not pull the trigger to go to the gym at 5 a.m. because they know that that's painful.
They know that that's, and maybe it's not even going to be worth it.
Maybe I won't even feel good afterwards.
What if I don't reach my goals?
There's all these reasons not to do it.
Similarly, there are things like applying for a new job, shooting for your dream job, sending the application for a role that you feel is a little bit out of your reach.
People will avoid taking those steps.
And the inspiration here is...
To start viewing some of these decisions as less of a commitment
So what we're doing is we're going to substitute a simpler decision, okay?
So a great example of this, a great example of this.
Let's say you've been at your company, you know, your current job for a few years.
You feel very bought in.
You feel loyal to the people, but you're not really sure if you're growing.
You're not sure if this is really the long-term fit.
Maybe you're interested in something else.
It's not really your dream job.
So there's plenty of reasons why this is worth paying attention to, right?
Because, of course, you only have one life to live.
You're the person who's going to take care of your career more than any other person.
No one else can get your dream job for you.
That's not going to happen.
You have to be your own advocate in this world, right?
In this example.
But the tension that happens is you may feel a sense of uncertainty or fear, maybe even guilt if you feel loyal to the people that you work with.
If you feel like leaving is risky, there's some kind of negative downside to making the choice to move.
And so that, along with the uncertainty of maybe I'll be rejected, maybe I won't get this job,
Is very often the reason people won't even start that process.
They won't send a job application, they won't send an email, they won't ask for a reference, they won't do any of those steps
They take it as a foregone conclusion that this is too risky, this is too much.
Somehow there's some negative emotion or negative prediction associated with this decision.
My proposal here is substitute...
The idea that you are making the decision to jump into the deep end and look for or shoot for a job, a new job, substitute that with, I'm going to send an email.
Now notice the difference here.
The weight of sending an email is very low.
The weight of attaching your resume is very low, right?
The steps that you would take are one step at a time iterative.
And software engineers know that this is the case.
We take small steps and a lot of small things build up to very complex, larger things.
We discover complexity through simple composition, right?
And so the process of getting your dream job is actually composed of a bunch of small things that get you there.
That process is sending an email, right?
It's sitting down and thinking about what should I include on my resume, right?
It's sending a connection request to the person that might be able to get your referral at that job.
None of these are commitments.
None of these are resignations.
None of these are the big decisions that you would later need to make, right?
So what we're doing is we're removing friction from the actions that you're bundling.
So this is part of the problem is we bundle all of these things together.
This often happens when we're trying to develop and release software as well.
We've been working on this project forever.
Is there anything at all that is complete?
It's very likely that yes, there's some, if you've been working on it forever, either something's very wrong and you need to go back to the drawing board or you've got something, something's complete.
So shipping that something to an environment, production environment.
A lot of times the reason we don't do that is because we connect this motion, this like muscle movement and memory to releasing something into the wild and calling it good.
If we disconnect these ideas and we say, no, all we're really doing is deploying this into the cloud.
All we're really doing is we're releasing, we're merging these branches.
It's all we're actually mechanically doing, separating this labeling of this thing being ready
Being production ready, being ready for release from the release process.
So you're substituting a lot of these micro steps, right?
And there's a lot of research on this.
Most of the research talks about making smaller commitments, right?
And I want to kind of get a slightly different frame on this, right?
Because what we're usually imagining is that, okay, well, I'm just going to make this small commitment and hopefully it'll roll into the big one.
But eventually you still have to make this big commitment.
Actually, the meaning that we put into these actions is usually constructed.
It's usually something that we perceive or that we imagine others will perceive.
When actually,
That the action itself that we're taking is probably fairly trivial in the grand scheme of our lives, in the grand scheme of all of the things that could happen with the actions that we're taking.
We're moving bits around.
We are having a conversation.
These are small actions that if you were to substitute in your mind what you think this means with the actual action that you're taking, it is a lot less intimidating.
And so making decisions, making weighty decisions, you can likely cut that decision down and substitute an easier thing, something that you you can you can kind of strip out the assumptions.
Right.
You strip out the attached meaning of these decisions.
Instead, focus on, okay, this is simply X.
What is this simply fill in the blank?
What is that?
What is the decision you're actually making here?
Can you make a smaller decision?
Could you make a substitute decision?
Could you take a substitute position?
Instead of saying you think this is the best way or you believe that this code is ready to go to production or you think this is the right person to hire, you can substitute
A much lower commitment levels to these things and still take the action, the same exact actions.
Right.
So so the internal commitment might be I'm going to try, you know, I believe that this code is is shippable.
Instead of saying this code is great or I'm willing to put my name on the line for this, I think this code is shippable.
What happens?
What's the downside if we ship it and it's wrong?
We can roll it back, right?
Make your decisions easier.
You know, try to find exit pathways, make decisions that are easy to come back from.
You're lowering your commitment thresholds in almost all these cases.
Right.
So if you have a hire to make, for example, you rest on the fact that.
Hey, look, the hiring process is volatile and you can't predict the future.
And so if you're going to hire somebody, you want to be rigorous about it.
You want to actually put them through all of their standard development stuff.
But at the end of the day, none of these decisions are permanent.
Right?
None of this is permanent.
If you screw this up, it might be expensive.
It might be a regret or whatever.
But at the end of the day, most of the decisions that you're going to make, there are ways to divert and reduce the risk of those decisions, right?
A lot of the time we overestimate
The risk of a decision so much, right?
And we underestimate the risk of doing nothing.
This is going back to our action orientation, but trying to find these kind of mental tricks that help us get to an action-oriented spot
By reducing our perceived risk, most of the things that we are perceiving as risky are ultimately not a threat to us.
It's very likely that we can find a way around most of the risk that we are perceiving, or we can simply relabel it.
We can substitute, again, substitute a heuristic for what this thing actually means.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
Hopefully you can quickly attach to some of these ideas and see them playing out.
Next time you feel like there's a big decision to make, try to break it down into its more fundamental aspects.
What am I actually doing here?
What are the physical actions?
What are the actual words or the mechanical pieces of the puzzle here?
What is the actual downside in the worst case?
If this goes awry, you know, do I have to connect my all of my worth to it?
Probably not.
Right.
It's OK if this fails because it's a simple action.
It's very likely that you are doing this already with substitute questions and substitute beliefs.
Right.
And so I encourage you to try to take that kind of thing that your brain is good at already and reuse it in a more intentional fashion.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
