– In which Dorn turns breaking things into a virtue.
One of my duties at my last job was to break things. When a new computer program, website, or procedure was created by the office, I would dive into it and test it to the breaking point if I could. I followed the instructions as laid out, but tried think of ways they could be misinterpreted or mis-applied, resulting in the failure of the whole system. The theory was, of course, that it was better to find and fix these weak points while the product was in house than after it was made public.
I liked my job of breaking things, partly because it was like puzzle-solving, and partly because I had a knack for it. I understood the feelings of Nick Naylor, the “hero” of the 2005 dark comedy Thank You For Smoking. He’s a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, and when asked by a lung cancer victim how he can work at such a job and even enjoy it, he says the job gives him satisfaction because he is so good at it. (This is a very funny movie, and I recommend it if you missed it the first time around, unless you are offended by slurs cast on the health virtues of Vermont cheddar cheese. It’ll be on HBO over the next week or two.)
Of course I’m not suggesting that there’s any moral equivalency between trying to break things that people have worked to make unbreakable, and trying to get people addicted to a nasty life-shortening habit for money. The latter is odious, while the former is perfectly respectable. As Phil Johnson points out in his essay “Failure is just data“, testing out a new product is like a scientist testing a scientific hypothesis. If the product fails to perform as expected, it just means that the hypothesis (that the product is ready for rollout) is disproved.
“If this were to happen to a scientist,” Johnson explains,”the reaction would be that they are doing their job well, as long as they capture the data about why the hypothesis was wrong. It’s not out of the ordinary, it’s expected and necessary. The key is framing a failure as an informative versus negative outcome.” (Johnson may have a few blind spots himself about the mental and emotional makeup of scientists.)
His point is that there’s an emotional bias against experiencing a failure which is frequently misplaced—it often should be welcomed as a stepping stone towards ultimate success. This emotional bias is a form of confirmation bias (my favorite bias), which causes us to seek out information that confirms what we already believe, or what we want to believe.
This bias is present even when we don’t have pride of ownership in a product we are testing, or any objective stake at all in the success or failure of the process. In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt describes an experiment performed by the originator of the term “confirmation bias”, where the process for determining a simple sequence of numbers is investigated:
It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so they tested out other rules: “3–5–7?” “Yes.” “What about 35–37–39?” “Yes.” “OK, so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?” “No.” People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule, sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their hypothesis. For example, proposing 2–4–5 (yes) and 2–4–3 (no) would have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending numbers.
Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession—your child, almost—and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.
My knack for breaking products and processes at work might have been related to my ability to suspend any pride of ownership (which of course is easier if it’s not my own product that I’m testing).
Now that I’m retired, though, I find I don’t have as many chances to practice this skill—there just aren’t that many things around that need me to test them to the breaking point, unless I want to failure-test my own work (which I’m not confident I could do objectively), or to tell Kathleen all the ways that the thing she is doing isn’t working. And that way madness lies!
Happy Halloween!
Thanks,
Dorn
10/31/2019