That Burning Feeling When You’re Right
“The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” (George Bernard Shaw, slightly modernized and de-gendered)
I talked a little bit about what happens when a person is not exactly aligned with the organization within which they try to operate in Candor, Bluntness, Impedance Matching; one of the fundamental benefits of not being entirely aligned with your organization is the potential for good that can come from that lack of alignment, as you help your organization move in a certain direction. The challenge with not being entirely aligned with your organization is that the further away from popular and policy-based stances[0] you are, the more thoughtful you need to be, because the harder it will be for people to listen to you. Which seems like as good a time as any to tell you about John (not his real name).
A long, long time ago, I worked at a company that was trying to change the fundamental way in which it did deployments and engineering and ran its servers. They had a bunch of smart people, who had already made some decisions on this front (“We’ll move from MySQL to SimpleDB, it’ll be great!” for example). They also hired John, who became my peer and coworker.
