Originally posted 30 August 2023 on Medium.

I’m a huge fan of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, (now called Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit). Disney’s Jason Cox (Head of Global SRE) is a fine speaker and storyteller, and my favorite Disney character. His presentation on Creating Digital Magic gave me a lot to think about.

Go check it out now, if you’d like to, because I’m about to give some spoilers.

I’ll wait. [humming a little tune to myself]

Registration is free, and it gets you ten free videos per month, which is a pretty good deal. It gets you on the IT Revolution mailing list too, of course, but I actually like what they’ve been sending me, so I don’t mind.

Okay, so you’ve either watched the video, or you’ve decided you don’t mind the spoilers. There’s more to the talk than this, but here are Jason’s three main takeaways:

1. Listen.
2. Have empathy.
3. Actually help people.

Hooray! Wait…

My first reaction was to cheer. Yes! So many people in tech need these lessons. I’m sure we can all imagine working relationships, past or present, that would be utterly transformed in positive and uplifting ways (or at least made tolerable) if they embodied these three principles. We could stop wondering if we’re talking to a wall, an ogre, or both. We could get some real work done. We’d be happier.

My next thought was: wait… do we really need to tell people to listen, be empathetic, and help?? Shouldn’t that just be a given? As a friend of mine says, “we’re trying to have a society here, people.”

What have we come to as an industry, or as humanity, that we need a leader from a major company to get up on the main stage at a conference to tell us that we should be kind to each other? Great message, but kind of awful that it’s so needed.

My third thought: does telling people something like this actually help?

Given everything I’ve heard about the community that has sprung up around the DevOps Enterprise Summit conferences, I imagine that a fair amount of Jason’s audience already behaves in the way he’s exhorting people to consider. I suppose it’s pleasant, for someone who already puts effort towards listening, empathy, and helping to hear a champion of those principles speak about them with enthusiasm. I’m sure there’s an element that believes they don’t behave that way, when in actuality they do, and I suppose the message could motivate those people to try harder.

But what of the people who already aren’t listening, being empathetic, or helping? Do those people actually hear this message and think “you know… he’s right, I really ought to try that”? And if they do think that, is just telling someone this (granted, in a heartfelt and well-presented way) enough to get them to change their behavior?

Underneath it all for me is this deeper question…

Why do people do what they do?

There’s a huge hazard, one that trips me up all the time. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to chalk up someone else’s actions to something inherent to that person, but one’s own behavior to external factors.

Some relevant examples:

• They didn’t listen to me because they don’t care. I didn’t listen because I was distracted by an urgent issue that came in.
• They aren’t empathetic with me because they’re egocentric and childish. I am not empathetic with them because they’re giving me attitude all the time.
• They don’t help because they’re lazy and incompetent. When I don’t help, it’s because I’m busy and overwhelmed.

We make up stories about other people all the time (“that look she gave me means she’s nervous”) and if we’re not careful, we take them as reality. The fundamental attribution error creeps into these stories and influences the narrative we write. Add to that any other reasons we might be defensive and ready to blame others while exonerating ourselves — e.g., looming deadlines, personal financial woes, traffic jams — and we’ve got a potent combination for believing others to be awful and oneself to be an innocent victim, neither of which are especially useful conclusions.

Just telling people — even yourself — to do something is generally not enough. If you want behavior change, you’ve got to work out a plan for it.

In other words, “great, Leaf, but what do people DO about it?”

What to do

Here are a few things I’ve tried in the service of breaking the habit of telling fundamental attribution error stories:

• I have a sign taped to my monitor that says, among other things, “Is this true, or a story?”
• I’m starting to use being angry or upset as a warning flag that I’ve got a story going on. It’s useful to tune into signals from the body if you can. I’ve spent decades being a floating head, so I get it if that’s hard.
• The phrase “that’s one possibility” is helpful here. Or try my dad’s favorite: “Is that so?” Both are good litmus tests for spotting when you’ve got a story instead of a known truth.
• I just finished Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick’s book Agile Conversations, which suggests a practice of deliberately considering alternate explanations, including some ridiculous ones to get the ideas flowing.
• I try to figure out under what circumstances I might exhibit the behavior for which I’m criticizing someone else.

Let’s try an example.

They don’t help because they’re lazy and incompetent! Hey, I’m angry here, my jaw is tight and my hands are clenched. This might be a story I’m telling myself. So… yes, lazy and incompetent is one possibility.

Maybe they don’t have enough people to handle the workload. Maybe I wasn’t clear in my request for help. Maybe they somehow heard a message that this wasn’t urgent, so they’re prioritizing more urgent work. Maybe they are fending off a zombie attack and I’ll be lucky if they can help at all.

What has caused me to not be helpful to others in the past? Well, I sometimes get requests from people who don’t realize that I’m out of the office, so maybe a key person is on vacation. I keep getting stuck in meetings, which gives me less time to help; maybe they’re getting pulled into too many meetings. And hey, sometimes people are simply asking for something unreasonable. Could it be that my request is not as reasonable as I think it is? Maybe I’d better check into that.

Where I landed

Right then. Jason’s three takeaways — useful, or no?

I’d like to see more speakers go past explaining their ideas to suggesting things to try. But just the same, I’m going with yes, his talk was useful for me. It got me thinking about how we determine why people do what we do. It led me to articulate some things I’ve tried to bring more depth to my conclusions and go beyond accepting the first and likely problematic story that comes to mind.

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Have you caught yourself telling yourself stories? Have you noticed times when you’ve made the fundamental attribution error? What might you do differently, or what have you already done or tried to do, to listen more, be more empathetic, or actually help others?

New p.s. for 2025: I’ll be at Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in Vegas in September. If you will too, come find me there.