Episode 62: The Peculiar Failure of Correctly Predicting Problems

welcome to never rewrite I'm Isaac ASU and I'm Jeffrey Sherman and today we're going to discuss the peculiar failure of correctly predicting problems so this is something that I've had a perennial problem with where I can look at a project and say oh this is the problems that will like you know especially in a projects with the large big bang these are the problems that you're going to encounter along the way and that will hit you because your whip is too large you're making too big of a single thing like all the things that we talk about like okay these are going to lead to these known and obvious problems and sure enough they do and what I have realized over the years is that that's not a success that it means that I have failed in my consultative role because I these are known problems I knew them I saw them I told you about them but I failed to get any traction about it and you hit them anyway and so it's a failure It's A peculiar failure for me because part of the value that I'm bringing to the table that like some somebody like us brings to the table is I can tell I see the problems before you hit them and I can tell you how to avoid them right but then you hit them anyway because you didn't listen and sort of the Genesis of that is I I got congratulated yesterday for I made three predictions and two of them came true already and the third one probably will come true soon if it ever makes it into production okay because the third prediction was that the and the customers are going to complain and you're not prepared for that like it's a rewrite and you're going to create all these new things and some of the customers are going to complain that the new design sucks okay because customers always some amount of customers will always complain that the new design sucks MH and you're not ready for that and therefore you're going to end up pushing this out they're going to tell you why it sucks you're going to pull it back and this is like it it's not a magic prediction because I don't like the designs or anything it's just this happens every single time and if you don't you know if you thesc ship and you incrementally change something it'll work or if you put it out there for Early Access and get let people see it and then give you feedback that works but if you just change it you know 100% of the time some of the customers hate it with valid reasons and you're going to pull it back okay so you got congratul these are not amazing predictions yeah so so even though you're saying like you predicted some negative outcomes uh I the funny part is you get congratulated on them uh as as you watch them come true instead of just working to to prevent them well I was working to prevent them and some of the people who were I worked to prevent them and I failed like I we had or I did not succeed more than failed okay we had well I was brought in like on this specific project I was brought in in a consultative manner it was not a project I was working on they said this is our this is the problem this is our solution and here's our implementation and I said your problem sounds real Your solution sounds good your implementation is going to cause these problems uh but I you I like your solution but I don't you're the way you're going to get there is is fraught it's a hard and Rocky path and here's an alternative path that is much less steep it's a you still have to climb the hill but the the path is not as steep the grade's not as big it'll go better you'll go faster and you'll suce more likely to succeed and they're like no no we're going to do this we got it we we've done all this research and you know we've talked to the bit the stakeholders and this is what they've told us and it's going to be great we're going to nail it the first time it's going to be 100% correct and we're going to go straight into production and it's like you're you're not but here let me write it up in a report so that you have it in case you change your mind I'm glad that you wrote it down and so yesterday two of the three things that I told them were most likely not going to work have been determined not to have worked and the third one you know the customers are going to hate the new UI again that's a like if you've worked for more than a few years and you've seen more than like a few reskins customers always hate the reskin yeah and some amount of that will be valid like a lot of it is just ketting because you change things and they'll be fine with it in a week but some of it like you're going to have missed something like there'll be something new that's now hard that was easy before does this a lot yeah every time slack changes people complain but then after a week most people are like okay this is fine right it's fine it's different but it's fine yeah but like I'm sure they also change things and like oh yeah that was a mistake and we have to change it back or add this new thing to make it uh so that was an interesting thing uh and this is actually this is a known problem for Consultants there's a very famous book that I have not read but I bought it okay nice nice right so there is famous book right Flawless Consulting by Peter block it okay 50 years old and it's still in print uh and the book is all about getting people to actually listen to your advice as a consultant uh so I I I did buy it I have read like the first 30 pages or so and I'm like oh yeah yeah you're describing my problem exactly and also yep yep didn't do this and yeah that happened too yeah so much like my predictions being totally obvious his diagnosis of my problem totally obvious like he's totally got to him it's totally obvious got it yeah so that's what's what's the solution like what could you have done differently to have gained traction and like persuaded people okay so off of the very minimal amount of what I've read so far the number one thing that I didn't have was I didn't have buyin from leadership I got brought in from leadership leadership said hey go and do you go look at this and take a look and let us know what you think and what the answer is but I didn't have bu in from leadership that they actually were going to do use any of the what I was going to say and per per this book sort of that's on leadership and not on you but you it's you've made the mistake of agreeing to do the work under those terms where leadership hasn't bought in to the importance of actually implementing whatever your your recommendations uh and so he to him the mistake I made is I agreed to listen and come up with recommendations without having the Buy in of and you're going to and you you value these recommendations and you want to implement them how could you have known that they wouldn't value them so that's the the the image I have in my head is leadership brought me in they said hey come come to come to these meetings do your thing and they presented me like a tool in the toolkit of here's Jeffrey Jeffrey knows a lot about these implementation uh operational you know implementation detail and roadblocks MH come in uh he's going to give you some great feedback about that present it as a tool in Your Arsenal right that the decision was still up to the managers of the team about whether or not they intended to use the tool okay much like you could have a code Quality Tool and you could decide to use it or not like tdd te unit tests are a great tool and if you do 100% coverage you're going to have many fewer problems than if you do 0% coverage but how much coverage are you going to pick well we leave that up to you right yeah so what's the I guess the analog here of your failure like if you if you so like's say somebody brings me and says hey we need your advice is it successful for me just to give my advice and say all right take it or leave it see you or am I supposed to sit there and try to be like no you really got I mean you're pushing back on me but I'm telling you it's going to fail and is it is it my role at that point to keep trying to convince leadership or is it just basically a leadership problem like oh you don't get it okay well I did what I was supposed to do and I'm not going to be fighting every day for you to listen to me so that be it the failure is in the engagement structure if if leadership hires you to come in and write a report and then hand it over and like that's the end of the engagement that they've hired you for then you can't be faulted for doing that and then them not listening to you and failing but you can be faulted for agreeing to that relationship in the first place uh what this book is saying and what I am have internalized from seeing this pattern play out is if the engagement can't be I'm going to come in and make recommendations instead the engagement has to be I'm going to come in and I'm going to work with you throughout the entire implementation and we're going to do this together it has to be collaborative that's I think is the the key key word there it's it if I come in and I make recommendations and then I leave it's diagnostic yeah yeah right like if you know I go to the if you go get if I go when getting a physical right you go to the doctor and it's like yeah you need to exercise more and eat less and eat healthier and then you go home and you do whatever you want right that's diagnostic the doctor has told you what you should do and has left it up to you to go do that and if you go work with a nutritionist or hire a personal trainer they're going to tell you to do the same thing and you're going to meet with them every week and they're gonna you know if you've got a personal trainer they're going to kick your ass and they're GNA take notes on how your ass was kicked last time and you know how to kick your ass differently this time for maximum effect so agre to the wrong engagement is in the consultive flow here so you're saying instead uh like if you go up to leadership and you say this is what we should do how in this case are you supposed to guide them if they if they push back so hard and say no we're not going to do it this way like cuz you're you're still trying to be that personal trainer but what if the personal trainer is you know like the person you trying to train is like nope nope I'm just going to eat poorly and I'm not going to push myself like you're telling me to like how how is that reflecting badly on the personal trainer if you have a stubborn client uh I fire them that's a client okay answers my question that's the solution so well so let's take this example right um I will make up titles here so the let's say that I was working under a VP and he had a manager and the VP says Hey I want you to go sit in with this manager and work with him and come up with this thing and what I did is I came up with a report so this would be like your wife making you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you to eat less and exercise more and then you turn around you tell your wife I went to the doctor like you said versus if the director had said I want you to con you know to be consultative and collaborative and work with this person for months and have weekly check-ins and have discussions and so it's not a one and done it's the manager and I would be we meeting weekly we' be discussing the project we' be discussing the the things that have happened and not happening and I would be reporting back on the progress or not progress to his manager the VP that would be an entirely different engagement from what I did right and that requires you know if the if the manager was not bought in then that would be discussion that I would have just as if your wife hired you a personal trainer and you refus to go along with it and the personal trainer is like look I'm it's not working it would be your personal trainer would be ethically required I feel like to to at least report back like hey you're paying me all this money to do training with Isaac he's not doing it right I can you know make him do a little bit but it's not really effective maybe you should hire somebody else right okay that's a good yeah yeah I see it's an interesting way to kind of phrase it and I think maybe a lot of times in the consultant role we're like inclined to want to say yes to clients because maybe we're either desperate for some clients if we don't have any yeah or or we just want to solve the problem and we're just you know excited about solving problems and not thinking about those particular clients that would be essentially a waste of time because they're not really ready to listen to any of the advice you have to give they're just checking a box like we got a consultant you know it's not like we're actually going to take the advice and work with the templ and fixing yeah well it's the difference between being Diagnostic and being uh collaborative right it's right you go to a doctor and you tell the doctor hey I want I'm working with a doctor and I want a second opinion like that's a diagnostic discussion and you're walking in there for a diagnostic discussion you say hey this I've got these symptoms Dr ju said this I'm asking you for a second opinion and I expect that you're probably going to say the same thing and if you say something different I may go get a third opinion because you know I've got two doctors that disagree and I'm not I'm not buying it like this engagement is not if you agree with the first doctor I'm going to go back to the first doctor for my treatment MH if you disagree with this first doctor I'm going to go find a third doctor to try to get some consensus at no point is this engagement going to be more than like one or two meetings where you're going to diagnose something for me so it's really key in that relationship and understanding what you're agreeing to or and and what what role you're playing as as as a consultant as you start like defining what the project looks like or what you're going to be doing in the project and then also being honest and saying you're not the right person for me if it ends up being conflicting right to take the doctor metaphor if I'm if I was a doctor right and in this case I said hey you've got um cardiovascular disease if you don't do these things you're going to have a heart attack and you don't do them and then you have a heart attack I don't feel good about that like ah I was right you die yeah right right but but you see you see it you see like you have to say something but you see you have to say it but if I was Dr 2 and I was being asked for a second opinion right and like yeah Dr one said I have heart disease and if I don't you know eat better and exercise I'm going to die and I look at the data I say yeah Dr one was right and they say okay I'm going to go back to Dr one for treatment you say okay cool and then later they don't do treatment and they die then do 2 at least would feel very time being like yeah I that's what I told him I agreed with Dr one right okay this is yeah this is a pretty good um an interesting reflection because I feel like there's been many times to where I've called something out and I've also not been able to really convince leadership um but these are also different roles I think I think some of the projects I'm reflecting on are more of my role as an employee at a few places rather than a role as a consultant um and those can be different and tricky too with power dynamics yes the the internal consultant or the full-time employee who is also acting as a consultant which is what I try to do poorly is a tricky one remember dear listener we're all on a journey and anyway uh awesome I think this was an interesting conversation but yes the the Curious or the peculiar failure of correctly predicting problems it does you no good if the patient still dies right unless you're doing it purely in a diagnostic right unless your job is merely to to be diagnostic yeah then you did your job yes it's still not great like because if you're a medical professional your met your your know your great knowledge and wisdom still didn't change the outcome which is uh un unfortunate yeah awesome thank you all for listening I'm Jeffrey Sherman and I'm Isaac ASU and this is never rewrite