Modes of Thought

People tend to argue from three perspectives, or ways of thinking. Some of the greatest disconnects occur when people are argue the same point from different perspectives.

• Principles--The principled thinker holds on to basic truths and measures other ideas against these truths. "We hold these truths to be self-evident…"

• Systems--Systems thinkers are less concerned with right, wrong, or absolute truth. Instead they focus on the outcome and putting together the appropriate system to produce the desired result.

• Details--Bottoms up work. Detailed thinkers figure if each step is handled correctly the journey will take care of itself.

Some of the great political debates have at their core a conflict between these different modes of thought. The systems thinker comes along with studies showing how they can reduce crime or some other undesirable behavior through different programs or regulations. The mistake the system thinker makes is that they assume that the principled thinker has a shared goal with them. That isn't always the case. Sure the principled thinker has no problem reducing crime, for example. But perhaps they value individual freedom greater than a world with less crime. It's more important that the individual  has the freedom to make the choice and then bears the consequence of that choice. More crime does not disprove their perspective. All the while the detailed thinker looks at individual cases and thinks that both principled and systems thinkers don't know the reality on the ground.

If you haven't noticed from reading some of my other posts like The Bug Constitution, I tend to be a systems thinker. I figure as long as you get the right rules together, and get the economy structured correctly, the right outcome will happen almost automatically. Principled thinkers tend to confuse this approach with detailed thinking, but it's not quite the same thing.

The trick is that all three modes of thought are critical, none of them are inherently superior to the others. One of the great pitfalls is that people can become very successful with one mode of thought and stick to it even when other approaches would be more effective.

Of course, you can see all three modes in full display during a project shiproom. Everyone is trying gauge the quality of the product and our ability to meet schedule. The systems thinker says "We just need the right triage rules and bug bars in place and we can track quality and schedule analytically." The detail thinker claims "Bug counts are meaningless. You have to look at all the individual bugs and run the product daily to understand what the quality is." The principled thinker says "You are both wrong. Product quality is nothing but features that add value. It's more important that we find time to had high value features than every pixel gets properly aligned. Also, we are experienced developers we don't need a bunch of rules to help us determine which bugs to fix."

As you can imagine, nobody changes anybody's mind. The real problem is that they are all correct. Sometimes a value and a vision for a product can be so compelling, that users will forgive a lot of niggling bugs and design problems. (Spolsky has a great post on this.) Other times a relentless focus on every last bit of fit and finish can transform a product from a relentless pile of annoyances into a pure joy to use. Other times only broad customer analytics and trends get help you get your heads around what's really going on. What's tough about this is that all perspectives are right. It takes leadership to balance them and know which one is more important for a given product, product version, and stage of release. The answer is not always the same and people who get it right once, often get it wrong the next time because they don't adapt to a different world.