I sat through a technology briefing this week with a decision I made ten years ago doing all the listening for me.
A product company walked a group of us through where their technology is going, and all I could do was not listen.
This week went into the learning space instead of the work space, which is normally where I come back with a head full of ideas. What I came back with was a filter, running in real time, in a room where I could watch it work.
I learned a decade ago that this organization and their products were not inventive, not current, and often not as capable. That was true when I learned it. The word I used then was often, so I was not working from a single bad impression, and that is exactly how a technical bias gets built and exactly why it starts feeling like knowledge rather than opinion.
What I missed is that the judgment kept running long after the company stopped matching it. I was dismissing it solely on my bias, which meant it was not even going to be considered. My evaluation had finished before anybody started talking.
From the inside, a decision made by filter feels identical to a decision made by evaluation.
This could negatively impact my program, and I mean that plainly rather than as a caution. A program built by somebody who rules options out before looking at them stays narrower than its builder can ever see, and the gap never surfaces in a review, because you never rejected anything on the record and never opened an evaluation anybody could challenge.
Here's what actually happened in that room. The business leaders carried no ten-year history with this vendor, so they saw the effectiveness and the simplicity sitting in front of them while I was still not listening. The least technical people present had the most accurate read that day.
That should bother anybody who has built a career on judgment. It bothers me.
Leaning out of the familiar zone sounds like a development goal somebody writes into a review form. What it actually looks like is sitting in a room where the thing on the table stopped getting a hearing years ago, and working out that you are the one who stopped it, using evidence that has since expired.
None of this makes the pattern worthless. The patterns we learn over a career remain true to this day, and they remain true often enough that we never get around to testing them. The trap sits right there. A pattern that keeps being right stays unexamined, and unexamined is where it quietly stops matching the world that built it.
You can't test this one alone. Auditing your own bias by thinking harder about it works about as well as proofreading your own typo.
So hand it to somebody else. Somebody whose background looks nothing like yours, and who won't be polite about it.
So, here's the MondayMove
Take one thing you ruled out without evaluating, hand it to somebody whose background looks nothing like yours, and ask them what they see.
Find out what your certainty is made of, and how old it is.
Discussion