Category: Reflections

Hanlan’s Razor is one of my favorite mental models.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I grew up with several conspiracy-minded relatives, and this one idea did more than anything else to help me see other possible explanations beyond a secret cabal.

It also made me a far easier person to work with since it helped me see certain relationships at work as something other than adversarial relationships.

I often contemplate what most TV shows and movies would look like if a character’s best friend would, at a key moment, step in and ask them if they’d ever heard of Hanlan’s Razor.

In my fantasies, the main character understands and goes on a completely different course with more empathy for the other person. In a more realistic depiction, the best friend probably gets their head chewed off.

Today I discovered a different side of Hanlan’s Razor that might be worth calling the Forest Gump Principle.

In the movie Forest Gump, the main character Forest bumbles into important historical moments. It’s not so much that he is a genius, quite the opposite, but he does some incredible things through luck and timing.

One of my favorite examples is when Forest stays at the Watergate Hotel one night and calls the front desk to tell them about the power being out, eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.

So my proposal for the Inverse Hanlan’s Razor is

Never attribute to good intentions that which is adequately explained by dumb luck.

It turns out that determining people’s intentions is really hard, even when it’s ourselves. I don’t know that moving entirely to consequentialist thinking is the correct answer, but heavily discounting our assumptions of people’s intentions is probably a good rule of thumb.

1. Mitigate the issue
2. Find the root cause
3. Address the root cause

Order matters. We often skip the mitigation step and move to the root cause. This means that systems are broken longer than they need to be.

Have you ever struggled and chaffed against stupid rules at work?

I know I have.

Why do I need to fill out this form?

Why does that group need to approve this?

Wait, we need to wait how long to release?

The list goes on and on, and so does the frustration. For years I was confused why so many places I worked had senseless policies that got in the way of me doing my job.

I remember this one episode from Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm gets in trouble at work for not flattening boxes in the “designated box flattening area” and getting way more work done because he did the job the most efficient way he saw.

There is no point in having a “box flattening area.” Just get rid of it!
So why do we have these rules?
The people I’ve worked with genuinely want to make things better. I’m lucky, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen rules created to allow someone to create a tiny fiefdom inside a company.
So, where do the terrible rules come from?
Sticking with the “box flattening area,” I suspect that rule came about because of an accident. Something terrible happened, and afterward, people looked into what happened and came up with the idea of the “box flattening area” to prevent that kind of problem from happening again.
Does creating the “box flattening area” address the root cause of the issue? I have no clue it’s a contrived example in a TV show. It feels like a solution that quickly addresses the symptom rather than digging deeper to find the root cause.
It’s uncomfortable for folks to go through something like The Five Whys even if they are familiar with the technique, as it’s all too easy to sound accusatory when asking “why.”
There is also a challenge to removing rules once they are established. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” becomes an answer far faster than we realize.
Also, for most people questioning rules is an uncomfortable process.
We often ask ourselves, “Do I really think you know better than all the people who created this rule?”
What I’ve come to realize is that it is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask, “Do I have more information than those who created this rule?”
We almost always have more information, and we should not ignore that. The rule might actually have been the best available solution at the time, but now there are different solutions.
The next time you come across a policy that seems dumb, remember that it was made by well-intentioned people trying to solve a specific problem as quickly as possible with less information than you currently have.
It still might be an uphill battle to remove the policy, but approaching it from that angle will also make it seem like less of an attack on those who created it.

Today was a rough day at work, but I’m working on looking at it from a different perspective.

Last night right before I left for the day, a coworker reported an issue with something I was working on that was blocking his work. After looking into it, I realized his problem was caused by a problem I’d been trying to resolve for several weeks.

I put yet another bandaid on the problem, got him unblocked, and called it a day with a plan of spending today, finally resolving the root cause. I was also optimistic because my team lead and I had discussed this issue before the holiday break. He had an idea to resolve the issue.

I knew the problem, and I had a path forward; it was going to be a good day, and I was finally going to resolve a nagging issue that kept cropping up in unexpected places to give me a headache.

Unfortunately, that idea didn’t work, and neither did the four other things I tried. I wrapped my day up by talking with my team lead as we spitballed some more possible solutions. As we got off the call, I commented about how I didn’t feel like I accomplished anything today. This was when he laid down some wisdom that I’ve heard before, but I keep forgetting.

Accomplishing something does not require committing code. Today I found five more ways that won’t fix this problem. That is something, and it has moved us forward.

My lesson from today is that while I did not resolve the problem I set out to, that doesn’t mean I didn’t accomplish anything.