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I mentioned elsewhere, the theme here is correcting common, default mental models that, without thinking through, lead many people to make a lot of mistakes. By recognizing the bugs in your default thought process, you can avoid many bad decisions that you would otherwise eventually regret. Halons's Razor: A partner company just did something that makes life much more difficult for you and much easier for themselves. By all accounts it looks like they are only pretending to be "partners", but actually secretly trying to screw you over for their own gain. It's easy to get emotional and paranoid in this situation. If it's really true, you need to find a way to cut off the partnership quickly. That is serious business. But, it's more often better to default to the possibility that maybe they aren't actually fucking with you. Maybe they're just idiots. Maybe they got lazy. Maybe they didn't think through the consequences. Maybe you don't need to go into paranoid adversary mode, blindside your partners with suspicious reactions "out of no where" and fuck up a good partnership that in reality just needed better communication. Or, maybe they actually are out to get you. Just don't completely forget the more likely possibility that this is simply a mistake. It's very common that people do forget... Zero Sum: It's easy to default to a "If they are getting richer, someone else is getting poorer" mindset. A significant number of businessy people have a "In order for me to win, YOU MUST LOSE" mindset. From both directions, this cuts off the greatly preferable win-win outcome. Recognizing this flaw in default thinking can lead you to an even better outcome for yourself than the "you defeating someone" outcome. You can instead find a way for both of of you come out ahead of the "individual victor" outcome. Streisand Effect: You just fucked up majorly in a way that isn't obviously your fault. There are two different ways that you can try to improve your situation that will likely backfire very badly. 1) You can pretend nothing happened and hope it goes away. That is very easy. But, when the truth becomes clear, you won't just be a fuck-up, you'll be a lying bastard betrayer fuck-up, unworthy of trust or respect. 2) Even worse: You could try to shift the blame to someone else. Doing this will mostly serve to bring focus on the problem that you yourself caused. So now, even more people become strikingly aware that you are a lying bastard betrayer fuck-up who back-stabs innocent people for your own benefit. In the end, if you had simply admitted the problem and discussed how you were trying to solve it, most people would have been OK with your fuck up. But, by trying to hide it, you only made it much worse. Framing: Sometimes mechanically analyzing a complicated situation is difficult for a human. It's easier to fall back on prior, similar references. Unfortunately, that tendency can be hijacked and abused in situations where you don't actually have much in the way of prior references. By presenting brief, false, set-up situations, an adversary can plant invented prior references into your decision process. If you are not aware enough to dismiss those plants, you will likely make a very poor value judgement. The adversary might not be a person, but instead simply a situation. And so on... |