{"id":102926,"date":"2023-03-22T15:27:44","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T15:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/?p=102926"},"modified":"2024-03-23T10:39:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T10:39:35","slug":"need-to-resolve-a-technology-religious-war-meet-sam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertpeake.com\/archives\/102926-need-to-resolve-a-technology-religious-war-meet-sam.html","title":{"rendered":"Need to Resolve a Technology “Religious War”? Meet Sam."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Danny Cohen wrote his proposal “On Holy Wars and a Plea For Peace” in 1980, hoping to put an end to some petty online bickering and adopt an important internet standard. That’s how long technologists have been arguing zealously with one another about the superiority of their preferred approaches. Some such conflicts drag on to this very day, frequently devolving into personal attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clearly, “holy wars” are a toxic threat to high-performance engineering teams, who must make smart decisions fast, and line up behind them fully, despite often strong opposing viewpoints within the team. To succeed, they must not only do all this, but do it often and well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Furthermore, any one of these conflicts can appear as hard to settle as an actual religious war. Yet I have found a method that has worked for me repeatedly to get teams to do just that. I am eager to share it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The secret is to address the fundamental reason that such conflicts persist ad infinitum<\/em>–which is that humans are fundamentally irrational beings attempting to appear otherwise. (For more on the irrational nature of human decision making, I highly recommend the work of behavioural economist Dan Ariely.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put simply, one of the biggest problems is that, “People make up their minds and then make up their reasons.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why the debate around the coffee maker or Slack channel never ends–because when you are committed to a course, you can always find a new reason or rebuttal, justifying both your position and your self-image of rationality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is therefore no coincidence that engineers, who have a reputation for rationality, are often most susceptible to such petty conflicts–for the opposition strikes not just at a principle, but a sense of self. This is precisely what someone disparaging one’s religious beliefs can feel like as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Externalisation is a key to objectivity. In the absence of documenting the reasons people cite for this-or-that approach, conversations loop back on themselves. However, conversations “documented” in endless threaded messages often become so verbose as to make the rationale on either side mind-numbingly difficult to contextualise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key to settling such arguments therefore is to do it comprehensively, all together, simply, and once. Here’s how it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Step one:<\/strong> gather the team in a room, and draw a 2×2 matrix on a whiteboard:<\/p>\n\n\n\n