August 25th, 2023

I would like to not get so tied in knots whenever I encounter frustration because my job has been made harder by someone else not doing their job (without losing the clarity that something is poorly organized in the situation). Put another way, I would like to more deeply internalize the insight that I picked up from Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism: that even if I delegate solving some problem of mine to someone else, I can never fully delegate the choice of what to delegate, or to whom. If it's my problem, it's in some sense my job. And it seems like what's in the way is feeling more of this pain, more directly. Feeling the ugly unfairness pervading things. Grieving the grasp I have on the idea that it should already be closer than it is. It isn't.

I'm writing this section over at my mum's, and I commented just now that I want to write some books in the coming years, but I probably don't want to get a publisher involved anytime soon because I don't want others to be expecting me to write anything other than what I feel like writing. But I think on some level I would like to have someone else playing a role of helping expect my book to arrive, if it were someone I trusted to dance perfectly with my own evolving will for the book.

This feels relevant. Ha—also relevant is that I was not expecting to talk about all of this post-blame stuff in this section. I thought I was going to talk about how I can get stuck in my workday when I encounter something that isn't working but is in some sense supposed to be: "it's not my job!"

It's all very subtle. I can sense so vividly that in a world that were well-organized, there are aspects of my work that I wouldn't have to do because somebody else would love to do them, which would be a huge relief, and because I can sense that and I can't let go of that world, it's hard to motivate myself to be doing those things even though in this world—the one I find myself in when I stop imagining and Look—that is my job. Or part of my job.

And I can tell I'm longing to take more ownership.

There's a mindset shift that people (I'm people) talk about that involves not blaming anybody else for anything. There are a few different ways to approach it, which have different tones.

One angle, which we might call "radical ownership", uses the mantra "it's all my fault". This article on being a responsible leader of a company highlights the power of saying this in relation to everything—refusing to shrug and say "it wasn't my fault" when something goes wrong. It's powerful, and especially appropriate for leaders. If someone shirks their duty, and you hired them and didn't fire them and didn't notice, then in a very real way, well, that was also up to you!

It's a way out of a kind of victim mindset. It's a way out of a mode of complaining, into an empowered stance. If it's my fault it's not working, it's my job to fix it.

One of the reasons this shift is hard is that we don't want to feel shame or get punished, and one of the main reasons for "fault-finding" is to find a target for shame or punishment—and one reason to look outside ourselves is to avoid the pain of our own shame.

As I wrote in the previous section, we long to be able to rely on people. We long to be able to feel like we understand our jobs, and that if we do ours then others' will do theirs and things will all fit together into a coherent whole. To some extent we need to do this in order to actually let others do their jobs and not micromanage them. But then we end up feeling betrayed by the misunderstandings that inevitably occur when we're not as in-sync as we had hoped we were.

And maybe what happens—I really don't know, I'm thinking out loud here—is that leaders have a sense of "if everybody would just align with my will, then everything would work". And then a frustration that that doesn't happen. Something about that resonates. And simply taking ownership of everything can't quite be the way out, because not everything is your job. But I do think there's a piece here around owning one's own choices (so we don't get regretful) and owning one's own trust-dancing process, so we don't get surprised by a lack of sync.

"It's all my fault" is one way to frame this mindset shift. It has the advantage of being simple and making it obvious the need to reclaim agency. It has the downside of disempowering others. When I imagine doing it, I feel sad and lonely. But some of the things where this has been coming up for me are not even really anybody else's responsibility, like getting my curly hair to be less frizzy.

Gay & Catherine Hendricks have a different frame, which is that everyone is 100% responsible. They say "it's never 50/50. If there are two of us, the total amount of responsibility to divvy up is 200% and we each get 100%. My mentor/colleague Jean liked to say "co-responsible".

< between these my boat sails >

This question, which I've also phrased as "What if we made it good tho?" is a koan, that I've used both to shift my energy from my sense of people not doing their jobs, towards articulating a vision for what a well-designed system would look like.

It's deliberately a kind of cocky statement, implying that the existing option doesn't even qualify as "good". This is genuinely how I feel about a lot of things. My new MacBook's hardware is definitely good, but the window-management is such an abject failure that I would once again be incapable of having a job at Apple without either fixing this or getting fired trying.

But I think in general it makes sense to see a lot of what exists in the world of designed products as "the worst option that people will still buy and put up with." There's a lot of taking for granted that things can't get any better, and sometimes this is right but only within a certain assumption set.

Loosen those assumptions, and you can sometimes solve even more of the problem than people thought was possible. As a fascinating example, consider the Diverging Diamond interchange, which is a way to get people off the highway that is simultaneously both faster and safer. It's as if they somehow converted all of the turns to right turns (flip that ofc if you're UK/AUS/JP)... by having the traffic drive on the "wrong" side of the road briefly! Totally non-obvious, and a little weird, but it works just fine.

If you're an interchange designer, or someone who is hiring one, or someone who is choosing what type of interchange to use for a new highway or a repair... you will be forgiven for going with the same old classic cloverleaf that has a lot of accidents. It's your job to make it happen, not to make it good. Or is it? If it's not your job to make it good, whose is it?

This is a related question to "whose job is this?" but they are absolutely not the same (although people confuse them constantly, for good reasons).

If a parent wants their kid to clean their messy bedroom, they are attempting to tell the kid "it's your job to clean this room". However, the parent is the one for whom the messy room is erroneous. One man's familiar splayed out in-progress creative train of thought is another man's annoying irrelevant clutter. This is very messy in relation to parents and kids though, because to some extent part of the job of a parent is to help kids learn that certain states of the world are erroneous and others are preferable. To help the kid see that a messy room implies an intention to clean it.

Sometimes an apparent conflict in "whose job is this?" is actually a conflict in values. We don't agree there's a job to be done at all.