James King

I noticed something recently, which others may have seen before but which I had not really noticed.

It may even have a name but I have not heard of it so I don’t know the name.

The paradox is this:

Sometimes I know what to do in a situation and indeed, it is obvious what I should do. But it is so obvious I give it little or no thought.

But since I give it no thought, I will skip doing it and then assume I did it.

The result is that some obvious step or habit is missed, but I then assume later that I would have done it.

Some examples are checking to make sure people are not burning out, sticking to a meeting agenda and validating my assumptions when I agree to do something.

I am a good-guy

I am a good guy so I don’t burn out my peers, team members or anyone else. Yet being confident of this might make me assume I don’t need to check in on people because I would not let them burn out. Then they start to burn out and I ask why they didn’t say anything. I am confident I would have checked and so I didn’t but I assumed I was.

I don’t like pointless meetings

I run effective meetings and I work with professionals. So we don’t really need to pause and confirm the goal of a meeting before we start. Then we go to a meeting, ramble for an hour and then leave without achieving the goal.

You would think I would then be upset with what we did. But because I know we are professionals I assume there is no problem. So next meeting I know we need to align on a goal but I skip it because it is obvious we would do it. Then we have another wasted meeting.

I validate my understanding

I am a very experiences business analyst and a very experienced coach. I have even taught others to do perform those roles and one of the key things I rave and rant about is the need to both listen and to reflect/validate your understanding.

Since I know I am good at this, the parodox is that I will skip doing it because it is so obvious I will assume I do it. Then later I will assume that I did validate my understanding because it would be stupid not to.

Then somehow it turns out I had a different understanding to you.

The rule or anti-pattern

It sometimes seems to me that the more obvious something is, the more we will assume it will happen. And the more we assume it will happen, the more likely it is that it won’t happen.

Maybe to mitigation is to stop to check the most obvious thing. Or maybe it is for me to pause and ask myself if I really do the things I think should be be done.

I don’t think it is hubris, but maybe it is a lack of presence or just being rushed.

Is that really a thing though? Or is it just me that sometimes seems to miss doing/asking/saying something because I assumed it was so obvious I just assumed it happened instead of doing it?