On the blog, Improve Something Today, Brian Kerr wrote a fascinating post titled Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it). Drawing on his experience as a consultant, he surmised three ways problems are addressed: Push, Preserve, or Promote.
I appreciated the author's definitions. Then I realized the way each section was titled, with zero-based padding. Surely there are at least a thousand behaviors? So, I saw this as an invitation to extend the author's document. Here is one more.
No. 0004. Pretermit new problems
From my experience with software, when a new problem arises for a team, the most common reaction is to ignore it. "It's not my problem." However, there is always a small group within who will go for it; those are the devs who are the definition of Price's law - the square root of the total number of contributors produces 50% of the work in any given domain.
Deeper still, ignoring problems, especially when they are not an immediate threat, is a default human response. And in software, consulting, or business, it's about protecting ego.
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