When you’re stuck in traffic, do you find yourself blaming people for it? “I’m stuck in traffic because…”

Because the highway department designed this road poorly. Because people are on their cell phones. Because the college kids are in town. Because nobody knows how to drive properly these days.

I’ve caught myself thinking: “If everyone would just drive faster, then we wouldn’t be stuck in traffic!”

Oh yeah, Leaf? Why don’t you drive faster?

Well, obviously, I can’t drive faster because there are other cars (or people, or traffic cones, or something else) in my way.

Hmmm. And that’s not true for everyone else?

"Just go faster!" Photo by Minku Kang on Unsplash

When there’s a problem - we get stuck in traffic, the website crashes, the work is delayed, whatever - we may feel as if we’ve been personally wronged by someone who has behaved badly.

But what if problems don’t always mean someone has been misbehaving?

A website crashing, for example. Something in the system, a bug or a configuration error (or several!) somewhere, explains the crash. The website may be a complicated system, but it’s not complex.

Hold on, let’s pause here for the thing I always have to look up: “complicated” vs. “complex.”

I like Barry O’Reilly’s explanations. Here’s my summary: If a system has a lot going on, but you can explain the system’s properties and behaviors by looking at its parts and how they interact, then the system may be merely complicated.

When the system is not fully explainable that way, we’re talking about something complex instead.

So, a website crashing isn’t a complex problem. Complicated, maybe. Hard to troubleshoot. It might not even be our problem to solve, especially if different teams or even different companies are responsible for different parts of the system. But ultimately, the behavior of the website is explainable by looking at its parts.

As we progress in our careers, we need to solve more problems where humans are part of the system. Maybe another team is delayed in delivering something they promised. Didn’t I explain to them that this was urgent? Do they just not care? What’s going on over there?

Humans make things complex. Systems involving people are not so easily explained. But we may make the mistake of treating these complex systems as if they were merely complicated.

We may be sure there’s a “bug” - somewhere, someone is to blame. Track them down and “fix” them (educate them! make them behave!) and everything will be fine.

On some level, we believe that problems wouldn’t happen and everything would be smooth sailing if everybody just did what they should.

We might not go in search of a specific person as the culprit, we might cast a wide net of blame. “If management would just be clear… if that other team would just do their jobs… if people would just pay attention to detail… if everyone would just drive faster…”

The word “just” appears in these statements a lot. We’ve determined what the solution is: it’s someone else’s fault, and there’s a simple fix. If only everyone “just” behaved.

Life as a staff developer started to make much more sense the day I realized that many problems I was encountering weren’t glitches in the system caused by people behaving badly. They were part of the complex system. They weren’t blockades keeping me from getting my work done. They were my work.

The complexity, the ambiguity, the messiness of the system I’m working in isn’t a curse designed to make me miserable. Handling that complexity is why I’m here.

Maybe the other team isn’t delivering because they’ve been told another problem is even more urgent, and one of their key people is out sick. Is the fault with their manager, then, for leaving them understaffed? Senior leaders, for not clarifying priorities? Their project manager for not setting my expectations appropriately? Do I blame the sick person for catching a cold??

Maybe nobody’s misbehaving. Maybe some problems in complex systems are just really hard.

And I’m dealing with those problems not because I have bad luck, but because that’s where my skills in dealing with messiness are needed most.

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