Perhaps one of the most undervalued skills for software engineers and for workers in general is the ability to affect change. You may think that your job doesn't require you to affect much change, but at some level, pretty much everything we do is about change. We write code so that something that didn't exist before now does, and that can mean that something that wasn't previously possible now is. But change comes in many different forms, and perhaps the hardest types of change are the ones that we don't have all of the control over. The kinds of change that require coordination, buy-in, and collaboration. But in today's episode, I want to talk about two different vantage points on what it means to be responsible for change. How do you approach affecting change? My name is Jonathan Cutrell, and you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your careers. I want you to think about a small change that you'd like to make in your own life. Perhaps you'd like to wake up 30 minutes earlier, or maybe you'd like to consistently read books more often, or maybe you'd like to write a blog post every other week. Or maybe the change isn't one that requires a recurring change. Maybe it is a single decision, a big decision that you'd like to make, a commitment or a move, maybe quitting your current job, or applying for a different job. Or maybe the change is as simple as finally cleaning out that old closet that you have been putting off for so long. When you talk about implementing some kind of behavior change, especially when we're talking about ourselves, we often have the illusion in mind that effort is the only lever to pull. In other words, the change that we want to make in our own lives is purely about a mixture of motivation and energy. These two kind of resources that if you truly wanted to change something and you truly had the means to do so, then you just naturally would. This is the first lens of change, the first vantage point that we're talking about today, the lens of the purely rational change maker. Think about this as a purely rational individual. When you look at a rational decision, for example, with money, if you have a certain amount of money and you have a certain decision to make, that you make the perfect decision based on your constraints. If something is worth $5 to you and you have $6, then you will always make that determination. You'll always make that transaction. Of course, like with most models, actually with all models, there's some missing information here about the way that humans act. First of all, this rational model of human behavior, specifically as it relates to making some kind of change, investing the necessary effort or the necessary money for some kind of change, it relies on the idea that we as humans have a way of accurately accounting for the value of something. Most of the decisions that we make are not based on a single metric of value. They're not based on some obvious observable value. For example, the value of cleaning out that closet, how do you translate the value of that into the amount of time and energy necessary to invest in it? On top of that, we have a hard time understanding opportunity cost as we talked about in the last episode. If I spend the time cleaning this closet, then I get the value of the closet being clean. But if I spend that time doing something else, then perhaps I'll get something more valuable. The problem is, once again, that our rational ability to calculate these things is incredibly limited. When you're writing code, for example, it's hard to determine exactly how much optimization is worth your time. How much exactly is that 10% improvement actually worth to your company and to you? These calculations are difficult for quite a few reasons. One reason is that often when we're trying to decide how much something is worth to us, we don't really think in terms of long-term gains. We don't think in terms of out and to some infinite point in the future, how much is this decision worth to me and everything that I care about? Most of the time we're thinking about some shorter window. Everyone has, what makes it more difficult is that everyone has a different window that they default to. That 10% performance improvement may be highly valuable in five years from now, but for today, it may not have very much value at all. So you have to decide how you make a rational decision with a lot of ambiguous measurement. This is where things break down for humans. Because we don't have an unlimited amount of time and resources to calculate every perfect possibility and make perfectly rational decisions with our time, and specifically because we can't make rational decisions about the change that we want to invest in, focusing on purely rational arguments for change, and then hoping that the motivation will make up the difference is probably a bad strategy. And yet when we want ourselves to change, when we want others to change, we often try to enforce that through policy or by trying to kind of command ourselves with some level of grit or determination and using all of that motivation to force the change. But perhaps there are better ways to think about change, specifically when it comes to helping others change or affecting change in an organizational structure. We're going to talk about that right after we talk about today's sponsor, Get Prime. If you are a leader of an engineering team, let's say you're a manager or maybe you are some kind of director, you are probably faced with a problem that pretty much every engineering team has right now. You need to increase the impact of your team. And there's a bit of an illusion that hiring is the only way to do this, but hiring can be really expensive. It can take a lot of time. And so another angle that you can approach this from is growing your existing team. That means helping your existing team members continue to cultivate their talents and have a higher impact on the goals of that team. So how do you grow that existing talent? Get Prime is hosting a panel to talk about exactly that. The panel will discuss things like creating engaging career ladders and providing opportunities for your engineers to grow beyond just title changes. Head over to GetPrime.com slash webinar. Get Prime that's gitprime.com slash webinar to sign up for that panel today. Thanks so much to Get Prime for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. We're talking about change and affecting change on today's episode of Developer Tea. I want to be very clear that change is not easy. It does indeed take a lot of motivation and a lot of energy. It takes a lot of decision making to move towards any reasonable amount of change. But it's not just about grit. It's not just about deciding to make a change. There are a lot of other factors that you can and really have to consider if you want to make change especially at an organizational level. And so the other vantage point to consider change through rather than just forcing that change or attempting to force a change is observation. Instead of imagining a change and then trying to force that change through sheer will or determination, you can observe. Observe what people are already doing. Observe others who have already made the change that you want to make and learn about the environment that the change was made in. What things were true about that environment that are not true in the one that you want to change by understanding the different factors, not just the motivation and not just the energy or the capacity to do something. But instead looking at the holistic picture and finding those key differences, the ones that seem to lead to those changes actually occurring. Philosophically, this is an entirely different approach. This approach requires a careful understanding of the situation, of the different motivations and incentives around that change. And here's kind of a key heuristic, a differentiator in someone who's trying to affect change with the first vantage point versus someone who's trying to affect it with the second. The observational vantage point. When you try to force change or empower change through sheer will or determination or motivation, the agent of change that's you will often have a tendency to blame the people who he is trying to get to change. In other words, the agent will say that it's the person who is not changing's fault. And the rationale behind this is the same rationale that leads them to believe that the change should be successful. The idea that this person is acting in some irrational way. They've been presented with a better option and they haven't made the change. They haven't chosen to go that route. And so the agent of the change assumes that the person is acting against their own best interest. And typically, the problem with this perspective is that it's not well rounded. It doesn't take into account all of the different factors that people use to make decisions. It takes only into account this simplified and supposedly rational decision that's on the table. But from the second vantage point, the heuristic you can use to determine if you're kind of approaching change from the observational perspective is a pervading sense of curiosity. And specifically, curiosity about motivations, about incentives. Why are people making these particular decisions? And what can we do to incentivize, in the right way, the change that we want to see? You'll notice that in the first vantage point, the responsibility is on the person that you want to change. And in the second vantage point, the responsibility is on you as the agent of change. When you take on this responsibility, when you take on the ownership of affecting change in your organization, then you start to realize that it's not just about trying to force your will on other people. When you can accept the failure of the change as something that you are responsible for, then you can begin to understand that change doesn't happen by people forcing other people. Instead, healthy organizational change happens by understanding the needs and desires of the people that you're working with. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Once again, this episode was sponsored by Get Prime and we wouldn't be able to do what we do without our wonderful sponsors. Head over to GetPrim.com slash webinar to sign up for that panel today. Today's episode and every other episode of Developer Teacan be found at SPECT.FM, but a ton of other wonderful podcasts can be found on the network as well. Head over to SPECT.FM to learn more about the other shows on the SPECT network today. Thank you so much for listening. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.