It doesn’t feel great when you get a feeling those closest to you are not giving you credit for your ideas but maybe that is usually not the whole picture.
There is Fundamental Attribution Error1, where one attributes behavior to character traits that are perhaps more easily explained by circumstances. This is similar to Hanlon’s Razor2 as far as attribution errors go. But what if there is a different kind of attribution error, a mis-attribution error?
A Fundamental Mis-attribution Error?
There is also a concept called False Attribution or Mis-attribution3, where one gives credit for an outcome or idea to the wrong person. This is a classic pain in all industries (think plagiarism, IP-theft, copyright infringement), but it also happens among people who work together and then this can be more personal. This can be managers not citing individual contributors when discussing team accomplishments, but this can also be a phenomenon among people on a team or between teams at many levels. IP theft at the local level though, much like Hanlon’s razor, might not be malicious but might be just defensive, protective, anticipatory, and also just plain unintentional. And maybe very common also, there is no theft, say, but many ideas arise in parallel and also in a group setting where an idea forms by a group together.
Shoulders and Armpits of Giants
When some ideas are developed and worked on in parallel, by people who don’t know each other or even within a team of people who know each other, the individuals may be stewing in a space where there is a common set of problems with answers that are just obvious to anyone who looks at them carefully. And why is the problem space so common? Everyone today, at least in Tech, is standing on the same Internet, the same Cloud Infrastructure tools, the same modern AI/ML/RL stacks, and they were all built by giants. But all those giants built this tech imperfectly and so usually it feels like you are in the giant’s armpit and it smells really bad. And there are many people around you dealing with the same smells.
The closer people are, the higher chance they will literally be trying to solve the same problems because by then they will be sub-sub-problems, highly constrained by the context.
And several people might come up with the next best deodorant but chances are it was an obvious idea that was percolating behind the scenes in many peoples minds given those shared circumstances.
But it’s still painful
But even if mis-attribution is unintentional, or parallel-evolution or just group-owned and not individual owned, it can still be painful to be on the receiving end of it.
What do you do?
Talking about it is possible, but what if we end up in a loop where no one really remembers the root of an idea, say, and then maybe there are a few strategies:
- generosity of abundance,
- lineage or audit-trail,
- group ownership,
- tit for tat as a last resort or forgive and forget.
Firstly, one can just always be freely giving, and giving colleagues the benefit of the doubt when it comes to any errors of mis-attribution; let’s assume there is usually no malicious intent. Alternatively, write everything down. Don’t generate new ideas in public. Only share them over git version controlled articles or code. That way perhaps, unless there is some actual plagiarism, attribution is clear. And we also have the “nothing belongs to the individual” concept, which is maybe hard to swallow for western thinkers, but it also exists. If foul play is confirmed, maybe a sort of public forgive-and-forget is better than a quiet tit-for-tat, which can spill into warfare.
Lessons from the Kon-Tiki expedition story
This story, I heard recently, [4], about what great teams have in common, may help to shed light that when teams are more diverse, and people have more cleanly mutually exclusive well defined roles, people feel more psychologically safe. Their work is less likely undermined.
But what about Scrum and Extreme Programming?
Perhaps these disciplines have two opposing views on this problem?
I think Scrum says more or less, lets cut up the work into pieces first, and each person gets a mutually exclusive chunk so theres no ambiguity about who works on what.
But by solving ambiguity, Scrum introduces problem of boredom, reduces collaboration, and perhaps people still end up getting creative along the edges in their spare time so Scrum only papers over the problem but it still exists in reality.
Extreme programming (XP) perhaps acknowledges that pair programming feels great but it says, only one person is at the keyboard at a time. And maybe at that point its just not worth splitting hairs on the team effort because it would just get way too blurry.
But your resume/CV still begs of you for the part that you did precisely, so what then? Our brag-documents and CVs sort of are forcing functions to constantly hunt for opportunities for emphasizing the self, putting the “individual” back in “individual contributor”.
From Daniil’s list
“If it’s not wrytten down, it didnt happen” Well stated!
References
Hanlon’s razor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_attribution#:~:text=False%20attribution%20may%20refer%20to:%20*%20Misattribution,fabricated%20source%20in%20support%20of%20an%20argument.
Choice-ology, https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/teamwork-that-works-what-great-teams-have-common