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Two Useful Prompts to Explore Intent and Behaviour

TL;DR: Asking "What other possible explanations could there be?" followed up by "How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?" is a better approach than "assume positive intent".

The technical-founder CEO had a direction in mind for the company’s primary product, had a list of features that he was pushing through to get built by certain dates, and didn’t want to listen to anybody who was bringing news about that approach not working. Which annoyed the heck out of me — since the team was fighting a company culture of long hours, and was getting organisational push back on leaving “early” despite showing increased productivity and better quality. Because while I’d been assuming this guy was a bit of an idiot for the last few weeks, what was actually happening was that he was spending as many hours at work as possible because home wasn’t a safe place for him for various reasons.

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