The Basket and the Spear

This comes from one of the books I loved reading as a child — a story from The Fifth Discipline. As a kid, of course I didn’t understand anything about organizations or teams; I just liked the story itself. Only when I grew up did I realize that the story in The Fifth Discipline is really centered on teamwork.

Because there was not enough food, two groups volunteered to travel east and west to explore the possibility of finding food.

Each group reached a tower, but the views from the towers were completely different. The group that climbed the East Tower saw fertile plains dotted with herds of animals; the one that climbed the West Tower saw a vast forest full of abundant fruit.

Back in the tribe, it was easy to imagine that the conclusions each side drew were completely different. The group that returned from the East Tower said they should make weapons, bows and arrows, and spears to hunt animals; the group that returned from the West Tower said they should make baskets and long poles to gather the fruits from the trees.

Conflict and division never stopped after that, and so the ancestors scattered and moved into caves of all sizes, eating insects in the darkness and drinking dew from the rocks.

This is the reason, in the shadow story about cave people, why the ancestors of the cave people all lived in caves.

It sounds absurd, right? In the story, both sides are right, and both propose solutions that fit the landscapes they saw. But because they saw different landscapes, they could not understand each other, which led to conflict. In the end, the innocent descendants had to live in caves ever after.

As the book says:

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, images, and beliefs that we have about ourselves, the world, the organization, and our place within it.

Whether in your career or in development, encountering disagreement or different viewpoints is completely normal. But the “there is one correct answer” style of education in Asian families seems to make us very poor at thinking through arguments that differ from our own.

Many seemingly unsolvable conflicts between people stem primarily from a lack of understanding. In this story, the most straightforward thing would be to say to the other person: let me see your tower. But in reality, you rarely see people doing that.

Another reason is that developers are generally afraid of showing vulnerability, of having their ideas rejected, or of admitting they were wrong.

They fear being labeled as stupid by others, so they subconsciously resist other people’s ideas. They assume the other person is just picking a fight, and that they themselves must appear more capable. Everyone says we shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes, but in practice people are often fiercely resistant to admitting them.

(At the same time, I have to once again assume a normal workplace environment 😂)

We should be working toward delivering better results, not protecting our personal pride. In the early days of my career, I often felt that having my ideas or opinions challenged, or even going through code review, was very uncomfortable.

But as long as you can shift your mental model, and first try to understand the other person’s perspective and see things from their point of view, you often discover something new. Just like in an article I wrote before: are you curious about what others think, or do you only want to argue them into silence? The starting point of those two attitudes is completely different.

I want both the basket and the spear.

There Are Always Exceptions

Recently, I’ve become very fond of the “third time’s the limit” rule. The first time, the other person may just be in a bad state; the second time, it may simply have been a mistake; the third time, you can conclude that “this person really isn’t cut out for it.” Trying to be understanding also consumes a lot of energy. If someone is bullying you, don’t keep wondering whether they have some hidden hardship.

If everyone around you is vastly below your level, then it may also be impossible to foster any exchange of ideas.

Just like in the story, if the other person wants neither a basket nor a spear, but instead proposes rebuilding the tower, I might truly not be able to understand it. It feels something like that.

If you find yourself in such an environment, I’d recommend quitting.