Reverse-Engineering Workplace Friction

(medium.com)

1 points | by ideamod 10 hours ago

1 comments

  • ideamod 10 hours ago
    I wrote this after going through performance reviews and noticing a recurring pattern: smart engineers constantly talking past each other. It didn't look like "personality clashes" to me; it looked more like a "protocol mismatch."

    I tried to reverse-engineer these conflicts into 4 dimensions (Representation, Reasoning, Attention, Framing) to make them debuggable.

    The core idea is that we often argue because one person is looking at the task through a "Holistic/Abstract" lens (Vision/Strategy), while the other is locked into a "Sequential/Concrete" lens (Implementation/Edge cases). Both are right, but the encoding is incompatible.

    I tried to keep this grounded in engineering terms.

    Curious to hear if this model maps to the friction you see in your teams.