Skip to main content

Lego My Ego


The Line. As a model there's not much simpler than a single horizontal line but, for Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, it's sufficient in any quest to become a more conscious leader: at any given moment, a person is either above the line and conscious, or below it and unconscious

In their book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, they elaborate. Being above the line means being open, curious, and committed to learning while being below it means being closed, defensive, and committed to being right. To operate above the line is to have a By Me state of mind (to take responsibility for being in any situation, to let go of blame) while below it is To Me (to believe that external factors caused the situation, to have a "victim consciousness"). Above the line leads to healthy and trusting relationships while below the line leads to toxic and fear-based relationships.

Shane Parrish, interviewing Dethmer on the Knowledge Project podcast, suggested his own snappy summary of the opposition: above the line is about outcomes while below it is about ego. I think this captures the essential idea of the book well and fits with my personal trajectory, albeit one that I feel has been underway for a long, and very slow, time.

My own experience has led me to a place where I try to recall Jerry Weinberg's quote "things are the way they are because they got that way" when encountering a situation, to encourage me to see it as the state that just is irrespective of how it was arrived at. Despite not always managing to either recall it or act on it I still do my best to be motivated by achieving congruence, to resist the temptation to make comparisons, and, particularly, to avoid judging others.

I additionally find humility in this definition of an idiot from Bob Marshall: "Anyone who is just trying to meet their needs, in the best way they know how, where their way makes little or no sense to us."  But it's not easy to let go of ego and I fail frequently.

Recognising that I've slipped below the line on a particular occasion is a positive according to Dethmer and his partners (Kindle location 248-249, 250-251):
We suggest that the first mark of conscious leaders is self-awareness and the ability to tell themselves the truth.

Distortion and denial are cornerstone traits of unconscious leaders.
Strategies for dissolving the ego to reach a dispassionate view of the context, other participants, and yourself are the thrust of the book after the core concepts have been introduced. It consists of 15 commitments that signify consciousness and, if I could boil it crudely down to a single sentence, it's about finding ways to frame situations as learning opportunities or cultivating behaviours that naturally lead to those kinds of framings.

Note that commitment is a loaded term here. It's not a statement of intent, but rather the result of behaviour. The commitment is satisfied by being above the line with respect to it, not by saying you will attempt to be so.

Interestingly, despite apparently aligning with my own motivations, I found a strong negative reaction to aspects of the book. There's a thread of spirituality running through it that I find hard to accept. To pick just one example:
Again, if the universe is benevolent, always organizing for the highest good, then other people are part of this collective support for your personal growth. (2905-2906)
I have a similar issue with energy:
Energy flow is our natural state, but when it’s blocked or interrupted, the life force so essential to great leadership is dampened, and effectiveness wanes immediately and drastically. (1688-1690)
Fortunately, accepting the premise of a benevolent universe or some other higher agency (they also mention Source, Allah, God, Love, Jesus, Presence, and The Tao) is unnecessary for practical purposes.

On that practical side, anecdotes are offered to show how actions can lead to desirable outcomes. Again, my intuition is that above the line is a better place to be than below it but, with an analytical background, I found myself yearning for stronger data.

Despite these and other misgivings  I persevered with the book and still find the central messages compelling. Another quote towards the end seemed to address this point:
When we own our resistance, we see that we simply need more motivation: more vision or dissatisfaction. This is not a problem. It is just what is so in this moment. (3390-3392)
Image: Mercury Rev at Discogs

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Am I Wrong?

I happened across Exploratory Testing: Why Is It Not Ideal for Agile Projects? by Vitaly Prus this week and I was triggered. But why? I took a few minutes to think that through. Partly, I guess, I feel directly challenged. I work on an agile project (by the definition in the article) and I would say that I use exclusively exploratory testing. Naturally, I like to think I'm doing a good job. Am I wrong? After calming down, and re-reading the article a couple of times, I don't think so. 😸 From the start, even the title makes me tense. The ideal solution is a perfect solution, the best solution. My context-driven instincts are reluctant to accept the premise, and I wonder what the author thinks is an ideal solution for an agile project, or any project. I notice also that I slid so easily from "an approach is not ideal" into "I am not doing a good job" and, in retrospect, that makes me smile. It doesn't do any harm to be reminded that your cognitive bias

Play to Play

I'm reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act: A Way of Being . It's spiritual without being religious, simultaneously vague and specific, and unerring positive about the power and ubiquity of creativity.  We artists — and we are all artists he says — can boost our creativity by being open and welcoming to knowledge and experiences and layering them with past knowledge and experiences to create new knowledge and experiences.  If that sounds a little New Age to you, well it does to me too, yet also fits with how I think about how I work. This is in part due to that vagueness, in part due to the human tendency to pattern-match, and in part because it's true. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book but already I am making connections to things that I think and that I have thought in the past. For example, in some ways it resembles essay-format Oblique Strategy cards and I wrote about the potential value of them to testers 12 years ago. This week I found the f

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Test Now

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When is the best time to test?" Twenty posts in , I hope you're not expecting an answer without nuance? You are? Well, I'll do my best. For me, the best time to test is when there

Rage Against the Machinery

  I often review and collaborate on unit tests at work. One of the patterns I see a lot is this: there are a handful of tests, each about a page long the tests share a lot of functionality, copy-pasted the test data is a complex object, created inside the test the test data varies little from test to test. In Kotlin-ish pseudocode, each unit test might look something like this: @Test fun `test input against response for endpoint` () { setupMocks() setupTestContext() ... val input = Object(a, OtherObject(b, c), AnotherObject(d)) ... val response = someHttpCall(endPoint, method, headers, createBodyFromInput(input) ) ... val expected = Object(w, OtherObject(x, y), AnotherObject (z)) val output = Object(process(response.getField()), otherProcess(response.getOtherField()), response.getLastField()) assertEquals(expected, output) } ... While these tests are generally functional, and I rarely have reason to doubt that they

A Qualified Answer

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn ,   Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Whenever possible, you should hire testers with testing certifications"  Interesting. Which would you value more? (a) a candidate who was sent on loads of courses approved by some organisation you don't know and ru

README

    This week at work my team attended a Myers Briggs Type Indicator workshop. Beforehand we each completed a questionnaire which assigned us a personality type based on our position on five behavioural preference axes. For what it's worth, this time I was labelled INFJ-A and roughly at the mid-point on every axis.  I am sceptical about the value of such labels . In my less charitable moments, I imagine that the MBTI exercise gives us each a box and, later when work shows up, we try to force the work into the box regardless of any compatiblity in size and shape. On the other hand, I am not sceptical about the value of having conversations with those I work with about how we each like to work or, if you prefer it, what shape our boxes are, how much they flex, and how eager we are to chop problems up so that they fit into our boxes. Wondering how to stretch the workshop's conversational value into something ongoing I decided to write a README for me and