Some of the most celebrated stories in business literature are where people did not accept the rules or others believed that they were not empowered to act and acted. One of my favorites tells the story of a Federal Express (before it was FedEx) employee. They picked up the whole drop-off box and took it back to the station because their key wouldn’t work. They acted and accepted responsibility for their behavior. Years ago a friend and colleague paid with their career. My friend approved an emergency change to a department’s website when it went down. The change went to production without going through the change control board which would have taken several days to meet. They knew what they had to do, the failure put lives at risk (it is a cool story) and there would be serious consequences. The person in both stories did not accept that something was outside of their control, acted, and pushed forward.
Taking responsibility for your actions is the first mechanism for combatting fatalism. You own your attitude and your behavior. Recognizing those simple facts (simple but not always easy) puts you in a position to understand that you can change how you feel and how you act.
Another nasty form of fatalism is hindsight bias. Quips like “I always knew this wouldn’t work” is a hindsight bias used to generate closure and to abrogate responsibility for the outcome. Falling into this habit tends to poison whole teams. ‘I told you so’ remarks generate distrust for decisions they make causing them to believe they can not affect the outcome of the work they do.
Again, taking responsibility for your actions is an integral part of the solution to this type of fatalism. When a whole team falls prey to this type of problem, consider a timeline retrospective to identify the inflection points in a program or time frame. Identifying where things changed (both positive and negative) during the time period provides a platform to explore how the team and individual decisions made a difference. Seeing that the actions of people or individuals on the team had an impact is empowering. This type of retrospective can also help people identify the biases that influence decision-making. This approach can is useful at the individual level as well as it can for a team.
Another set of approaches to combat fatalism draws on the experiences of others with different mindsets. This might mean extending your circle of relationships but can be an effective tool in behavior modification. The term behavior modification sounds clinical, but what are the common coaching techniques of pairing, modeling, and role-playing if not tools for behavior modification? Seeing someone working on the same goal as you build confidence that your actions will influence the outcome. Combining observation and action builds muscle memory.
As an agile coach, in all forms, you are not a mental health professional and have no standing to diagnose or treat a mental health problem. That said, I don’t see common organizational fatalism as that kind of issue though it could affect the health of the organization if left untreated. Empowering people and teams are table stakes for effective agile. Fatalism is the antipathy of empowerment.
