After publishing my last post, “Building Software, Sharing Knowledge”, I’ve been thinking more about an idea I touched on:
“Rarely do we just blindly do things without giving them any thought and so it’s always best to assume that past decisions were made with some level of consideration.”
While we often like to assume that past decisions were stupid, I don’t think they’re as common as we’d like to think they are.
Invariably, in all aspects of life (including work) there is context to another person’s actions, often that we cannot understand. Without this context we may incorrectly perceive their actions as stupid and sometimes even malicious.
Incidentally, I find that our inclination to see things this way is usually indicative of our general feelings about a person.