Out(r)age
Ever get those moments when someone says or does something, and you instantly get the rage? Or worse still, you hear about it second-hand? That tidal wave of indignation that starts in the pit of your belly and rises up, through your chest on its way to your mouth — or fingertips if you happen to be near a keyboard. Before you know it, you are spewing out all that righteous anger at whoever happens to be in the vicinity, whether they deserve to hear it or not.
It’s such an easy pattern to fall into. That feeling of being absolutely, incontrovertibly in the right is a helluva drug, and the release of venting our pent-up aggression is quite a high. But, just as with many recreational substances, the comedown can also be messy and painful — and may leave us with a lingering sense of regret or shame.
Why? Well, in the heat of the moment, we’ve likely overlooked some significant information. The story we heard might not have been the complete picture, or there could have been forces at work of which we were not aware. It’s very easy to get angry over a statement or an isolated action, taken out of its full context. It’s not always so easy to stay furious when we understand the (often complex) circumstances around that one piece of information. By the time we do get it after blowing our stack, we face an embarrassing climb-down, a cringeworthy apology, and possibly a lot of work to repair a damaged relationship.
While none of the relevant conditions are available to us though, blind fury prevails. We’re experiencing a total lack of concern for anyone or anything other than our own hurt feelings or injured pride. In that moment, we’re in the grip of an empathy outage — the circuits in our brains that allow us to see the world from other people’s viewpoint have failed, our compassion goes dark, and we flip over into transmit-only mode.
The worst thing about this kind of outage is that it’s contagious, and spreads like a virus. One of two things needs to happen for it to multiply; we might blow up at the people we perceive as the enemy, in which case we trigger an outage on their part as they feel unfairly attacked and rise up to defend themselves. Or, we rant to those we know will be sympathetic to our own perspective, who having heard our skewed version of events are likely to trip their own switches and feel aggrieved on our part. Grumbling and gossiping ensues, any wedges already present are driven in that bit further, and we all become that bit more distant from each other.
Working in tech, with its multiple tribes and silos, we are particularly vulnerable to this. We’ve all seen these kinds of conflicts, between test and dev, dev and ops, ops and — well, everyone… People who care deeply about their team and role within the SDLC can very quickly lose all sight of what is important to others in the value chain. Occasionally, it escalates into all-out war — whole networks go down, and then no-one wins.
I almost fell into this trap just the other day. I heard about a situation third-hand, and immediately went into empathy shutdown. (There’s a lot of context here that I won’t bore you with — besides which, I have a duty to protect the innocent.) I did engage in some ranting and infected a couple of co-workers with my outrage before I took a beat and made myself think through the consequences if I continued in the same vein with the source of my irritation. A few minutes gazing out of the window while nursing a cup of tea and reflecting on why things were as they are, and gradually I was able to see the bigger picture again. My anger dissipated, and <Windows start-up music plays> my usual sunny self came back online. I set about clearing up the outages I had already triggered by explaining my moment of clarity, and set out a strategy for dealing with the problem more constructively.
What made me stop and think instead of ploughing ahead and causing mayhem? Well, for one thing, I naturally have a fairly strong aversion to conflict — that definitely helps (in this context — others, not so much). But I have also learned the hard way that there is a time and a place for incandescent rage, and it’s rarely — if ever — appropriate when dealing with people who are just trying to do their job the best way they know how. Which is to say 99.999999%* of the folks any of us encounter in our daily work lives.
Outrage (along with its less dramatic but equally pernicious siblings, irritation, impatience and ego) is prolific and communicable, but you can immunise yourself with practice. Noticing what enrages you, recognising what happens to you when you encounter those things, and actively choosing your response — these are pretty good defences against unplanned downtime in your working relationships. Give it a go, you might just help to halt an epidemic.
*Some people are just dicks — but a lot fewer than you’d think, I promise.
