Observing

Athletes watch other athletes perform. Pick a football player. There’s close to a 100% chance that they watch other players playing. This is true ranging from your Sunday League warrior, to your Ronaldo or Messi.

There’s a point where observing an activity stops to make sense. What that point is, I have yet to conceive. Duration is surely a component. One can pay attention for 90 minutes, but what about several hours? The outcome imposes on the process. And the latter becomes history. One can appreciate a building, a bridge, or some other structure. Or any endeavour that takes several days, months or years. Appreciating the process would simply be too tedious for most.

The same happens with coding. One can review a Pull Request, but the thought process is often missed. It’s the equivalent of a football player looking at the stats of a match, but missing the actual game. It doesn’t really tell the full story. Therefore, the question in my head is: how they did they arrived at that oucome? What was their reasoning?

That’s something that I look for with high performing individuals. As a manager, I am of course pleased with their impact - for the business and within the team. Yet, my selfish desire is to be intimate with how their mind works.