Who checks my plan?
I like reading about neuroscience, group psychology and whatever other bit of popular science catches my attention. Astrophysics. The most efficient way to walk. Apparently, even walking—something I’ve been doing for quite a while—has room for improvement.
The subjects can be fairly random. What I enjoy is when something I read makes me reconsider an ordinary moment: a conversation, a training session, a mistake I was perfectly capable of making without scientific assistance.
So I’ll bring some of that reading into these articles from now on. When a study connects with the question, you’ll find the references at the end. Follow them, explore further, see what you make of them.
Full disclosure: sometimes I open a paper and barely get through the abstract. Then I ask ChatGPT to help me understand it. I still need to check the explanation against the source, especially before passing it on here. An accessible summary is useful. A confident misunderstanding, less so.
Which brings me to a schedule I was rather confident about.
I got the schedule wrong.
Not the tactics. Not some complicated decision involving fourteen players and several plausible ways to lose a point. The time. I had not allowed enough of it before the match for the warm-up.
Someone suggested leaving earlier because of traffic. A sensible contribution. But my calculation survived, and we ended up rushing.
In my notes afterwards, I was annoyed that nobody had told me.
There is something almost impressive about that: my mistake, followed by my irritation that other people had failed to rescue me from it.
I had asked about the schedule. That part was true. It just hadn’t been enough.
When I ask people to check my plan, what am I actually asking them to do?
I don’t know whether someone spotted the problem and kept quiet. Maybe nobody spotted it. Maybe one person was thinking about traffic while I assumed we were all checking the whole morning.
Those are different problems. Calling everyone a yes-person would save me the trouble of finding out which one I had.
There is also a question worth asking before I congratulate myself on being open to feedback: how easy is it to tell me I am wrong?
Research gives that question some substance. Amy Edmondson’s study of 51 work teams found that psychological safety—the shared belief that taking an interpersonal risk is safe—was associated with learning behaviours such as discussing errors and seeking feedback. It was an association, not a guarantee. But it makes “I told them they could speak” look like an incomplete answer.[1]
There is a brain connection, too, though it needs handling carefully. In a laboratory study, temporarily disrupting activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex reduced how much people adjusted their judgements to match a group’s ratings. The task involved rating faces, not correcting a coach before a match. It tells us something about the brain’s contribution to conformity. It does not tell me what was happening in anyone’s head that morning.[2]
I can’t use neuroscience to explain away my timetable.
What I can do is make the check more specific. Ask someone to start at the match time and work backwards. Allow for the warm-up, changing, arriving, travelling. Do the calculation independently, then compare it with mine.
That gives us something concrete to disagree about. And if the numbers don’t fit, I need to be willing to change them without turning the correction into a discussion about my competence.
The warm-up needs its minutes. My title doesn’t add any.
Asking for feedback leaves a lot to interpretation. Asking for a specific check gives someone a job they can actually do.
Before your next shared deadline, ask one person to work backwards from it independently. Compare their timings with yours before agreeing on the plan.
Today, or the next time it happens.This comes from my coaching notes about a scheduling mistake and the rushed preparation that followed. Someone did suggest leaving earlier because of traffic. My account does not establish whether anyone recognised the underlying error or chose not to mention it.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. Read the study
Klucharev, V., Munneke, M. A. M., Smidts, A., & Fernández, G. (2011). Downregulation of the posterior medial frontal cortex prevents social conformity. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(33), 11934–11940. Read the study