As a technical person I’ve always had a pretty immediate negative reaction to anything “political”. I would just think of the negative aspects of a political work environment. Things like decisions being made based on who someone knows instead of the merit of an idea, and people driving projects based on their own advancement instead of the good of the company. And for a long time it kept me from understanding the good part of political problem solving.
The good part of being political is about finding some common ground and figuring out how to reframe things to create alignment. I tend to think of it as the opposite of negotiating. I know it’s an oversimplification, but people say “you know a negotiation was successful when everyone walks away unhappy” because there is a grain of truth to it. While if you can find a political approach that doesn’t have to be the case.
Political problem solving isn’t something I see all that often in technical folks. We love to deal in objective data and hard facts. Finding a solution by doing something like redefining the problem or changing the context can feel like weaseling out of finding a solution instead of being creative. And it’s certainly not an approach that works for every problem every time. Sometimes you just don’t have enough flexibility to make a win-win solution out of what you’re working on, it needs to be a negotiation.
Looking for a way to side step a negotiation and find a win-win solution is a technique I find myself evaluating more often currently. I think as the size of the organization you’re operating in gets larger it gets more useful. But also, the malleability of the systems we’re working on keeps increasing as more tools and techniques based around AI become available. There are fewer and fewer objectively correct ways to divide up systems. That can be frustrating in certain aspects. But it can also open up opportunities to find quick alignment where you had to deal with negotiating before.
So if you find yourself in a situation where you’re about to explain the trade-offs between different approaches, or you’re sitting in a meeting with two groups talking past each other and just not converging on a solution, it could be worth running through some alternative ideas to see if you can instead get folks lined up. We have a whole bunch of new tools available to us currently, and sometimes the solution space you can cover with minimal effort is amazingly large. It’s a bit of a mental shift, especially if you’ve been building technology for a long time and have a bunch of established practices you need to reverse. But I think it’s a muscle worth exercising.
And if you want a much more detailed treatment of the evolving practice of building software overall, I recommend The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House. It lays out a great mental framework for some behaviors that might seem, well, kinda crazy. Until you understand where they come from.