“I call bullshit,” he said with authority. “it it couldn’t have happened like that. Let’s move on to something real.”
And just like that, he missed the most important part.
Because sometimes – maybe often – what you need to know is not whether something really, actually, 100% accurately happened “that way”.
It’s about what happened next. More to the point, it’s about what people did about the thing that may-or-may-not-have-happened-that-way.
How we respond to events (real or perceived) tells us and others more about who we are than the situations we find ourselves in.
“The entire data center was crashing”
(it was only 10 servers)
“the CEO was calling my cell every 2 minutes”
(he called twice in the first 30 minutes and then left you alone)
“it was a massive hack, probably out of China or Russia”
(it was a mis-configured router)
Whatever. I’m not as interested in that as what you did next. Did you:
- Call a vendor and scream that they needed to “fix this yesterday”?
- Pull the team together and solicit ideas and put together a plan
- tell everyone to stay out of your way and worked 24 hours to sort it out?
- Wait 30 minutes before doing anything to see if anyone noticed, or if it sorted itself out?
- Start documenting everything you saw happening, to review afterward?
- Simply shut everything down and start it up again and see if that fixes it?
- Look at your historical data to see if you can spot the beginning of the failure?
- Immediately recover from backups, and let people know work will be lost?
Notice that most of those aren’t inherently wrong, although several are wrong depending on the specific circumstances.
And that is the ONLY point where “what happened” comes into play. The events around us shape our environment.
But how we decide to respond shapes who we are.