Something happened last week that took me straight back to my schooldays. It was as if I was right there in the physics lab, aged 14 or 15, when this very on-brand-for-me incident took place. You see, I was a geeky, generally well-behaved student, not accustomed to getting into trouble. But this was the final double lesson of the morning, and maybe the teacher, who I’ll call Mr B, was getting hangry.
I was working with another boy on a practical with boolean logic gates. These were chunky teaching aid versions: ANDs and ORs and the more exotic Exclusive Or, which we called an EOR, pronounced like the donkey. We had to wire them together to get an output signal in response to given inputs. My favourite (doesn’t everyone have a favourite?) was of course the universal NAND, out of which all the other gates can be constructed. Today this foundational technology is shrunk to atomic scale in a Taiwanese chip fab and stuffed by the trillion into someone else’s datacenter to answer your AI chatbot query about what to have for lunch. But this was the 1980s, a different time. Mr B did not have ChatGPT.
Pair work is a great way of learning. Being forced to verbalise our own ideas and consider those of our partner really helps to solidify understanding. It can also be maddening because it demands communication and compromise. What I was learning in the lab that day was 10% physics and 90% people. My partner was clever, but he had a tendency to overcomplicate. As the tangle of wires spread across the wooden worktop Mr B wandered over. I could picture in my head a solution to the problem with far fewer components than my partner was busily lashing together.
“How are you getting on?” asked Mr B.
“I don’t know why we’re bothering with all these EORs,” I replied.
At which point, totally unexpectedly, Mr B flew into a rage. Ordinarily I was not afraid to stand my ground in a conversation with a teacher. But this time was different. My only option, being the smaller and less powerful person in the situation, was to rapidly de-escalate. Apologise first, while hastily working out what I needed to be sorry for.
I realised only belatedly that Mr B – who had none of the context of my previous 15 minutes of frustrated pair working – had not heard my answer as innocent concern for a simpler way to solve a specific problem. Instead he took it as an outright dismissal of the entire field of binary algebra. George Boole must have been turning in his grave!
We were both saved further embarrassment by the lunchtime bell, and never again spoke of this incident, but it’s always stuck with me.
Why did it happen? There’s something in all this about personality types. In pop psychology terms, I’m a perceiver, not a judger, and that sometimes gets me into trouble. If I make an observation, I’m not always saying that thing is good or bad, just that it’s a thing. No, really, I am #JustSaying.
But the bigger pattern here, and the one that jolted me right back to my schooldays this week is that when we’re deeply wrapped up in solving a problem, we often omit to give the context that would help other people to make sense of our opinions. In those moments quite specific technical articulations can be misinterpreted as generalised statements.
This shows up acutely right now among teams working out how to deploy artificial intelligence in their products and services. Doubts or suggestions about a specific way of using any of the vast range of different approaches bracketed under those two letters can be blown out of context as a dismissal of the technology as a whole. Suddenly the people who have thought hardest about the technical possibilities and have most to contribute to implementation are cast as obstacles to be manoeuvred around, not allies who if listened to would prevent time being wasted down dead ends.
That’s a shame, and it weakens all our work, so it’s on us all to communicate more clearly, and not jump to conclusions.
I still liked Mr B, and was sad a couple of years later when he left the school under a cloud for another reason. In retrospect, he was lucky it was the 1980s, a different time.
Matt Edgar writes here 