Addressing ambiguity on your IT team: A meeting of the minds

Quite often, a pair of colleagues on a technical team have serious trouble working together. It’s as if they have completely opposing worldviews, and neither will grant the least bit of validity to the other’s perspective.

The things the say about each other, with intense emotion, sound like this:

• Joe is useless. He can’t get anything done unless every single question is answered down to the minutest detail. He seems immobilized unless all his questions are answered to his satisfaction.
• Jane is useless. Everything she produces is so vaguely defined, it’s unusable. She draws a few boxes and arrows on a diagram and thinks that’s a fully specified system that can be estimated and built.

If you have thought either of these things about one of your colleagues, there’s a good chance that your colleague has thought the other one about you. One thing you are likely to have in common is that you have dismissed the other as incompetent, obstinate or stupid. And the longer you work together, the more entrenched your judgments of each other become.

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