Don't "Be Careful" 
Published: 2020-08-05 13:57:39

My son was watching a kids' TV show next to me on the couch this morning, and the hidden message (and moral of the story) was, "BE CAREFUL." It's a reasonable phrase to introduce to children, who clearly start out with an excess of enthusiasm and a short supply of focus and mindfulness. It says to us, "come back to the present moment and consider the risks," maybe. But then, it also says, "when something goes poorly, it was your fault."

My wife and I have been trying to get a little more precise with how we discuss errors with our kids.

For example, a kid who was hustling through their chores recently placed a bottle of hair detangling spray in the fridge because it was on the counter during clean-up time. 

At work, some errors, especially ones that appear on the public-facing radar, get handled with "Root Cause Analysis" (or sometimes, "Post-Mortem"). The idea is to walk through the various "five whys" behind the problem.

Contributing Factors:
* Yes, the kiddo was probably distracted, being goofy and the other kids at the time. Because chores are boring, and they weren't "being careful."
* One of the chore-age kiddos is still working on reading, so labels aren't helpful. I'm not sure which one it was, but this could be part of it.
* The bottle was probably hanging out on a countertop near other bottles after dinner. It did not belong on the counter permanently (and it was probably placed there by an adult).
* The evening chores are done independently by design. This is their opportunity to take ownership of bettering our home lives together. So there's no one checking the work in the moment.

In terms of errors, this one is minor. No one was at any risk of putting detangling spray on their pancakes, and a brief period of refrigeration did not seem to hurt anything. I did not even bother discussing it with the kids.

Mistakes run a full spectrum, from barely-detectable through catastrophic. Thinking through this activity when the stakes are low allows us to gain a degree of comfort and familiarity with these concepts. We may not be able to control the final outcomes of the processes we participate in, but we all shape our environments, we participate in shared routines, and we each have our individual habits.

You will find, in more safety-critical applications, that the role of an individual's state of mind is reduced. I can't say for sure, but I doubt that the operating manuals for a nuclear submarine include heavy use of the phrase "be careful."

Being distracted is just part of being human. That's why we don't give out driver's licenses to kids as soon as they are tall enough to reach the pedals. As a rule, children are physiologically less able to maintain the focus required to operate heavy machinery compared to most adults. Which isn't saying much, because even adults are massively distractable and we now live in an age where the demands on our attention are intense and frequent.

Sidebar: acknowledging this aspect of human nature can get strangely political, because one of the differences between progressive and conservative outlooks includes a differing perspective on the role of individual liberty and individual responsibility. This whole conversation might even call into question the moral rectitude of reward and punishment for what, taken in sum, often comes down to luck of the draw. But that's not my point, here. I'm talking about the design of shared processes and routines, not society at large. Let's tackle that some other time.

"Be careful" reads a lot like "you failed, try harder not to fail next time." Or possibly, "worry more in these situations, there are risks here."

I would argue that we are in an anxiety glut already in our modern lives. We don't need more cause to fret about details.

If a task must succeed - yes, try to induce the appropriate frame of mind in the person executing the task. But more to the point, structure the environment in direct proximity to the task so that it has a lower probability of failure.

Reading List:
* Brene Brown’s work on Shame - it's all over, and it's anathema to meaningful relationships at home and work
* Nudge by Thaler - we can structure decisioning environments to encourage better decisions, which has a very "UX" feel to it
* Atomic Habits by Clear - habits eat goals for breakfast. If you want high-quality outputs, create high-quality habits
* Accelerate by Forsgren et al - same as with the Clear book, organizations that have mastered their own habits end up winning. DevOps is full of examples where a task is made to succeed more frequently by being automated out of existence.