Fear comes in different flavors… people can be afraid to speak (toxic environment), people can be afraid to change source code (no test inside)… it’s all about the same topic: fear. How can we eliminate fear from our conversation?

Psychological Safety helps, I’m sure. But fear happens in places where we could have a bit more of prevention happening.

Example… you are coding a feature, because team says it’s ready to start coding… but every day some part of the features changes or you believe you have missed a concept… and now you are afraid to code a next part. What may happen? Will my code run correctly in production? Will I need to delete and code something different in the last minute?

We can find lots of options and engineering tools to avoid this kind of issue. Paper prototyping, user journey maps, slicing and breakdown techniques… but the real world is sending fear signals… you don’t want to continue coding. Why waste my time doing something that will not be used or will be changed at any time?

Is it all but wasted time? We better move code to production than thinking about wasted years building code that no one uses. In the end, we want to keep moving our work to production, generating value to real world customers. We want to Drive Out Fear! That’s one of Deming’s management points. It’s been decades since those points were written, but we are still questioning about fear in workplace.

It’s a power issue, pure oppression or just sick bad management people in place?

— Daniel Wildt

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