🐿️ Reflexes - The IPT Newsletter

Originally published 11th August 2025

Tuning In To Mistakes

Two of my heroes, Jack Reacher and Richard Mitchell, agree on the importance of details. The placement of a single comma or apostrophe can totally alter the meaning of a sentence and change the direction of a company or a country.

In my own practice, I’m always coaching clients to look for subtle, highly significant signals in their own speech; my unsubtle method for doing this is usually shouting “STOP!” in the middle of one of their sentences to point out an error. And it’s paid tremendous dividends, particularly when the person I’m coaching becomes attuned to common thinking mistakes and begins automatically making corrections, as instinctively as when the doctor taps your knee.

Here’s a short list of reflexes to develop that will help you and your team tune your own radar to detect and fix dangerous cognitive distortions:

The error you make: Uncritically accepting an unverified “attribution”, that is, your belief about someone else’s reasoning or motivation.

Example: “The CTO is drowning in customer requests and must be frustrated by not having enough staff to fix them all.”

Reflexive response you can develop: Be sure to ask the person involved about what he or she is really thinking. If you confirm your attribution, you can use it with confidence (“I’ll approve hiring some more engineers to address the feedback”); depressingly often, your System 1 assumption turns out to be wrong, and you need to do something else (“Ah, you have enough capacity but you’re missing designers to come up with solutions; let’s get you some specialist help”).

Error: Prematurely ruling out options. Often signalled by language like “shouldn’t”, “can’t”, “not allowed”, or “impossible”.

Example: “We don’t have budget for another contractor, even though the project would have a clear 5x return.”

Reflexive response: Question the dichotomy. Rarely are there only one or two options to choose from, and even less often is one choice categorically forbidden (assuming you don’t have a gun to your head or aliens threatening the planet). Once you discover the actual consequences of the “unworkable” choice, you may very well decide you can live with them!

Error: Automatically appealing to authority, using terms like “best practice”, “right answer”, or “doesn’t meet the spec”.

Example: “The Spotify model is the standard way to organise teams, no matter how complicated it sounds.”

Reflexive response: Abandon betterism and the “wisdom” of crowds (“everyone else is doing it” doesn’t work any better here than it did with your mum). Instead, figure out specific reasons why the proposed action matches your strategy and fits your organisation.

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 11th August 2025. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/