There’s a powerful and funny commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace called “This is water” and it highlights how hard it is to be aware of something that surrounds you. The punchline is when a fish is asked “How’s the water” he would respond “What the hell is water?” This simple truth affects us every day in so many ways that I find it useful to work hard to step outside my own worldview.

As a software developer, my first goal has always been to make something work. I haven’t always considered how well something worked, how easy it was to use or how beautiful it was. My goal was “make it work.” That served me well in lots of circumstances. So many times I dealt with developers that delivered something that “almost works.” It works except for this bug and that condition. For me, working software has always been the primary goal.

The goal of “get it to work” blinded me often to choices that resulted in counterintuitive usage or design. I recall building a system when I was in college as treasurer of a social organization to manage the payments I was responsible for receiving. At the time, I had an IBM PC and I was determined to replace the manual ledger with a program that generated dues and helped me track payments. My program succeeded in allowing me to eliminate the ledger, and also confusing anyone else that tried to use it. The ledger was back immediately after my term as treasurer was over.

In college I rarely worked to view the world from someone else’s point of view. I was optimizing of a population of one - me. I didn’t even realize it, although the impact was clear as I tried to take my ideas outside of my fishbowl.

I started a company in 2000 to serve physician offices with a hosted solution to help manage their patient schedules, billing and payments. I took some of the lessons from my early college experience and decided that this system would be simple for the end-user. In fact, I had the concept that I wanted a customer to be able to sign up in less than six steps and start using our system. It was a close to self-provisioning as existed in those days. The system was a success from the user point of view.

At the same time, the system was highly configurable and difficult to maintain. The design for each page was encoded in XML in order to allow flexibility to change the user interface for each user or organization away from the system default. I hadn’t viewed the system from the point of view of the other developers who had to maintain and extend the system. It was cumbersome and complicated. I realized again the value in stepping outside my own view.

The value in taking on different views increases when one realizes the importance of working in teams. The human dynamic of working together requires that people with different viewpoints come together. It is what one might call culture. It is a powerful tool as a leader to see a goal through another person’s viewpoint. You can more effectively incorporate others into the team and deliver value when you can step outside of your own fishbowl.

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