People Frameworks - by Mike Fisher - Fish Food for Thought

Leadership rarely fails from lack of intelligence or effort. It fails when leaders take interpretive shortcuts under pressure, defaulting to simple stories about people rather than examining systems. When things go poorly, the reflex is to blame character: someone didn't care enough, someone wasn't capable, someone made a bad decision. These explanations feel satisfying because they're simple and provide emotional closure, but they're usually wrong. Once institutionalized, they quietly rot organizations from the inside.

The frameworks here fall into three categories: foundational assumptions, interpreting behavior, and making meaning from failure. Start with assuming competence and positive intent. No one comes to work hoping to fail. Under stress, leaders revert to character-based explanations because they're fast and emotionally satisfying, but this approach absolves systems and elevates judgment without leading to improvement. The shift is from asking "Why did they fail?" to "What made success difficult here?" That redirect moves energy from blame to diagnosis, and diagnosis scales while judgment does not. Similarly, assume people already know when they're struggling. Most performance problems aren't awareness problems. People know they're behind. What they don't know is how serious it is, what good looks like, or whether it's safe to ask for help. Feedback that treats awareness as the missing ingredient becomes didactic and one-directional. Feedback that assumes people already know becomes collaborative.

When interpreting behavior, remember it always has a backstory. Leaders see outcomes and moments like missed meetings or half-finished work, but they don't see the tradeoffs, interruptions, incentives, and cognitive load that produced them. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to over-attribute behavior to character while underweighting context. In leadership, this bias is particularly destructive because it masquerades as insight. A single incident becomes a story, a story becomes a label, a label becomes a reputation. Wait for patterns, not moments. Leaders who react to isolated data points create volatility. Leaders who wait for patterns create stability. Trust by default, verify by exception. Control scales linearly, but trust scales exponentially. David Marquet's experience commanding the USS Santa Fe showed that moving authority to people closest to the work and communicating intent rather than orders transformed performance from worst to first in the fleet.

When failure happens, distinguish between blameworthy failures and intelligent failures that occur in pursuit of learning. Organizations that treat every failure as a moral lapse train people to hide information. Organizations that treat failure as data learn faster because problems surface earlier and more honestly. Remember that people are rational locally, meaning behavior that appears irrational is simply rational within a context the leader doesn't fully see. People optimize for what they believe is rewarded, not what leaders say they value. If collaboration is praised but individual heroics are promoted, people will compete. Before reacting to any behavior, run the reflection test: if I were in their position with their information and constraints, would this choice make sense? The stories leaders tell themselves about people become self-fulfilling systems. Generous explanations grounded in systems, context, and incentives produce better outcomes over time, not because they're kind, but because they're true.