Surprises: A Guardrail for Partnerships

Pradip Thachile -
tl;dr? Keep track of surprises, they provide you with a measure of health, especially for rocky relationships. Treat the surprise as an intervention point to build deeper alignment to grow trust.

Surprises aren't good. While an unexpected birthday gift is pleasant, in the workplace, a surprise is a bad thing. Surprises befuddle planning. The more uncertain, positive or negative, future outcomes are, the harder it is to plan, creating frustration.

This problem occurs even at an interpersonal level. When working with another person, strong partnerships need to build a mutual understanding: partners need to trust each other's motives and predict each other's actions. Surprises disrupt this, making the partnership inefficient, unsatisfying, and even contentious.

Predictability in partnerships is essential for decentralised execution. Aligned on a set of principles or other decisioning directives, strong partners execute independently with minimal coordination. The greater the number of surprises, the more often check-ins are needed, and the partnership becomes less efficient. The more shocking the surprise, the more intense each check-in becomes, and the more drained everyone gets. If this trust debit isn't replenished, the relationship falls into disarray.

I've found that the number of surprises is a (surprisingly) good metric for the health of a partnership. Relationships can buffet the smaller pleasant or unpleasant surprises, but the shocking ones are the focus. Shocking surprises as a metric of health has been effective at both reforming and strengthing relationships. I keep a counter that helps me track this over time, reviewing it regularly for rocky relationships.

Outside of tracking, surprises create a natural intervention point. Whenever I feel the visceral reaction coming from a surprise, I immediately take note to follow up with a mini-retro. Ignore the formalism implied in the word retro; this is solely an opportunity for me to have a conversation with my colleague around expectations and outcomes. Like a retro, this isn't about blame. The goal is for us to understand each other better, and I set aside other expectations. I'm looking to share my thinking, hear theirs, and hopefully internalise this to reduce future surprises.

This only works if everyone is genuinely leaned into becoming better partners. For struggling partnerships, this is hard as trust is compromised. Cerebrally, I know this is the right approach, yet it is emotionally hard to put myself in a situation that can cause heartburn. I've approached these situations by starting slowly:

  1. Asking for permission to share my thinking.
  2. (Re)stating my intentions to learn and understand explicitly.
  3. Sharing my fears that what I say would be misconstrued as criticism.
  4. Leveraging a framework like situation-behaviour-impact.

You should proactively deter surprises on your part as well. Whenever I think that something I'm doing may be surprising, a sync is warranted. The threshold varies with urgency and context, but I often err on the side of caution. Usually, this is just a quick Slack exchange and, if nothing else, builds confidence in my predictions.

Partnerships need more than reactive attention to flourish. Consequently, surprises are a guardrail metric, and the structure above helps me consistently invest in improving my relationships. Successful partnerships are built atop boring reliability—reserve excitement for the things you do and discover together.

Here are a few interesting articles and books that informed different aspects of my thinking above. Please know that I may collect Amazon affiliate credits for purchasing through some of these links. Any credits I earn are used to buy and read things I think are cool.