Three questions for examining what else might be shaping the outcome.
What do a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed intern, a deputy keeping an entire department afloat, and an employee enthusiastically automating their own work have in common?
At first glance, not much.
Wei Ling is waiting at the printer with the quarter’s deck in her hands. Across the floor, the interns are clustered by the glass room. The directors are by the window. In between, rows of docked laptops and nobody at them.
She tries to name one person on this floor under thirty who isn’t an intern, and counts twice.
Then she takes the pages back to her desk and starts tomorrow’s task early.
Wei Ling is keen, capable and trying to make herself useful. She has been told that good work matters, that initiative is valued, and that demonstrating what she can do is a sensible way to improve her chances of being offered a permanent position.
But there are a lot of interns. There seem to be very few junior employees.
She doesn’t know what it means. The company could be growing and have a particular recruitment cycle. Permanent positions may be limited, or the people who would normally occupy them may simply be elsewhere that afternoon.
She has noticed a pattern. She has not established its explanation.
That matters because Wei Ling is making an investment. She is spending time, effort and attention in the hope that doing good work here will lead to a future here. The quality of her work is something she can influence. Whether there will be a position for her, whether she will be considered for it, and what will determine the decision are not necessarily things she can see.
She may be doing everything expected of her and still be working towards an outcome whose conditions are largely outside her view. There is a kind of hope-funded investment here. Wei Ling is committing effort in the present against the possibility of a future benefit. The investment is real; the return is not yet assured.
Now this is not unusual. People are often able to see what they contribute without being able to see the circumstances that govern what happens to that contribution. Those circumstances may sit with a manager, a department’s staffing budget, an organization’s hiring plan, or a decision-making process whose criteria have never been explained to the person doing the work.
Nobody needs to be deliberately withholding information. You can be fully engaged in the activity without being equally informed about the circumstances governing its consequences.
Nor does everyone have equal access to the information governing their situation. An intern may not know whom to ask, or may be reluctant to ask at all.
Noticing without deciding
Marc MacYoung teaches his Normal–Abnormal–Dangerous model (NAD) as a way of categorizing behaviour by comparing it to what is ordinarily expected in a given environment.
The distinction between abnormal and dangerous is important. Something that falls outside the expected pattern is a reason to pay attention and evaluate what is happening. It is not, by itself, evidence of danger. There may be a perfectly ordinary explanation once the circumstances are understood.
Think of a street that suddenly goes quiet. You look up from doomscrolling. You take out your earbuds. You pay attention to who’s paying attention to you. You haven’t established that something dangerous is happening. You’ve noticed a departure from what you expected, and you give yourself time to assess it.
The example is mine; the underlying distinction is the useful part. Noticing something unusual should change your attention before it changes your conclusion.
Workplace uncertainty is not the same as physical danger, but the principle still applies. An unusual staffing pattern, a change in responsibilities or an unexpected management decision is not evidence of wrongdoing. It is a reason to pay attention, examine the context and understand what you’re seeing before deciding what it means.
There is a complication, though. On the street, you may have a reasonably clear idea of what normal looks like. At work, you may not. Wei Ling might never have seen a department with a healthy balance of interns and permanent junior staff. She may be comparing what she sees with an expectation formed by recruitment promises, conversations with her supervisor, or simply what she assumed a functioning department would look like.
So the question is not just whether something looks unusual. It is:
What did I expect, and where did that expectation come from?
For Wei Ling, the answer matters. If she has mistaken an ordinary recruitment cycle for a warning sign, she may be worrying unnecessarily. If she has assumed that good performance naturally leads to a permanent role when the organization has no such intention, she may be investing in a future that was never available to her.
Neither conclusion is established by what she has seen. But the difference between them is important enough to examine.
This is where three questions can help:
- What doesn’t fit?
- What assumptions does it put into question?
- What deserves attention now?
They are not a formula for discovering what other people are thinking. They are a way to examine the gap between what you can observe and what you are relying on when you decide what to do.
1. What doesn’t fit?
The first task is to describe what you have noticed, without immediately deciding what it means.
We are remarkably good at supplying explanations before we have properly described the observation. A delayed response becomes a sign of disinterest. A change in someone’s behaviour becomes evidence that something has happened. An application that goes unanswered becomes a judgement on the applicant’s suitability.
Those explanations may be right. Or they may not. But once one takes hold, we tend to interpret subsequent information through it.
It helps to separate three things: what happened, what we expected to happen, and what we think the difference means.
Wei Ling has noticed that there seem to be many interns and very few permanent junior employees. That’s her observation. She may have expected a department with a more established junior workforce, but she does not know whether that expectation reflects how this department normally operates.
The observation is still useful. It tells her that she should not assume the organization’s staffing arrangements are what she imagined them to be. It does not tell her what those arrangements mean for her prospects.
The distinction becomes more consequential when someone has less room to absorb a mistaken interpretation.
Consider a father of three, barely forty, who has been retrenched. He drives PHV for a ride-hailing service to keep money coming in, while sending out job applications during the day. He is doing what people generally advise someone in his position to do: keep earning, keep applying, keep trying.
But what is happening with those applications?
If he is getting no interviews, that points towards a different line of enquiry from regularly reaching final interviews without receiving an offer. The first situation might lead him to examine the roles he is targeting, how his experience is presented, or whether his applications are reaching the right people. The second suggests that another part of the process deserves attention.
If employers are responding but not progressing the applications, that is another observation. If they provide little or no feedback, he may have very little information to work with.
Treating all these situations as simply a matter of needing to try harder would obscure useful differences.
He cannot put his life on hold while he works out what is happening. He has immediate responsibilities and needs to keep earning. He may not have the time or money to conduct an exhaustive investigation into every unsuccessful application.
That constraint changes what useful enquiry looks like. The aim is not to understand the entire employment market before he applies again. It is to distinguish between possibilities that would lead him to spend his limited time differently.
The observation is where the enquiry begins. It isn’t yet the diagnosis.
2. What assumptions does it put into question?
Once we have described what doesn’t fit, we can examine the assumptions that made the situation seem straightforward in the first place.
A common assumption is that if we perform an activity well enough, the outcome we want should follow. Good work should lead to recognition. Taking on responsibility should lead to advancement. Making a process more efficient should make us more valuable.
These connections are not absurd. They often do hold. But they are rarely the only conditions influencing the outcome.
Six months in, Daniel is still approving his team’s leave, and since March he’s been signing the department’s budget revisions too. At Monday’s meeting the Group Director thanks him by name. “Couldn’t have asked for more,” she says, and a few people nod.
Afterwards he opens the intranet again. The Head of Department post is still listed as “under review.” His own title hasn’t changed. HR hasn’t mentioned it. Maybe the hiring freeze just hasn’t lifted, he thinks. Maybe it’s nothing.
Forty-one unread emails. He starts at the top.
Daniel is performing much of the work associated with the position, but the organization has not formally given him the position. He is carrying responsibility without knowing whether the authority, recognition and terms that should accompany it will follow.
The Group Director’s appreciation may be genuine. His colleagues may depend on him. The department may be functioning because he has taken on work that would ordinarily sit with its Head.
None of that settles the appointment.
Daniel is trying to infer something about a formal decision from evidence about his performance. Those are related matters, but they are not interchangeable. His contribution may be relevant to the decision, but it cannot establish whether there is a position to fill, what criteria will govern the appointment, or whether the organization intends to appoint him at all.
This is not just a question of whether Daniel is good enough. It is also a question of what the organization is prepared to do, and on what terms. We see here another dimension of hope-funded investment: the organization is already receiving the benefit of his additional contribution. Whether he receives the corresponding benefit he may be anticipating remains undecided.
For Daniel, the distinction has immediate consequences. He is carrying work that affects his time and responsibilities now, while the question of his formal position remains unresolved. How long should he continue on that basis? What should he make of the recognition he receives? What would he need to know before deciding whether to keep accepting the arrangement?
The question is:
What else has to be true for the connection I’m relying on to hold?
For Daniel, it is the connection between performing the role and being appointed to it. For Wei Ling, it is the connection between doing good work and being offered a permanent position. For the retrenched father, it is the connection between sending out more applications and eventually securing employment.
The original assumptions may turn out to be sound. The organization may indeed intend to appoint Daniel. Wei Ling’s department may have vacancies when her internship ends. The father’s next applications may lead to interviews.
But examining the other conditions makes it harder to mistake one kind of evidence for proof of an outcome.
It also prevents a different mistake: treating every disappointing result as evidence that the person has failed to do enough. Sometimes the missing condition is not effort, but a decision, an opportunity, a process, or access to information that the individual does not control.
3. What deserves attention now?
Once we accept that part of the situation is outside our view, the temptation is to investigate everything.
That is rarely practical. Information takes time to obtain. Some enquiries are uncomfortable. Others change the situation simply by being made.
The reconciliation report used to take Ming Hui three days at the end of every month. Now it takes forty minutes, and she spent a fortnight checking it against the old figures before telling anyone.
Her manager is pleased. “Send me the documentation,” he says, “and a one-pager on the hours saved.” She has both to him by Friday. On Monday he forwards the one-pager to someone in Finance she has never met, with no message.
That evening she starts an email to her manager, typing, What does this mean for my role? Reads it back. It sounds like someone bracing for bad news. She deletes it and opens the shared drive instead, to see what happened to the team that moved onto the new ticketing system last year.
Ming Hui has a practical reason to pay attention. She has made a process substantially more efficient, and information about that efficiency has moved beyond her immediate team. She needs to understand what is happening without assuming either that her initiative will be rewarded or that it will be used against her.
A direct question might help. It might also change the conversation before she has a clearer idea of what she wants to ask. Looking at what has happened in a comparable team is a less exposed first step, provided the information is actually relevant to her situation.
This is not a matter of being clever enough to find a hidden meaning in every management action. It is a matter of deciding which uncertainty is worth examining first.
And that decision cannot be separated from where the person stands.
The same enquiry can have very different costs depending on who makes it. Daniel may be able to ask his Group Director about the appointment, but may have reasons to consider how that question will be received. Wei Ling may have to weigh the value of asking about permanent positions against the risk of appearing to presume that one is owed to her. Ming Hui may have access to information about another team that someone else would have no way of obtaining.
Before taking a step, it’s worth asking:
- What am I trying to find out?
- Could the answer change what I do next?
- Is there a less costly or lower-risk way to find out?
- What might happen simply because I make this enquiry?
None of this is an argument for avoiding the difficult conversation. Sometimes the only way to learn anything is to ask directly, and the cost of not asking is higher than the risk of asking. But it’s worth making that choice deliberately.
There is no universal answer to which step is right. That depends on what the enquiry reveals, what options are realistically available, and what constraints the person is working under.
And sometimes there is no useful enquiry available. The person may have to make a decision with the information already in hand, while recognizing what remains uncertain.
Continuing unchanged is also a decision. It deserves the same scrutiny as any other.
Yes, there are limits
I know. There are limits to this way of looking at things.
Noticing something unusual does not establish that something is wrong. A staffing pattern may have an ordinary explanation. A vacancy may remain under review for reasons unrelated to the person acting in the role. An employee’s automation project may lead to new responsibilities rather than a reduction in their position.
The questions are intended to help you examine what you know, what you are assuming, and what you might need to find out. They cannot tell you what another person intends, or guarantee that an uncertain situation will turn out well.
There are also situations in which the information needed simply isn’t available. An employer may not explain why an application was unsuccessful. A manager may not be authorized to discuss a pending appointment. An organization may not yet have made a decision about what it intends to do with a process that has been automated.
Sometimes the decision has not been made. Sometimes the relevant information is held by people you cannot approach. And sometimes you just have little practical influence over the conditions determining the outcome.
There is a human cost to getting this wrong. It is easy to turn a method for examining uncertainty into another burden for the person already carrying it.
If you just lost a job, you don’t need to be told that every unsuccessful application reflects a failure to investigate properly. Just been passed over for promotion? You have not necessarily overlooked some obvious clue. And if your work is being reorganized or automated using AI, asking the right questions cannot always change the outcome. The decision may rest with people whose priorities, constraints and plans you have little access to, let alone influence over.
There is no requirement to investigate every uncertainty before acting. Sometimes you have only incomplete information while deciding. The aim then is to identify which assumptions deserve examination, which information might change the next decision, and which steps are worth taking given the time, access and choices available.
That may mean changing course. It may mean continuing with the present approach while looking for better information. It may mean recognizing that an outcome depends on conditions beyond your control, and making decisions accordingly.
The questions do not remove those constraints. They cannot promise that a person who understands the situation will get the outcome they want. What they can do is help distinguish between what the person has contributed, what the situation permits, and what remains outside their control.
That distinction matters. Without it, people can end up spending months treating a structural uncertainty as a personal failure of effort.
Back at the printer
Wei Ling takes the pages back to her desk and starts tomorrow’s task early.
She may eventually get a permanent position. Perhaps her supervisor will recommend her. Perhaps her department will have vacancies when the internship ends. Perhaps the organization will decide that it needs fewer junior employees than she had imagined.
She doesn’t know.
The staffing pattern she noticed may turn out to mean very little. It may turn out to be an early indication of something she would have been better off understanding sooner. At this stage, she cannot tell.
What she can do is pay attention to what happens next. She can find out how the organization recruits, what permanent positions actually exist, and what her supervisor can tell her about the prospects of staying. She can continue doing good work while recognizing that good work, by itself, does not settle the question.
And perhaps she will never get a particularly clear answer. Perhaps her internship will end, she will move on, and the people who made the staffing decisions will never know that she spent an afternoon counting the permanent employees on her floor.
Forty minutes later, the printer is quiet again.
