Hanlon's razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

…or a system failure, or a lack of data, or miscommunication, or any number of things.

Most friction I have seen came from overload, ambiguity, miscommunication, or mismatched assumptions. And I’ve never once actually faced a secret campaign against my roadmap (though it has certainly felt like it). Defaulting to a generous read of intent keeps me faster and less miserable.

The razor still has edges. Malice exists. So does a pattern of carelessness that stops being excusable after the third outage. A heuristic is not a cover for harassment or someone who will not do their job. Use it to slow your tendency to personalize pain, then follow the evidence where it goes.

If you only take one habit from the aphorism, pause before you write the sharp Slack message and ask whether your antagonist’s motivations could be explained by misaligned goals, or miscommunication, or a metric that rewarded the wrong behavior. Often it can be. When it can’t, be direct and act.