Let’s try a thought experiment. If I gave you the opportunity to cure cancer, but it would cause you to be broke for the rest of your life, would you take the offer? Depending on the person, I’m sure many would and many wouldn’t.
Now let’s take this scenario one step further: if you found out that by curing cancer, you would make me a billionaire. Would you still take the offer? Even if you still would, you would likely at least question my motivations for pushing you to take the offer.
I’d like to offer a framework for how to evaluate such a request if you were on the receiving end, inspired by the crime detective show, Numb3rs. As with most crime detective shows, the detectives look for both evidence and motive. In particular, one scene stayed in my memory over the years:
One of the FBI agents, Colby, was suspected of being a double agent. He was then detained and interrogated by his supervisor, Don:
Don: “And what was that the other day on the bridge? You weren’t trying to save Ashby, were you? You were trying to buy time for yourself. Who poisoned him?”
Don: “Who poisoned him?”
Colby: “Who gained?”
Real life is clearly not a crime detective story (or at least I would hope not!), but by asking “who gains?”, hence understanding motivations, it can provide you great insight into people’s behaviors.
A few years ago, a startup I worked at conducted a survey. One of the questions was:
“If you’re near the deadline of a project and can’t hit it with the current strategy, is it better to (1) push the deadline back, or (2) work later hours?”
For context, the company built solutions for financial institutions. Two-thirds of the engineers voted for (1) pushing the deadline back, while two-thirds of the account managers voted for (2) working later hours. In the discussion, both sides came up with reasonable explanations for their responses: engineers claimed that working longer hours would increase the chance of bugs and reduce software quality, while account managers claimed that clients always come first.
