Don't Listen to Your Therapist
Or your career coach, manager, or mentor. Talk to them, instead.
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There’s a technique in software engineering that is bizarrely, inexplicably effective at solving difficult problems. It often seems to work like magic. The efficacy defies logic — it shouldn’t work, but it does.
I’ve discovered that this technique can be applied to almost any problem. I’ve proven it in my work as a manager, mentor, parent, and coach. I’m going to tell you how it works. Then it will be up to you to use this secret for good, and not for evil.
“Rubber duck debugging” is as simple as it is effective:
Step 1 is to explain the problem out loud. Talk to a colleague, a volunteer, or an adorable squeaky toy. All that matters is that you put words to the ideas, as though someone is listening.
Step 2 is there is no step 2.
After trillions of attempts, millions of people have discovered that this one weird trick will often cause a solution to suddenly appear, even or especially if it has eluded you for hours. You’ll blink hard, shake your head, and wonder why you didn’t think of it before.
When debugging code, for example, start by explaining out loud what the program is for. Step through the code one line or a section at a time, describing its purpose and how it works. As you work through the scenarios that could cause your app to malfunction, you’ll often collide suddenly with the answer. It’s obvious but unexpected, like hitting yourself in the face with a pie.
This technique works well on all kinds of issues — business, career, even relationship problems. Take a deep breath, center yourself, and patiently explain the situation to a neutral third party. Often you’ll learn something surprising when you hear yourself describing your own behavior or choices.
Duck Yourself
This ancient ducking practice was developed and proven way back before the modern inventions that have revolutionized our lives. it was happening before Bitcoin and NFTs revolutionized our economy, before drone delivery redefined e-commerce, before contactless payments, the Segway, the Metaverse, Google Glass, driverless cars, and AI changed the way we live, love, and work.
Before all of that, some lucky ducker noticed that it’s really not important that the person you’re explaining the problem to actually understands it. [It may have been a woman who discovered this, although I cannot prove it. My wife has reminded me that women are often subjected to exhaustive explanations of things that they already understand perfectly well.]
The process is called “rubber ducking” because programmers have found that it works equally well if you explain the problem to a real person, or to a rubber duck. Personally I have found a patient, attentive, but dispassionate person to be the best partner. It’s not necessary (and it may be counter-productive) for them to have a point of view about the situation. An interactive conversation can also be helpful in some situations. But I find a quiet and patient listener somehow seems to work the best.
So, how can we explain the magical results, if it’s not the listener doing the hard work? Maybe it’s good luck. Or maybe it’s the duck!
It’s not the duck, silly, it’s you! Your brain does the magic as it organizes your thoughts and turns them into words. It’s the very process of verbalizing that transforms subjects you saw with blurred vision into crisp concrete beliefs. A gossamer tangle of feelings can suddenly be resolved by the realization of something you knew all along.
Putting words to a problem drags it out into a spotlight, like a reluctant child at the first performance of the school play. New ideas emerge suddenly and snap into focus as they traverse the liminal space between abstraction and cognition. Even an old familiar problem starts to look different once you start talking about it — in a way, more transparent.
Rubber ducking a problem — any problem — doesn’t always lead to a sudden discovery of the solution. Sometimes, zero ducks given. But you’ll find it nearly always reveals something new.
Duck Around and Find Out
I’m joking, of course, when I say you shouldn’t listen to your therapist. You should. After all, they have the most intimate understanding of all of this. Their work often seems an exercise in getting a client to say the thing that the client will only truly understand once they hear it coming out of their own mouth.
People who work in customer support understand the phenomenon. They’ll answer a call from a customer who thought they needed help. In the course of explaining it to our patient agent — poof! — they discover their solution. If customer support people invented rubber ducking, we could call think of them as the original or mother duckers.
Ducking magic has been revealed to you if you have taught in classrooms, conducted training, or taught someone (perhaps a child) a skill you thought you knew. Through teaching, we learn what we know, and we realize what we don’t know about subjects we thought we’d mastered. Explaining something to an interested student illuminates the gaps in our own knowledge with radiant intensity.
We hope that wisdom will be revealed by a manager, mentor, coach, therapist or another leader. It’s unquestionably wise to approach these relationships with open ears and an open heart. Be curious and inquisitive, ready to receive the ideas from someone who might know more than we do.
But our therapists — and many of the best leaders of all other stripes — they don’t do very much talking, do they? They come to listen, and to use their secret ways of getting us to say what we think, know, and believe. They’re in on the ducking secret, that the answers we need are very often already in our head.
Get Ducked
We can all apply this ducking tool to the topics that are most important in our business and careers. Management problems, personality differences, choices about career direction all benefit from giving yourself a serious, detailed, candid explanation.
There’s a time to listen, of course. But once you’ve realized that talking about your work is a powerful tool for solving problems, you might ask yourself if you’re making enough time for the activity. Even with a hectic schedule, try to make time for ducking — set an appointment with yourself, if you must.
What matters is that you get comfortable organizing, verbalizing, and answering questions about the topics that are most important.
If you’re ducking with a partner, it’s important to pick the right listener. Choose someone without an agenda, or alternatively someone whose agenda includes patiently supporting you. Say that you want to “talk something out” and get their consent to do so, uninterrupted, for as long as it takes. Once you find the right fit, offer to reciprocate. Boom! You’ve got yourself a new duck buddy.
Working with a coach also gets you access to someone who is paid to listen. You should also be able to depend on a coach to tell you the truth about what you have to say. Coaches like me will tell you that we live for the moment when a client finally says the thing we’ve been hoping to hear.
Some of the most difficult moments in coaching arise when a client seems reluctant to open up about the topic that I sense is at the root of what we’re trying to address. One client needed several tries before they could discover that they’ve internalized criticism from a former boss.
Another arrived at our first meeting with a “strictly business” approach to people management. He then arrived suddenly (in the middle of the ninth hour of coaching) at the realization that people skills were central to the kind of leader they want to be. We’d ducked around a while, but we finally found out.
There are important things to learn about leadership and your career that no one else can tell you. It doesn’t mean as much if you read it, when you hear it, or even if you do it. Sometimes you have to say it before you know it’s real.
That’s the lesson of rubber ducking: Through talking, like teaching, we find out what we know.
If you enjoy my writing, I’d appreciate if you’d consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s incredibly easy, it only costs a few dollars a month, and there’s a free trial to get you started. You get access to paid subscriber-only content, a giant archive of my past writing, and special access in the Safe @ Work Slack community.