Control vs Acceptance

An axis for judging your actions and reactions

There are many axes you can use to simplify understanding behaviour. For example, you may be familiar with personality tests like Myers-Briggs and it’s four letter distillations of personality types - INFJs, ENTJs, and so on. Whether or not you place any validity in your particular four letters, it presents us with 4 measures, giving us a simple framework for understanding ourselves. For example: are we more introverted or more extraverted?

Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash

For people who write code: devs, engineers, programmers, you’ve probably been subjected to one of these sorts of things at some point.

Most people will already understand that it’s never that simple. (Almost?) nobody is purely introverted or extraverted, and our behaviour will differ at different times, different energy levels, and different situations. But it’s a useful axis with which to understand our own behaviours and tendencies. Am I more introverted in general or extraverted? What are the factors that seem to alter that? Which environments to I thrive in? Which do I find more challenging?

Any number of other tests will give you further axes with which to judge your own behaviour and sense of self. Are your thoughts more ‘emotionally led’ or more ‘analytically led’? Are you more driven by material goods or by experiences? Is your gender identity male, female, or somewhere in between (or on a different axis altogether)?

I would argue that most of these are useful, but usually to a limited (sometimes trivial) degree. Some people may be lucky to have a strong innate sense of themselves, but for others having guidelines can help form a useful picture of themselves that can help them find environments that are well suited. Or they may find things about themselves that they don’t like, and they wish to change. Having a language with which to talk about these things can help.

Which brings me to the axis I want to introduce you to: control vs acceptance (or controlling vs accepting). Like all the axes I’ve mentioned so far, this is not a question of absolutes. It’s about understanding behaviours, situations, environments that can lead to you being more controlling, or more accepting. It’s about understanding that, and perhaps identifying some situations in which you want to change that behaviour.

And to be clear, I don’t want to present either of these as a universally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing. Sometimes being accepting is preferable, in others taking control would be beneficial.

Here’s two examples to hopefully make that clear:

Lucy is in a meeting. It’s not going well: there’s no clear agenda and the conversation is veering into discussing unimportant minutiae. Nobody else seems to be trying to rally the situation. Is it better to accept this or take control?

Geoff is in a meeting. It’s a meeting with the whole team. There is an agenda but the thing he wants to speak about is not on it. He’s desperate to talk about his topic—it’s really important. Is it better to accept the situation or take control?

Both of these examples are ambiguous, you could come up with any number of circumstances in which either approach would be appropriate, but taken at face value, it would be better for everyone if Lucy took control of the situation and brought the meeting back on track, or ended it. In the latter example it would probably be better for everyone if Geoff accepted that this was not his chance to speak.

There are many situations in life where you will be automatically reacting with more controlling or more accepting behaviour. In particular you may find that controlling behaviour can emerge when dealing with emotional attachment—something that’s often tough to negotiate.

I’ve written previously about how programmers should be treated more like creatives, as their work is much more similar to the work of other creatives than it is to many other types of work. One of the strongest attachments can be to things you have created, and it can cloud rational thinking. This can be particularly hard when it’s time for a substantial piece of code or project into which someone has put a large part of the effort. Nearly all software will have a short life, and when the time comes for removal or replacement of something you consider to have ownership over, do you react with a controlling or an accepting mindset?

Hopefully this has given you a perspective on which to reflect. Over the next few days and weeks, check in occasionally and evaluate your behaviours. Are there times when a different approach on the control/acceptance scale could have benefitted you?