Learned helplessness is a psychological pattern first suggested and researched by Martin Seligmann. You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but the main idea is this: when someone is trained to believe there’s no way to escape the pain, they won’t try escaping even when an opportunity to do so is right under their nose.

This behavior was first shown in dogs but it equally applies to humans. In fact it has been proven that clinical depression is caused mainly by this perceived lack of control over one’s fate.

Organizational learned helplessness is widely present in traditional, centralized, command-and-control type IT structures.

In many of our interviews with employees in such organizations we hear things like: “This is how we were told to work”, “These are the limitations of the system”, “We don’t have resources”, “This is great but it will not work here”.

These engineers understand their tooling is inadequate, the architecture of their systems is far from perfect and they are acquiring technical debt. But they’ve learnt that deadlines and reporting are more important than their productivity or the quality of their work.

This leads to them actively resisting change even when an optimization initiative is suggested. They don’t believe that the organization will ever make their work more enjoyable. After all — this was never the case before. That’s not “how things are done here”.

These engineers have learnt that deadlines and reporting are more important than their productivity or the quality of their work.

They are told that they will have more power over their delivery process, they will be able to spin up testing environments on demand, they will have less routine work and can be more creative.

But all they hear is: you will be held responsible for more stuff! And don’t you dare miss the deadline! Don’t you dare be the bottleneck! Don’t you dare make a mistake!

All they see is pain.

Learned helplessness is a mental model that can only be changed by re-learning. In Seligman’s hypothesis: “the dogs do not try to escape because they expect that nothing they do will stop the shock. To change this expectation, experimenters physically picked up the dogs and moved their legs, replicating the actions the dogs would need to take in order to escape from the electrified grid. This had to be done at least twice before the dogs would start willfully jumping over the barrier on their own. In contrast, threats, rewards, and observed demonstrations had no effect on the "helpless" Group 3 dogs.”

No engineer starts their career willing to be unproductive, pessimistic and stressed out. But the companies they work at teach them to.

Learned helplessness can become a major blocker to improving the way an IT organization operates.

Unlearning Helplessness

As Peter Senge wisely noticed —the hardest part about mental models is that we are not aware of them.

Changing them involves asking a lot of open questions. Questioning every assumption we have about how and what is it we do as a team, as a company.

And realizing that the only correct answers are those that we can all stand behind. Because we’ve discussed them and agreed that this is how things should be done around here. Not because some consultant or architect or a central DevOps team decided it for us.

This is only possible if the organization is truly focused on continuous learning and enabling constructive dialogue.

This requires managers to abandon traditional leadership techniques and play the role of dialogue facilitators. This is not the transformational or servant leadership preached to us for the last 30 years. This is a move to a true leaderless, decentralized model based on individual motivation and the accessibility of necessary information.

This is how you build a team that enjoys the game.

Have you observed learned helplessness at your workplace? Are you feeling this way yourself?

I’ve definitely felt this more than once in my career. Until one day I decided that I won’t put up with this anymore. Work doesn’t have to be stressful, unsatisfying or boring. Engineering is a creative profession and creativity is fun.

There’s always a better way. But we can only find it if we are focused on improvement.

And for the last 8 years this is my focus — to improve the way we work on IT, the way we create and deliver software.

Many times this involves helping folks to unlearn their helplessness.

And I’ve failed at this quite a number of times.

But when the unlearning happens — it’s such a joy to observe.

If you’ve also encountered this — please share in comments. I believe this is a discussion we can all benefit from.