While reading a magazine article the other day about how to have more positive interactions, I was reminded of the term “flipping the bozo bit.” For those of you who have never heard of this term you might want to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit , the Wikipedia excerpt taken from Jim McCarthy in his 1995 book Dynamics of Software Development explains it well. “McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". In summary, McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. ”
Who among us hasn’t at some point in time “flipped the bozo bit”? While you wait in line at the supermarket and you see the cashier is your least favorite due to her slowness with bagging every customer’s purchases, you flip the bozo bit and think to yourself “what an incompetent nitwit. Why can’t she just hurry up so we don’t have to wait so long?…” Then, as the cashier bags YOUR purchases, she mentions that she always tries to be careful bagging everyone’s groceries because they are so expensive and she wants to make sure that every item makes it home in good shape. Wow, so you now realize your mistake, and you flip that bozo bit back to “false.” Or at work, when someone constantly comes up with outlandish suggestions that have little context and make no sense to you, over time you have just flipped that old bozo bit. When you tune them out, you may miss that one great idea.
I am just as guilty as others, as I have had my share of bozo flipping moments. But, at least now I like to think that most of the time I can catch myself when I feel that switch start to flip, and force myself to slow down and hear the words. When I am able to do this successfully, I’m happy to say that more times than not I’ve learned something from the “bozo” after all.
Yes, and I am sure that somewhere out there I have also been someone’s favorite bozo myself.
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