If you live in the UK in January 2026, you will not have been able
to miss hearing about the Traitors.
It's basically a psychology lab disguised as entertainment, And in case
you've never seen the Traitors, it's basically a reality game show where
a group of strangers live together.
They compete to win a big cash prize.
Now, most of them are faithfuls, but a few are secretly chosen as traitors,
and the faithfuls are trying to work out who the traitors are and vote them out.
The traitors are trying to stay hidden whilst eliminating
the faithfuls every night.
Now, the faithfuls don't know if anybody is a traitor or a faithful.
The traitors know exactly who everybody is.
So the whole thing becomes a very, very high pressure social experiment where
everybody's watching everybody else, trying to read motives, trying to decide
who to trust and make these calls back, who they're gonna eliminate and vote out
based on very little actual evidence.
And I think the reason it's been so popular is that we can see
ourselves in so much of it, and the behavior is absolutely fascinating.
Now, there was somebody in the Traitors called Harriet, and she
gives us a perfect example of assumptions, and I wanna talk about
assumptions in this quick dip episode.
Now, Harriet, very intelligent woman, she was a barrister, she was
a crime fiction author, and she had a hunch about who the traders were.
Now, bits of it were spot on.
Bits of it were right, but she kept describing her hunch as hard evidence
when actually it wasn't evidence at all.
It was intuition.
It was a hunch.
It was her interpretation.
It was the way somebody was behaving or the vibe or the sort
of slight pattern that I'm seeing,
And as soon as she believed that her thoughts were facts, she
started doing what all humans do.
She went around looking for confirmation that she was right.
So she filtered everything she saw through that lens, and she
got more and more convinced.
And then what happens was that she'd got more and more angry when
other people just couldn't see it.
Now she was convinced she was being rational and reasonable.
She was convinced that she was thinking with logic, not with her emotions, but
in actual fact she was thinking entirely with her emotions, getting more and
more angry, and the anger just made her less and less believable, even though
she was actually partially, right.
So then everyone else made assumptions about her because she was getting angry.
They thought, well, she must be a traitor.
She got voted out.
And as I watched it, I was thinking, oh my goodness.
This is exactly what happens in teams under pressure, particularly in high
stress, high stakes jobs like medicine.
This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we
talk about on our full podcast episodes.
I've chosen today's topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it
takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you're
up to feeling energized and inspired.
For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don't
forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts.
In healthcare, assumptions, they just feel sensible for us.
And the norm for most of us is, well, you trust your judgment, you trust your
instincts, you need to act quickly and you do need to decide under uncertainty.
Because quite a lot of the time you don't have the luxury for waiting
for absolutely perfect information.
And a lot of us have been trained to use our clinical judgment, to use
our intuition to, to apply pattern recognition and problem solving
to things rather than absolutely interrogating the data of stuff.
And in fact, a huge part of medical training is being trained to
be comfortable making decisions when we are not fully sure.
So we might make a working diagnosis and then test it as we go along,
watching and waiting, just seeing, well, let's do this and see what happens.
So we act and then we reassess, we fit things to patterns, and most of the
time that's exactly the right skill that we need because waiting for all
the absolute concrete evidence before we do anything could be too late.
And so what happens is that we have a thought about something
and then we believe it to be true.
We believe it as a fact.
But here's the challenge.
Outside of medicine and perhaps inside as well, a lot of what we call evidence is
actually, well, a story or a pattern, or a good guess or an interpretation, perhaps
we've been mind reading other people, or we are just really worried about the risk,
and so we default to the worst thing.
So even in clinical medicine, what we call hard facts often aren't quite as
hard as we want them to be, because real life is just full of incomplete patient
histories and mixed messages and missing information, and sometimes uncertainty,
which is disguised as confidence.
And the problem is we apply these things that we use in clinical decision making
into decision making about people's motivation and about team dynamics.
And here the evidence gets even softer and we end up making a lot of
assumptions, even though your brain is telling you, well, this is much
more certain, we know this is true.
That person has been acting weirdly towards you.
And this is definitely the reason why we like certainty.
Certainty feels safe, but that is the trap.
Because in medicine, we might assume something 'cause we need to have a working
diagnosis, but we do think about the differential diagnosis and we then search
for evidence to confirm it or deny it.
But when it comes to sort of human behavior, teamwork, conversations,
difficult people, assumptions aren't just a way of diagnosing, they're not harmless.
They create stress, they create anger and pressure because they actually add
so much more emotional load to your day.
So you're not just managing your workload, you're managing the story
about the workload, you're managing the stories about what you think
your colleagues think, what they meant, what that person intended.
It's absolutely exhausting.
And in healthcare assumptions can particularly harm us because
we do tend to assume the worst.
We are trained to, to look for the most dangerous situation
so that it doesn't happen.
We often think things are very personal.
We often think that we've done something wrong and blame ourselves
and think we might be in trouble.
We often, often feel that everything is just our
responsibility, even when it's not.
So we take the default responsibility and we assume that something bad is
gonna happen unless we personally fix it.
And I know this is one thing that.
I take on myself a lot.
If somebody else is upset, I assume that I must have done something, or maybe I
have caused harm to them by a thoughtless comment or something like that.
And then what happens is we get defensive, We get defensive 'cause
we're already feeling bad and so our amygdala is already in threat detection
mode and we respond badly to people.
So over explaining, over apologizing, over helping in order
to sort of mitigate this risk.
Or we start rescuing people or we take responsibility that just isn't ours.
And often we act outside our zone of power.
We try and change stuff, we just have no control over.
And then we wonder why we're so exhausted.
So in the Traitor's reality TV show, assumptions just don't work.
They need hard evidence.
And that is true for us as well in our lives.
Because here you have two different roads you could go down so when
something happens at work, so maybe a comment or a tone of voice, a, a
look, a decision or email, even just an email, you can go one of two ways.
Path one, you can assume something, you can believe you assumptions, you
can believe your thoughts, you can be certain about them, and you can react.
You can decide what it meant, you can decide what their intention was.
Act like it's a fact and then you'll either get angry and fight you'll freeze,
you won't be able to think properly, you'll run away, or you'll go into fawn,
over help, over explain, and that will really lead to a lot of resentment.
Your other option though, is to realize you're making an assumption and work out
what your hypothesis is and check it out.
Do I have evidence for this?
Is this really true?
So you've still got the thought, but you treat it like a hypothesis.
You check it, you clarify it, and then you end up solving the right problem.
And that is entirely within your zone of power, your control.
The participants in the Traders make so many different mistakes
when it comes to assumptions.
So I'm gonna go through some of these now and work out what we can do instead.
So the first mistake they make is mistaking certainty for truth.
So if somebody is very certain about something, they think that
means they're accurate, and if they feel certain, they think it's true.
And when people are really, really stressed, often they don't look for the
truth, they actually look for certainty.
And obviously certainty is not the same thing as actually being right.
So if you feel yourself a bit irritable, defensive or you are rehearsing the
argument again and again, and being more and more certain, or thinking that, or
they always, or they never, or you feel you've got to act really, really quickly,
then you might be reaching for certainty without knowing the actual truth.
So when you find yourself thinking like that, that's your cue to think to
yourself, well, I'm having a thought here, and my thoughts are not definitely facts.
I need to test this out.
That leads to the second mistake that people in the Traitors make they accuse
other people of having certain intentions.
So they might say to them, you accused that person in order to throw the heat off
you, or you try to confuse this person so that we wouldn't be looking over there.
And this is where things get really, really dangerous.
Now, I love to talk about being on your side of the net.
This is a concept I learned from the book Connect, a fantastic book
by David Bradford and Carole Rubin, we'll put the link in the show notes.
And they talk about this concept of going over the net, which is very simple.
Essentially, in any conversation, there are three things going on.
What I'm thinking.
My intentions, my motivation, what you are thinking, your intentions, your
motivation, the impact things are having on you, and then the behavior, right?
Now, we both can see the behavior.
It's out there in front of us.
It's what would be captured on a CCTV camera, but we can never know the
other person's thoughts, intentions, motivations, and we are over the
net when we assume that we do.
So if I said to somebody, you are being very defensive, well that's over the net.
I don't know if they're being defensive or not.
Now, their behavior might mean I think they're being defensive, but what they
might be doing is, is raising their voice and not answering questions.
So I could say to them, look, I'm observing that you're not answering this
question and you're raising your voice.
That's observable behavior and we can, I could ask them
what's going on behind that.
But if I say, well, you're being defensive, that is over the net.
And that will make them angry.
They will then become defensive, of course.
'Cause nobody likes to be told what they're thinking,
particularly if it's wrong.
Over the net is judgmental.
It's likely to get someone's back really, really quickly.
And you can see this in the Traitors show when someone else
accuses somebody of something.
Immediately rationale Logic leaves the room.
They just respond with emotion, because how dare you accuse me of something.
So being on my side of the net means describing observable behavior
such as, you interrupted me, or I didn't get a reply, or the decision
changed, or the rota was altered.
If I'm over the net, I'm assuming meaning and intention.
I might be saying, you are undermining me, or You just don't respect me.
You are ignoring me, or you're trying to make me look bad.
So that is delivering a judgment.
And if that person wasn't defensive before, well, they'll
become defensive the second you tell them what they're thinking.
And it's brilliant to watch on TV because the more people accuse each other, the
more everyone just starts acting weirdly.
And one example of this might be an MDT meeting where various
different specialists get together to discuss a patient.
So you might have presented a plan and the consultant running the
meeting might interrupt you, change your plan, and move on quickly.
Meanwhile, you are stuck going, hang on a sec, they've not respected
me, they're making me look stupid, and they think I'm incompetent.
Well, that's really over the net, and that's a story about their intention.
Well, the actual fact is they change the plan very quickly.
And so rather than saying to them, you undermined me there, you could say, look,
I noticed you changed the pan quickly.
What was your thinking behind that?
Help me understand.
Because often when we assume someone's intentional motivation, we treat
that hunch or that intuition that we think we've had like evidence.
And that is the third mistake that the traitors make.
And that's exactly the problem that Harriet made.
A hunch can be useful.
Intuition is really useful, but it's not the same as hard evidence.
So just doing this reserve number one, what did I actually observe here, right?
What would CCTV tell me?
And then what is my interpretation here?
What story am I telling about it?
And we talk about this all the time, don't we?
What is my story in my head?
What's going on here?
And then thinking, actually, what else could be true?
What are some plausible alternatives?
So instead of feeling your feeling and going, well, that's evidence.
What you're doing is you are looking at that feeling and going, well, hang on.
Yeah, I'm having that feeling, but do I actually know here?
So in that example about the NDT, the fact is they changed the plan quickly.
The story in my head, they were undermining me, but other possibilities,
they were worried about the risk, they were thinking about what else they had
to get done in the meeting, they're running late, or maybe they've got
some information that you don't have.
Now, it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
It doesn't mean it felt nice, but it just means that you're
not taking that second arrow.
You're not turning that slightly difficult situation into a a courtroom
of judgements and accusations.
Now, if we take that example of the MDT, often the most confident person
is the one that gets listened to.
And this is another mistake that we see in the Traitors, believing that
confidence is the same as competence.
So one of the reasons they get it wrong so many times is that the most
confident person there is the most persuasive, the most believable,
and everyone just follows them.
In healthcare, we have our own version of this.
We are trained to value clarity, and we are really trained to value decisiveness
and confidence, and because we spot patterns fast and we often act with
incomplete information, choosing our working diagnosis and committing to
a plan, we almost treat people in the same way as as blood results.
You know, people are not measurable like some physiology is.
So your doctor brain, you can't do that move of saying, well, I
feel sure, therefore I'm right.
The problem is, the higher the stakes, the more your brain will
really crave certainty, because certainty, like I said before, it
feels safe even when it's wrong.
So we do listen to the most confident person in the room
and go with their assumptions.
The other mistake we make is going with the most trustworthy person in the room.
And there was a fascinating article in one of the psychological journals
about the Traitors, with one of the fascinating mistakes that the faithfuls
make looking at someone who's kind and calm and reassuring and they say, well,
they're far too trustworthy to be one of the traitors, completely forgetting
that, that traitors just sort of picked randomly at the beginning of the show.
It's not based on personality, although I'm sure that the producers
like to throw some really, really, uh, trustworthy people into the mix
to be traitors specifically because everyone will trust them and not think
they could possibly be a traitor.
So on the show, being nice is not evidence of being a faithful, it's
just evidence of, of being nice.
And there's a deeper point here because trustworthiness and
motivation are different things.
So a person can be really trustworthy, they can be decent and likable, and still
have motivations that you don't see, or you don't know or you don't understand.
Because in Traitors, the hidden motivation is really obvious.
They wanna win a massive pot of money.
In healthcare, well, the motivations are a bit less visible So a colleague.
They might be motivated by survival, self protection, you know,
covering their own arse, right?
Fear of blame, their reputation, hitting their own targets, avoiding extra
work, loyalty to a different team, or wanting to be liked, keeping their
head down, all those sorts of things.
And none of those motivations make them a bad person.
But if you assume that they are operating with exactly the same incentives and
priority and motivation as you, you are gonna get confused and disappointed.
It doesn't mean they're not trustworthy, it just means that they have
another goal that they're aiming at.
So the real skill here is not cynicism, you know, not mistrusting, everybody.
It's just being really clear.
And instead of assuming shared intent, you could ask, well, actually, what is
mattering to them most in this situation?
You can ask them what are they trying to protect?
What outcome are they aiming for?
Because if you understand the motivation, then you can stop taking
their behavior quite so personally.
For example, if you're trying to work out, a new working pattern and one of your
partners who's got very small children at home, and they tell you that one of their
main motivations for the next five years is trying to get home on time, then you
won't assume that they're untrustworthy just 'cause they don't agree with you.
You'll go, okay.
Their motivation might be a little bit different from mine, 'cause they're
valuing time at home in the evening.
Whereas you might be valuing time at home in the morning or
an extra day off or something.
Different motivations, different goals.
And another assumption that we make, which they make all the
time in Traitors, is believing authority instead of testing reality.
So people often don't believe people based on evidence.
They believe people based on the credibility signals that they give.
So if somebody really sounds convincing or has the right background,
or claims specialist knowledge, then people assume they just must
know what they're talking about.
Now in the current series, someone called Rachel, she's a brilliant example of this.
She is actually a traitor.
She said several times on the show that she was trained by the FBI
to spot when people are lying.
And when she said that something really interesting happened.
Because she said to the group, I can spot a hundred percent
when people are lying to me.
So now whenever she says, well, I can tell you are lying,
people absolutely believe her.
Not because she's been accurate, not 'cause they've tested whether
she's right, but because she's told everybody that she's competent at that.
And then she's backed it up with saying, and I have been trained by
the FBI, the best people apparently, of spotting when you're lying.
So this credibility becomes the evidence other people need.
You see the same thing in teams.
So we defer to people that have seniority or confidence or.
Impressive job titles, or maybe you've done a course, they've got the right
qualifications, or they've got the reputation, even if the behavior
they're seeing doesn't actually match.
Now, of course, expertise matters, but the key point here is that credentials
are just a clue to stuff, they don't give you proof and hard evidence.
So just because that person with credentials thinks something,
it doesn't mean that it's true.
You still need to test your assumptions.
So the question isn't, are they impressive?
It's, well, are they accurate in this particular situation?
Because somebody can be highly qualified and still be wrong.
And somebody can be really junior and be totally right.
So let's stop just believing that the most confident person or the most
qualified person is necessarily the one to totally trust, because we need to
know what their motivations are as well.
Now in a minute, I'm gonna tell you how you can check out your assumptions, but
one of the key mistakes that people in the Trades are making is talking about
somebody instead of talking to them.
And this gets really relevant to work, because on the TV, people are constantly
getting into little groups, you know, in the kitchen talking to each other
about other people, talking to everybody, probably apart from the person involved.
And they're swapping their theories and building this shared story and
this shared narrative, and becoming more and more convinced as they
talk to other people about this.
But the person they're talking about, they're not in the room,
so they can't test reality.
This is basically gossip.
And we all know that happens at work.
It has a very specific effect.
It doesn't make you more accurate about stuff, but it does make
you more certain about stuff.
'Cause once you've said it and someone else has said it, then gosh, there's
two or three or four of us saying then that must mean it's right.
But as you see very quickly on the Traitors, those stories can spiral.
And you think, why are they all believing that?
Just 'cause one person started it off, it has absolutely no basis.
Absolutely no evidence.
It's not the truth.
And interestingly, you also saw Harriet doing exactly the opposite.
So she basically said at the beginning of one of the episodes, I've got cold
hard evidence against this person, and I'm not gonna tell you about it at all.
I'm gonna come out with it later.
So the person that was accused just didn't get a chance to respond or
to give their side of the story.
And then when Harriet came out with this cold, hard evidence and confronted
in a very, very aggressive manner, the group really responded to the
anger and the emotion, not the facts.
So here the antidote is very simple.
It's check with the person involved, not the group.
And the way to do this, of course, is to share what you've observed.
That, that CCTV camera footage, you can also share the impact on you if you
want to, because nobody can argue with that, you know that that's your truth.
And then check in.
So if we use an example of that MDT meeting, you could say,
well, when I presented that plan, you changed it quite quickly.
I felt a bit thrown.
That's the impact on you.
I'm not entirely sure I understood your thinking.
So can I check what your main concern was so I can learn from it?
Shorter version.
When you said that just now, I felt on the back foot.
Can I just check what you meant?
And when you shared your observations, remember, don't go over the net.
No judgements, just observations, possibly the impact on you, and then your
checking answer, what should you do next?
Stop.
Let them answer, because you need to find out.
Here's another example.
You get an email from somebody very brief just saying, can
you confirm this has been done?
We need it urgently.
So your brain goes, oh no, they're having a massive go at me.
They're thinking, I'm not pulling my weight, or I'm definitely in trouble now.
So a lot of us would attempt to send a five paragraph apology.
But instead of doing that check, check what's going on.
Either thank you.
Yeah.
I've done it, or no, I was gonna do that this week.
I'm just checking.
Is there a particular deadline or risk that you're concerned about?
Because what often happens is when we go into checking our assumptions, we don't
actually check, we go into confessional mode instead to make us feel better.
So this is another classic mistake, emotionally escalating
and losing the clarity, losing the information, losing the influence.
Because on Traitors, if someone feels desperate to be believed,
they ramp up the emotion.
They get louder and more intense and more insistent.
And the problem is the more intense you get, the less persuasive you become.
And people sort of stop hearing the message and they start then
reacting to the emotional threat.
You know, in the round tables discussions, people start saying, oh, don't cry.
Don't cry.
Please don't cry.
And doctors and people in healthcare, we often do another version of this.
We don't often get louder and louder.
Well, we sometimes get louder and louder, but sometimes we get nicer and nicer.
We go into foreign mode.
So instead of checking, we are just confessing and trying to
make ourselves feel better by trying to help the other person.
So instead of just saying, well, have I understood this right?
You go into, well, oh, I'm really sorry.
I, I didn't mean it, and I was busy and, and it's been manic and I
didn't go to that because of this.
And fawning is your nervous system saying well, I'm, this is feeling really risky,
this is, feels like a threat, so I'm gonna keep them happy so that we stay safe.
And we do it because we wanna smooth things over and not escalate things.
So we, we do feel really guilty.
We've got this ridiculously overdeveloped guilt chip.
You know, if I, if they're upset, I must have harmed them.
Sometimes we feel that we can't be direct 'cause of hierarchy.
We might feel the consequences, the blame and complaints, and our reputation.
So we want to make it better before we even check the facts.
And sometimes we confuse kindness with compliance.
We think we need to do everything that everyone ask us to in order to
be kind, but we know that's not true.
So if you two feel yourself fawning.
Instead of checking over explaining, just say, well, before I explain,
can you tell me what your concern is?
Or if you are automatically apologizing, you could say well, I just want to
understand what's going on here.
This is short, this is grounded, and this is clear.
So, for example, You bump into a colleague in the corridor and you ask
'em a question and they answer pretty sharply, maybe a bit offhand with you,
and instantly your brain says, oh, they don't like me, or they think I'm useless.
I've really mucked up here, or they're fed up of me.
So instead of going in into Fawn or, or just shrinking yourself, just
check it quickly and kindly saying, oh, I might be misreading this.
Are we okay?
Or can I just check?
Are you okay?
Gosh, the story in my head is, I might have done something to upset you.
Is that right or not?
And just to bring this into real life, I was chatting with a friend at the weekend
and she's been asked to change her working days and work a full day on Monday.
But Mondays don't work for her.
She's got other roles, she's got other responsibilities, it would
make her life genuinely difficult.
But she's stuck not because she doesn't know what she wants, but because of
what she's assuming they will think or it means about her if she says no.
And she said to me, oh, I just don't want to be difficult.
And can you hear all the assumptions in that?
She's assuming what everyone else will think.
She's assuming they'll judge her or see her as awkward or less committed.
So as a result, she's just gone quiet, she's avoiding her colleagues,
she's putting off the meeting.
So here you can see that assumptions don't just create stress, but they just create
silence and miscommunication and distance.
And distance creates more assumptions.
And I think this could be the real reason why many of us don't
check our assumptions at work.
'Cause we're so scared of upsetting somebody when we do or we're scared
of being seen as the problem.
So there are lots of different ways she could do this here, but she
could just be clear, say, thanks for asking, but that doesn't work
for me, this is what I could offer.
Or she can actually preempt the assumptions without over explaining.
So, I'm not saying no to be difficult here, But Mondays just don't work for me.
I'm happy to consider some other solutions if I could.
And side note, there's a fantastic book called Never Split the
Difference by an FBI negotiator.
And one of the techniques they use with hostage takers to use a thing called
tactical empathy, where what they do is they put out everything they're assuming
the other people think about them already.
So it could be something like in a hostage situation, well here you might
assume that we're being far too slow, that we're never going to give you any
of your demands, that we're not listening to you, that we're being difficult.
And they just list them out.
And often when you do that, the other person goes, oh, no, no, I'm
I, I'm not thinking that, and, and corrects themselves and corrects you.
So that's a really good little tip there.
And if you find yourself stuck in overexplaining and informing when you're
trying to check, you could just stop yourself and go I'm just gonna pause here.
What other options do you see?
Or can I just check what your thinking is around this?
Take that pause.
We know the pause is absolutely golden.
So two more common mistakes that I see in the Traitors.
Number nine is they've got form.
So this happens constantly.
If someone has been acting a bit suspicious once, then everyone
thinks they're suspicious forever.
So in teams we do the same.
So if someone snapped at us in the past or behaved not very nicely in the past,
we think to ourselves, well, they're gonna do it again, that's just what they
like, rather than actually the time they were doing that, they had a lot on at
home and were under immense pressure.
Now, I'm not saying we go around blindly trusting people and we
ignore all their past behavior.
But let's make allowances for people and just because they did something
a bit underhand or not very nice, or were, or were really difficult at one
point, let's not assume that that's what they're being like, or that's what their
motivation or intention is this time.
People can change and context can change, so check.
And also remember that other people are making assumptions about you.
So if you are really stressed, if you're really rushed, if you're a bit
risk with people, then other people just fill in the blanks, so if you
do find yourself doing that, then just give them a short explanation.
Don't let them go off and spend three days making assumptions about you and making
all those stories in their heads either.
Just a simple, oh my goodness, I'm sorry if I was a bit snappy in the corridor,
i'd just been with a really difficult patient and it was an over spill.
Please don't read anything into it that can work wonders and really build trust.
And then the final mistake here is about intuition.
So, some people really worship their intuition.
It's like my intuition is everything.
I trust it completely.
Well, you can never trust your intuition completely.
I've learned that often my intuition is wrong at the first, but
afterwards I really need to listen to that little nagging feeling.
And in the Traitors we get people going.
I just know I'm trusting my intuition.
Or they, they're thinking something that's actually along the right lines,
but they go, oh, I'm probably wrong.
I'm just going to ignore it.
And we do this too.
We either treat intuition like gospel or we dismiss it.
'cause we don't want it to be true.
So that better approach is to look on it as a signal.
It's a signal, it's not a verdict.
Listen to it and check it out.
Your gut feeling is probably picking up something, and it might be
also picking up your own stress.
So listen to your gut and check it out as well.
Now before I wrap this quick dip up, I just wanna zoom out for a moment.
'cause one of the reasons that Traitors is such compelling TV show Is that
it exposes a really difficult truth, and that is that we are not as good
at reading people as we think we are.
We would love to think that we can spot people who are lying
or not being a hundred percent honest with us, but we just can't.
And under pressure, groups really start relying on confidence and likability
and just vibes as a shortcut for truth.
And then the errors just multiply and multiply.
And on the TV show, people are defending their, their mates, their
pals saying, well, they could never be a traitor, even though the program
is literally there to prove that trustworthiness and deception can coexist.
Once the group locks onto a story, it just becomes contagious, it becomes groupthink.
And you see this emotional contagion and people following the
most confident voice in the room.
And I have seen this time and time again in teams in healthcare.
When we are tired and overstretched, we just default these same shortcuts.
So when someone is in the corner in their fight, flight or free
zone, we don't recognize that.
We just think they're a bad, nasty person for being at their end of
the tether and snapping at us.
And we just attribute it to some sort of personality flaw rather than the fact
that they have just had the day from hell.
We decide what someone really meant instead of checking it with them,
and we make decisions about people without having that person in the
room, and that is kryptonite for teams.
It destroys trust.
And there's also one really fascinating contrast between the people that you can
see on TV that have been chosen to be the faithfuls and the people who are traitors.
Because when the faithfuls are trying to work out who's a traitor,
they're stressed, so they often accuse, there's emotional escalation.
They use that certainty as proof.
They gossip, they think they can mind read, and they have this idea that
everybody must agree with me, otherwise they're really offended rather than
just trying to talk things through.
Whereas when people are traitors, they know that they're lying, and they also
know for sure that other people aren't lying, that other people are faithfuls.
And so these traitors, they rarely just go off accusing people.
They only accuse to sort of distract from them.
And I've watched them sharing their suspicions, but very respectfully so
they're not getting people's backs up.
They're asking questions calmly.
They're making their cases without bulldozing anybody.
They're rarely getting defensive in a very panicky or reactive way.
Well, these are the good traitors.
The bad ones do, they get voted off.
But some of the ones I've seen, they don't overexplain.
They don't become outraged by stuff.
They just quietly hold their ground, and that makes them really believable.
' Cause here's the really uncomfortable truth, that calm people sound
right even when they're wrong.
So this isn't just about stopping assumptions, it's about communication
skills and making sure that you are checking stuff out.
And if you want to be heard in a conflict situation, the goal isn't
to have the strongest feelings, it's the clearest language.
Then finally, the brilliant thing that the traitors in this series are
doing that matters hugely in real teams, is they're building alliances.
They're building alliances between the two of them.
They really trust each other.
They're talking to each other.
They know exactly where they stand for now, and at the moment, there's
no underlying mistrust, ' cause they both have the same goal.
And that's a reminder for teams in healthcare.
If you don't invest in getting to know each other and talking to each other
before things get stressful, then when things get stressful, everyone is just
gonna default to their assumption.
And also, the more you know about someone, the less assumptions you will make.
And the easier it is to go and check stuff out with them, which is why getting to
know your team and building psychological safety and having a culture where it's
really normal to check things early, it's not just fluffy and nice to have,
it's absolutely vital and it can stop these tiny misunderstandings just turning
into these massive conflict spirals.
So here's the main point for this quick dip.
In healthcare in the NHS and in other organizations where the workload is
escalating and everybody is overworked, we don't get stressed because we don't care.
We get stressed because we care deeply and often we're operating
with incomplete information.
And when that information is missing, the brain fills the gaps.
It creates a story and we start overthinking and we make assumptions.
And when we're overthinking and making assumptions, the danger is that we
start treating that story as fact.
We assume it's personal, we default to the negative.
And that that's a protective mechanism.
Your amygdala will always go to the negative to protect you.
It wants to keep you, but not happy.
So we assume stuff is personal.
We assume stuff is our fault.
We assume we're responsible.
We assume the worst, and then we burn through energies, just fighting
something that might not even be true.
So this week, try this one simple thing, right?
Catch one assumption, especially perhaps that one that says
you are being difficult.
Turn it back into a question and ask yourself, what did I actually observe?
What story am I telling here?
Or what am I assuming?
What else could be true?
And if it involves another person, don't just go off and talk to loads
of other people about it, take it to that person and use a sentence
When you did X, I felt Y. Can I just check what was going on for you?
Because the goal is not to be endlessly nice, it's just to be accurate.
When you stop treating your assumptions as evidence, you
can solve the right problems.
You can stay in your zone of power, focusing on things that are in your
control, and the work will feel lighter.
So next time you feel absolutely sure you've got hard evidence about
somebody's motives, just pause and ask yourself am I looking at the facts?
Or or am I stuck in an endless game of Traitors?