In my last article, I made the point that people are complicated, diverse creatures with many motivations, quirks, and ideas. Trying to distill them into models that lump people into categories, like Myers-Briggs, is always wrong, because no one is ever that simple.

I then disregarded this point entirely, and proceeded to wax philosophic about a particular vector that I use: enablers vs. fixers.

So what next? Let’s do it again! This time, it’s gophers vs. “my hair’s on fire!”

Remember, first and foremost: this model is wrong. People are diverse. Don’t treat them as things, treat them as people. Use this model to think about certain behaviors, not certain “kinds of” people. I’ve found that it helps me be a better coach, particularly when working with either a new hire or a new professional (i.e., a recent college grad or an intern).

The “gopher vs. hair-on-fire” spectrum measures how someone behaves when encountering an unexpected, blocking problem. They’re stuck, and don’t know how to proceed.

At one end of the spectrum are the gophers. They take the problem, retreat into their hole, start searching and prototyping, and a week later, they emerge with a solution.

At the other end are the people whose hair is constantly on fire. As soon as they hit a snag, they leap up, start running in circles, and scream “help me! Help me! Help me!”

Both extremes are bad, and nobody is ever fully one extreme or the other. Everyone is smeared out somewhere on this spectrum. But if someone leans heavily on being a gopher, they might spend a week solving a problem that, had they asked for help, could’ve been done in an hour. And hair-on-fire is bad because (a) it’s annoying, (b) you’re interrupting other people with a problem that could’ve been solved with a 5-minute wiki search, and (c) you’ve been hired to SOLVE problems, not have other people solve problems for you.

As a leader, I pay careful attention to how new hires and interns respond to their first significant problem. I talk to their peers, review their updates at daily standup, and watch how they interact with the team. I try to assess where, approximately, they are on this spectrum.

Most novice professionals (i.e. new college grads and interns) tend to be more extreme on the spectrum, but even experienced individuals in a new job or role can exhibit poor behaviors. This may be because it’s a new experience for them, and so they might be prone to being more panicked, and thereby more hair-on-fire. Or they might want to prove they can “do the job,” and so they take it fully on themselves and go it alone.

What’s even worse is that new college grads have been coached for years that they must NEVER plagiarize, that the work they complete MUST be their own, and nobody’s told them that’s not true anymore. Good professionals steal code, ask for help, use LLMs, and do whatever they need to to get the work done quickly. New hires – particularly gophers – often need to learn that.

I coach both of them on how they should ask for help (which is the topic of a future article!). I coach both of them on how to be a more effective member of the team. And I help them learn the meta-skills on how to solve problems in general, rather than helping them solve ONE specific problem at a time.

So for gophers, I teach them about timing and sizing the problem: if they hit a problem, that they think might take a few hours to figure out, then go ahead and work on it for a half-hour or an hour, and then ask for help. I encourage them to not be afraid to ask for help, and I teach them about the sunk-cost fallacy. I check back with them, and with the team, to monitor progress, and give positive feedback when they’ve done the right thing.

For hair-on-fire, I teach them basic skills on how to search wikis, how to assess problems and impact, how to map out potential solutions, and then how spend a reasonable amount of time trying to solve it for themselves before asking for help. I might then give them – or ask a peer to give them – a relatively straightforward problem, and watch them apply what they’ve learned. Then give them feedback, coach, observe; lather, rinse, repeat.

So which are you? Which one’s better, and why? Feel free to leave a comment or question, I’ll try to respond.