Oh nice observation! I hadn’t thought of complaining as a way to externalize the detection of blindspots, but that makes a lot of sense.
This also reminds me of “You should complain about it”, which also talked about complaining as a way of creating common knowledge about problems, but for a group:
Complaining often feels like unloading a burden, and it allows us to achieve shared feeling: Before complaining, you knew that the situation was bad, and you assumed that the others around you also knew that but you weren’t sure. After complaining together, you know that they think it’s bad too, and they know that you know, and you know that they know, etc. The object of complaint has reached shared understanding in a way that it wasn’t before. You know you’re not alone in feeling bad about it.
Sharing your pain this way is a bonding activity. When you complain to each other, you increase the social ties between you, because you each know and trust each other a little bit more than you did before. You’ve shared feeling, and you’ve demonstrated that you are someone who it is safe to share feelings with. [...]
Complaining, in and of itself, is unlikely to ever fix anything… other than your mood, your social relationships with your coworkers, and your shared understanding of the problems that everyone is facing. Little things like that.
Also, it turns out, those are all really useful things to have if you are going to fix anything else.
If you are one person with a problem, you have very little leverage. If you are ten people with the same problem, you have rather a lot more leverage… unless you don’t know that you are ten people with the same problem, in which case you are ten people who are not doing anything about it because you don’t think you have the leverage to fix the problem.
Complaining does not make much of a difference, but it creates the conditions in which you can all work together to make a difference.
Oh nice observation! I hadn’t thought of complaining as a way to externalize the detection of blindspots, but that makes a lot of sense.
This also reminds me of “You should complain about it”, which also talked about complaining as a way of creating common knowledge about problems, but for a group: