The Sally–Anne test is a test that helps psychologists gauge a subject’s social cognitive development. Here’s the test:

This is Sally. Sally has a basket.

This is Anne. Anne has a box.

Sally has a marble. She puts the marble into her basket.

Sally goes out for a walk.

Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it into the box.

Now Sally comes back. She wants to play with her marble.

Where will Sally look for her marble?

By Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith – Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?, Cognition, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53202493

The point of the test is whether the subject can understand what Sally will do, given the information to which she has access. Of course, the subject knows that the marble has been moved into the box, but Sally would presumably have no reason to believe that the marble wouldn’t still be in her basket, where she had left it.

(Yes, I know that it matters how suspicious Sally is of Anne, but that’s not the aspect of the story that I want to focus on today.)

At work, I see the Sally–Anne problem all the time. Lots of people struggle with it. I struggle with it myself sometimes.

Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about.

A customer calls me; they’re having a problem. They’ve had it for several months, and it’s killing them. I’ve seen many problems like this before, so I prescribe a sequence of steps that I’m confident will lead to a solution.

The steps seem straightforward enough to me, but the customer doesn’t execute them. It’s hard to tell whether they can’t, or they just won’t, but it doesn’t make any difference because, for whatever reason, they don’t.

I grow frustrated because I feel like the answer is within their grasp and they’re wasting both their time and mine by not following my prescription. Do they want to be stuck with this problem forever? Are they just idiots?

Situations like this make it easy for frustration to escalate into anger. But anger reduces everybody’s chances of success.

Dissolving the impasse begins with understanding what the customer sees—what information they both do and do not have access to. It may appear irrational to you when they look for a marble in the basket, but it starts to make sense when you understand the situation from their point of view.

When I catch myself in the frustration loop, I remind myself that it’s preposterous of me to assume that the people around me would automatically believe ideas that have taken me decades to learn. I’m not necessarily going to change their beliefs on the basis of just a lecture or two. Especially if what I’m saying contradicts their training—which, in my line of work, happens a lot.

It’s scenarios like this that inspired my friend Anjo Kolk to say that performance problems are 90% political and 10% technical. It’s why there’s a 10-chapter section called “Politics” in my How to Make Things Faster book, and it’s why the whole book is based on stories instead of formulas.