Be prepared for big feelings when you take something away

We all like to think that we’re very rational and make decisions logically. We’re not and we don’t. Like it or not, we’re humans and that comes with emotions. Frustratingly, means our very rational decisions are often greeted by other people’s emotions.

People form attachments to identities, like being a user of or contributor to a project. Of course, they also form attachments to things both physical and abstract. When something goes away, they do not like it. We do not like it.

There are, of course, many rational reasons to take away something that people want and have grown accustomed to having. Many projects have long ago dropped support for the i386 CPU architecture because the hardware is less prevalent and they no longer want to bear the burden of testing and supporting a rarely-used architecture. Nobody is shipping new software for Windows 95 or Red Hat Linux 8 — those operating systems were out of date 25 years ago. You might stop hosting personal websites for contributors because that’s not a scarce resource anymore. Maybe you stopped funding travel scholarships because your donation streams have dried up.

No matter how rational your decision-making process, someone will be upset about the loss of something they hold dear. (If no one cares, maybe you should have made this decision long ago.) Of course, not all of the objections will be emotionally-driven. Most decisions will have rational arguments against them — if there is only one reasonable course of action, there’s no need for a decision, after all.

You don’t need to get unanimous buy-in for a decision to take something away. You do want to minimize the stress the decision causes. Here are some tips that I’ve learned over the years:

• Prepare your rationale ahead of time. You only have one chance to give a first explanation. Make sure you give the reasons why you’re making the change. Acknowledge the impact it will have on people. Point out the benefits (if any), but don’t try to spin it as solely a good thing.
• Give yourself enough time. People will need time to process their feelings. Make sure the timeline allows for that.
• Make sure the key people are around for the announcement. You’ll want the folks who are respsonsible for the change to be available to respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner.
• Don’t try to win the argument. Answer questions, clarify ambiguities, and respond to novel concerns. You don’t need to respond to every message from every person. It wastes your time and over-arguing can just get people to dig in further. And, of course, don’t engage with bad faith arguments.

This post’s featured photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash.