Hanlon's Razor

That 'political' blocker is usually just a miscommunication. The stakeholder who seems to be 'undermining' you is usually missing one piece of information. The exec who 'changed their mind at the last minute' usually saw a version of the document you didn't send them.

Assuming bad intent is emotionally satisfying and burns through social capital faster than any product failure. Because the moment you start treating someone as an adversary, they start behaving like one — partly because they've picked up on it, partly because you now read neutral actions as hostile.

The habit that helps: when you're about to send an email containing the words 'unfortunately' or 'I'm concerned that', wait 24 hours. Nine times out of ten, a 15-minute call with genuine curiosity about their view will solve what a week of passive-aggressive follow-ups can't.

The missing version number. Legal 'shot down' a feature two days before launch. The Slack reaction in the product channel: 'they're impossible', 'they never actually read the proposals', 'they're blocking us on purpose'. The PM schedules a call. It turns out legal had been forwarded a version of the spec that was three weeks out of date — the document name didn't have a version number, and the one they reviewed still contained the risky data-sharing clause that the product team had quietly removed. Thirty seconds after the correct version was shared, legal said 'oh, that's fine, go ahead.' Zero political intent. One missing version number. If the PM had sent the escalation email they were drafting, the relationship would have taken a quarter to recover from a problem that didn't exist.

Robinhood / GameStop, January 2021. The GameStop episode is Hanlon's at industrial scale. When Robinhood restricted buying of GME and other meme stocks, millions of users instantly concluded the broker was colluding with hedge funds to protect short-sellers. Congressional hearings were convened. The CEO was dragged in front of a committee. The actual explanation, which took weeks to land in public understanding: the NSCC clearinghouse had issued Robinhood a $3bn collateral demand overnight due to volatility in the underlying securities, Robinhood didn't have the capital to post, so it had to pause buys until it did. No malice — just a structural margin call most retail users had never heard of. The malice theory was emotionally satisfying and wildly dominant on social media. The Hanlon's theory was correct.