In defense of defensiveness

THERE’S A MOMENT early in The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein’s very excellent and groundbreaking novel, when Rowan and Bel are attacked at night by a stranger. Rowan wakes up to a man coming at her with a sword, and realizes in a panic that her own sword is not within reach. She’s saved by the warrior Bel, who is quicker to react and wiser to keep her defenses at hand. As the stranger bleeds out, Bel says, “That’s a bad place to keep your sword, so far from your hand.”

I bring this up in order to talk about defensiveness, and the (metaphorical) swords and shields that it manifests. Defensiveness is a kind of specter that haunts every potential feedback conversation: those who are preparing to give feedback dread all the awkwardness and discomfort that defensiveness can create, while those on the receiving end fear the accusation of it, and the compounding judgement it implies. “You’re being defensive!”—whether spoken aloud or merely inferred—is a peculiarly acute assault, one that ironically triggers us to raise our shields damn near every time.

Part of the challenge here is that we have been taught to interpret all defensiveness as bad, but like most absolutes, it fails in the particulars.

We’re already knee deep with the metaphors here, so let’s keep going. Imagine, if you will, a zombie film. In the film, our intrepid hero has become trapped in a building that is absolutely crawling with zombies. She must navigate through corridors and stairwells—and, inexplicably, a ballroom—to reach an exit. You can imagine the accoutrements the screenwriters would give her to make it plausible (if not exactly trivial) for her to survive: a knife, or a sword, or both. A gun, maybe. A weathered old axe. The leg of a chair. A bottle of Pinot Noir. An old whiteboard transmuted into a shield. Whatever it is, you would not expect her to go into this scenario completely defenseless. If she was given a sword and she left it behind, you would think, omg, she’s done for and prepare yourself for the worst.

Our workplaces are, for the most part, not teeming with the undead. But they are also not entirely safe, either. We can, given enough attention and care, create some relative safety together—and I know a great many people out there doing everything they can to that end. But the reality is that we are always subject to potential harm, whether from each other (through malice or ignorance or both), or whether from those who pull the strings of stock prices and venture capital and hype cycles, heedless of the bodies they leave strewn behind. There is no perfect safety for the living, I’m afraid.

All of this is to say that if we don’t expect our film star to leave her sword behind, we shouldn’t expect the same thing of each other. We can’t, of course, go running around with swords raised, threatening to bring them down on anyone who crosses our path, alive or dead. (Later in the Steerswoman series, Rowan will have her sword at hand and raise it at the first sign of a threat, only to realize she’s being ambushed by children. This is a cautionary tale!) But we should not be surprised that after a few years of rolling and arbitrary layoffs delivered by email that everyone is reaching for their hilt whenever a breeze rustles the leaves. We should not be surprised that unpopular RTO plans have people wandering the corridors with their shields high. We need to recognize that policies that say someone with COVID should show up to work signal that we live in a culture that values productivity more than it values life. Under these circumstances, a defensive posture is not only expected, it’s wise.

Where does this leave us?

First, we need to remember that while we have agency over our own defenses, we lack any such control over anyone else. For that reason, it’s our own defensive postures we need to worry about, not those of our colleagues. By noticing and reflecting on when we feel safe and when we feel threatened, and by slowing down and responding to real or perceived threats more slowly and carefully, we can make better choices about when to raise our own swords, and when to leave them sheathed. As dangerous as our workplaces may be, they aren’t full of zombies or murderous wizard’s minions; split-second decisions are rarely necessary, and usually unwise. Slow down, take a few deep breaths, assess whether the thing that’s making you feel defensive is a real and present threat or only your own fear of one manifesting before your eyes. Then, and only then, act accordingly.

Second, stop worrying about triggering other people’s defensiveness and start getting curious. If you have feedback you want to share but you’re worried about how someone might respond, stop: back up and let go of whatever conclusions or interpretations you’re holding and think about what questions you have. You think someone was rude in a PR, or seemed unprepared in a meeting, or delivered research that was half baked? Set those judgments aside for the moment and practice asking about their own experience and perceptions. Questions like, what was your thought process when you worked on this? Or, what were you feeling when you added that note? Or even the evergreen, how are you doing right now? are much more likely to be generative than awkwardly lobbing feedback at someone and then ducking to avoid the retort. Trust that just as you can be responsible for assessing the difference between when you’re in real danger and when you’re simply learning, they can too.

At the end of the day, this comes down to trust. Maybe we cannot (and should not) trust our corporate overlords or the investors infected with LLM-generated brain worms or whatever the hell is going on at the CDC. But, my friends, we can trust each other. We can care for each other. We can have each other’s backs. And should the zombies or evil wizards come for us, we can raise our swords together.