Proprioception and Proactive Management

Proprioception and Proactive Management – D M Goldstein, March 2025

“Proprioception [ proh-pree-uh-sep-shuhn ] - noun - Physiology. 1. perception governed by proprioceptors, as awareness of the position of one's body.” (Ref 1). In plain English, this is your ability to know where your arms and legs are without needing to look at them. If you can close your eyes and touch your finger to your nose, that requires proprioception. I believe there are similarities with management.

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Driving a car

There are many things to be aware of when learning to drive a car: speedometer, tachometer and current gear (especially if driving a manual transmission), what is visible in your mirrors, what is in front of you, following distance, traffic controls, cross-traffic, fluid levels, other dashboard gauges, local laws about driving, etc. Once you’ve been driving for a while these all become second nature. You can feel whether you are in the right gear and going at the right speed; you are automatically scanning for cars, obstacles, and risks; you know when and how to change lanes. If you are paying attention to driving, not looking at your phone or other distractions, the work becomes almost automatic, without consciously tracking every detail. But subconsciously you are observing and reacting to everything. It is like that with management. There are hundreds of inputs that you are tracking and responding to on a regular basis, but an experienced manager might “just know” that these are happening without having to keep a mental checklist to search for each one. Yes, you have reports and metrics and more three-letter-acronyms (TLAs) than you care to acknowledge, but they are like scanning the windows, mirrors, and dashboard on the car. You know what is going on without having to recite mnemonics in your head.

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Playing music

As a musician, when learning a new song you may have to focus on the sheet music (or listen to the piece repeatedly if learning “by ear”), play slowly, repeat sections to get them right, and still stumble when playing it through. But eventually the muscle memory kicks in. You know which notes to play without explicitly planning them. It becomes natural. And the more you know about music in general, the easier it is to understand the song’s structure in your head. Like the inputs in my car analogy, as a manager your responses in this music analogy become automatic. You anticipate what needs to be done and you execute on it. As part of a management team, you are all presumably working in a coordinated manner to achieve a common set of results. Each has their part, and they must be in concert with each other, with higher members of the org chart also acting as the conductors for the team(s) below them.

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The airplane cockpit

My final analogy is a commercial airplane’s cockpit. In my car analogy, there are a comparatively small number of inputs to track. The execution analogy for music also has a small number of moving parts - you have ten fingers, two feet, and most instruments I am aware of have fewer than 100 unique notes. But a commercial airplane’s cockpit? Hundreds of gauges, requiring a multi-person crew. Variables like weather, other air traffic, and even political events, require a pilot to be vigilant. In business there are hundreds of data points, external variables, issues with staff and customers, economic and political influences, and organizational hierarchies to deal with. My reason for these analogies and the word “Proprioception” are because, as a manager, you must know what is going on and how to respond to myriad things at once. You need to develop a business equivalent to proprioception. Your “right hand needs to know what your left hand is doing.”

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Proprioception and proactive Technical Support

Managing Software Technical Support can be like that airplane cockpit. There are enough metrics and acronyms to fill a dictionary. We measure every aspect of a case’s lifecycle, from First Response Time (FRT), to whether it had First Contact Resolution (FCR), to Average Handle Time (AHT) or Time to Resolution (TTR), as well as things like how often cases are escalated to higher-level resources and what percentage of those were “good escalations”. We track whether a customer was able to use self-service tools like a portal or knowledge base, measuring “case deflection”. For customer sentiment, we measure Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES). From a business perspective we measure the Customer Retention Rate (CRR) or Customer Churn Rate. From a staff management perspective, we measure Employee Satisfaction (ESAT) and utilization rates.

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The metrics above are typically “lagging indicators” - metrics that are only known after-the-fact. Because they can only be known after whatever event caused them, they put the manager and team in a reactive mode. We have a Pavlovian response to many of these. Using the car analogy, we are hitting the brakes or swerving in response to seeing something enter the road in front of us. It may be a reflex-like response, with our “proprioception” knowing how to respond to the inputs. But how can we get more proactive, guiding our teams to avoid potentially dangerous situations?

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With the basic case statistics there are numbers you can look at, like backlog growth and composition, and other stats around aging, or any other statistic listed earlier. This is analogous to checking the weather before going outside; you know which outerwear to bring based on experience and expectations. This is not quite “proprioception” but anticipating what you will need based on what you know. If a certain business metric (or Key Performance Indicator - KPI) is going in an undesirable direction, you respond and try to mitigate it. That may be a product issue, a process improvement, a change to a tool or report, adding or training staff, or doing outreach to either customers or other internal departments. The trick here is to recognize it and respond to it quickly to avoid having it grow into a much larger problem. Here, “proactive” means seeing and recognizing early indicators of a problem and getting out in front of it. Admittedly, that is a reactive response triggering a proactive action.

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In the real world, if we see something coming at us, we either dodge or try to block it. Again, not quite “proprioception” (other than controlling your hands to block your head) but anticipating what you need to do to protect yourself and instinctively reacting based on what you observe. This is still reactive, but in closer to real time. In business you can have alarms go off when things are approaching a negative trend or situation or value, so you can jump in and respond. That might be anything from risking missing a Service Level commitment (SLA), to identifying a trend that may result in pain for many customers if not addressed immediately, like a bad bug or service-impacting Incident. You are sensing imminent danger and proactively trying to mitigate the damage.

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Back to driving

If you know there is an accident which is causing delays in your normal route, you might take an alternate route and even inform others of this problem. In the world of Software Support, that manifests as doing things that will prevent customers from having problems. “If we fix this bug, or add this feature, our customers’ experience will be much better.” That is a proactive way that a Support team can help. On top of that, Support can (and should) look at patterns and trends, using our “proprioception” to understand what those are telling us. Are parts of the product problematic? Are there seasonal patterns - either with your general customer base or a specific customer? Are you measuring the efficacy of your processes and doing continuous improvement? What other strategies and steps can you take to reduce the number of customer issues or the time it takes to resolve them? What are you doing to eliminate redundant work? Can a knowledge base (KB) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) system speed up resolutions or even aid in prevention?

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Back to airplanes

When there is any kind of significant disaster with airplanes, or one which fortunately was averted, some governments have an agency to investigate them. In the US, we have the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). They investigate crashes and close calls to determine their cause and possible deterrents. That is one of the best ways Support and their peers in Engineering can be proactive. When an “Incident” or severe bug happens, they need to perform a “Root Cause Analysis” (RCA) to determine what really happened, an “Escape Analysis” to learn why it happened, and create a plan of action to determine how to prevent it from happening again. That is ultimately a proactive exercise to prevent future problems.

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Controversy and heresy

I have been reading articles lately which say things like, “CSAT and NPS are worthless stats.” The sentiment behind that is that they are lagging indicators, as discussed above, and are often measured by surveying the wrong audience. If these answers are coming from end users but not the business leaders who make purchasing decisions, they could be inaccurate or misleading. While it is possible that these are as useful (or useless?) as the “Check Engine” light on your car’s dashboard, I still think they are an important datapoint, even if it is just to measure their trend as a lagging indicator after you make changes to your business processes or tools. And case stats like backlog statistics? I was in an interview long ago where the hiring manager asked me about the backlog size at my previous company. If I said “200”, how would he know whether that was good or bad without adding context to it? I discussed this and the need to have useful metrics in my article on Reporting (Ref 2). What ultimately matters (or should matter) is whether and how Support is contributing to the success of the business and its business objectives. Using the knowledge that Support (and Support Management) has from their experience gives them a type of proprioception and enables them to quickly react to situations or get in front of them to proactively prevent them.

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Wrapping it up

Your body takes inputs from your nerves, eyes, and ears, and applies experience, the result being that you know what is going on without having to intentionally monitor everything. When you sense danger or a change in conditions, you respond, sometimes “automatically”. In management you are similarly taking input from all your gauges, meters, and observations, and almost instinctively acting on the day-to-day ones. You can sense when something is wrong, and you jump in early. You develop a type of proprioception for your environment. That is your “super-hero skill”, and now you have a name for it.

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References

1.????? Dictionary.com

2.????? The Seven Rules of Reporting - D M Goldstein https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/seven-rules-reporting-miles-goldstein

3.????? Photo credit, Hiller Aviation Museum (Boeing 737-300) https://www.hiller.org/museum/exhibits/

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