First Principles
I see more fear than enthusiasm. I would not call it resistance.
Carlos Octavio, VP of Technology at LG lugar de gente, on the early signs that show up before a date moves — and why the people who stay calm in the storm are the ones he goes looking for.
9 min watch
Carlos Octavio
Vice President of Technology, LG lugar de gente
Runs technology at one of Brazil’s largest human capital management software companies. Forty years old as a business, roughly a thousand people, and an engineering organization now doing a kind of work that didn’t exist eighteen months ago.
What this conversation is about
Carlos watches for trouble in the weekly cadence, not the burndown. The signs he named are all verbal. Someone starts underestimating complexity and getting optimistic about a date. Someone explains too much, justifies too much. Someone waits until the last possible moment to mention that a dependency never arrived or that a requirement was never clear. None of it shows up in a tool. All of it shows up in a conversation, and he said the most reliable of them is communication itself.
On AI he refused the easy answer and said both things are true. His team built an optimizer that reads existing report code, extracts the data dictionary, finds the optimization, applies it, and then verifies the new output matches the old one completely. Real capacity, gained this month. And alongside it, a kind of work nobody scheduled: a cost forecast came back roughly eighty percent sound, the other twenty percent wrong in a way that looked identical to the part that was right. Somebody has to catch that. Junior engineers, he said, tend to read the output and believe it.
Then the last question, and the answer that reframes everything before it. Asked what he’d want to see about his team that he can’t see now, he didn’t ask for a number. He said he’d want to see excitement — because what he sees is fear. He started to call it resistance and stopped himself. That correction is the most accurate thing anyone has said on this series.
Three things to take from this
1.
Over-explaining is a status report.
Carlos listens for the moment someone starts justifying at length. It reads as diligence. It’s usually load. When a person can no longer say “I’m stuck” in four words, something is costing them enough that a plain answer feels unsafe. If you manage people, that’s your earliest signal and it’s free. If you’re the one doing the explaining, that’s worth noticing about yourself before your manager notices it about you.
2.
Somebody has to catch the twenty percent. Say who.
The optimizer is on a roadmap. The verification is on nobody’s board. That asymmetry is where the new load hides — the work got moved from producing to checking, and checking is the job you’re only visible in when you miss. Name it as work, give it time, and tell junior engineers explicitly that distrusting the output is the job and not an insult to it. Right now most of them are guessing what’s permitted.
3.
“Calm in the storm” is a state, not a personality.
Carlos looks for three traits: collaborative, open-minded, steady under pressure. Then he described what happens when steadiness fails — people get stubborn, stop listening, stop being willing to try another way. Most organizations read that as character and hire around it. It’s regulation. The same engineer is flexible on a Tuesday and immovable on a Thursday, and what changed was not their character. If you want more people who can see the hurricane from above, work on what’s raising their baseline, not on their attitude.
“They break under pressure, and collaboration goes down.”
— Carlos Octavio
Host’s note — Dharma Ramasamy
Carlos said his team is “afraid of what is coming and if they are not able to deal with that.” Read that twice. The fear he described isn’t about the technology. It’s about themselves.
That distinction matters more than it looks. A threat to your autonomy is answerable — give people more control and the alarm quiets. A threat to your competence isn’t. There’s no amount of control you can hand someone that resolves the question of whether they’re still good enough for a job that keeps changing shape. It sits open. And an open question with consequences attached, one you can’t close through effort, is the most reliable way we know to hold a stress response on. Add the fact that any answer will be delivered in public, in front of peers, and you have the exact combination the human body responds to most strongly.
Hold that next to what Carlos told me twenty minutes earlier, when I asked who he turns to on a hard problem. The people who break under pressure get stubborn. They stop listening. They stop being willing to try another way. That’s not two observations. That’s one, described twice, from opposite ends of the same conversation. Flexibility, curiosity, holding somebody else’s idea long enough to test it — those run on prefrontal capacity, and cortisol takes prefrontal capacity offline first. Not as a malfunction. As a triage decision.
So the organization sees stubbornness, calls it resistance, and books a training. Carlos looked at the same thing and chose a more accurate word. He was right, and the word he chose tells you the intervention: nobody has ever been talked out of fear about their own sufficiency. They can only be shown, in specific terms, what the new job is and how they’ll know they’re doing it. That’s not a culture problem. It’s a clarity problem with a physiology attached.
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