My Little Observation Game: Spotting the Odd One Out
Alright, let me tell you about this thing I did, kinda started calling it my ‘room full of people, one odd out’ exercise. Wasn’t anything official, just me trying to figure something out. It kicked off after a really strange project kick-off meeting I sat through a few months back. You know the type.
Picture this: a room, maybe fifteen, twenty of us. Some folks I knew well, others were new hires or from different departments we suddenly had to work with. The energy was just… weird. Everyone was super agreeable, lots of nodding, lots of “great idea” comments flying around. But it felt hollow. Like watching a play where everyone knew their lines but didn’t quite believe them. I left that meeting feeling like I’d just watched a performance, not participated in a real discussion.
So, I got this idea stuck in my head. I started watching people more closely over the next few weeks. Not in a creepy way, mind you! Just paying attention during coffee breaks, casual chats near the water cooler, observing the dynamics in follow-up meetings. Who paired off naturally? Who seemed to just echo the loudest person? Who avoided eye contact when certain topics came up? It was like scanning a crowd, looking for the one person facing the wrong way.
It reminded me of this gig I had years ago. Small company, felt really tight-knit. Then they brought in this new manager. Slick talker, charming, everyone up top thought he was the bee’s knees. But interacting with him always felt… off. Like he was wearing a mask. Never really committed to anything concrete, just managed perceptions. Long story short, the guy nearly ran the place into the ground with bad, flashy decisions before jumping ship. That experience definitely made me a bit more cynical, maybe a bit too quick to look for the person who doesn’t quite belong. You learn to watch your back, I suppose.
Anyway, back to my little observation game at the current place. It wasn’t about finding a ‘bad apple’ like that old manager. I was just curious about the dynamics. And I did spot someone who seemed like the ‘odd one out’. It was this quiet developer, hardly said a word in big meetings. While everyone else was debating frameworks and strategies for weeks, building slide decks, having endless discussions… I noticed this person was just quietly building stuff. Like, actual working code.
- Week 1: Heated debate about Database A vs Database B.
- Week 2: More meetings, flowcharts comparing A and B.
- Meanwhile: Quiet Dev had already spun up a test environment with Database A and was running actual queries, finding potential issues nobody had even thought of.
This person was the ‘odd one out’ not because they didn’t fit in socially, but because they were focused on tangible results while the group was stuck in performative work. They weren’t playing the game of ‘looking busy’ or ‘sounding smart’ in meetings. They were just… working. Getting things done. The oddness was their lack of participation in the collective ritual of discussion-over-action.
It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. Made me seriously rethink what ‘fitting in’ means, especially at work. The person who seems out of step might just be marching towards the actual goal. Since then, I try to pay more attention to the quiet doers, not just the loud talkers. It’s easy to get caught up in the noise, you know? Spotting the ‘odd one out’ turned out to be less about finding a problem and more about recognizing where the real work was happening. Just my two cents from watching the room.
