Try to Teach a Goldfish to Bark
If you tried to teach a goldfish to bark, you wouldn’t blame the fish—you’d question the request. Yet in many technical and open-source environments, this is exactly what happens to people.
We hire engineers, maintainers, and builders because they swim well: they think deeply, solve hard problems, reduce complexity, and make systems work. But as organizations scale, the definition of success quietly changes. Visibility begins to matter more than depth. Narrative begins to outweigh nuance. Social signaling eclipses problem-solving. The goldfish is now expected to bark—to speak the language of power rather than the language of precision.
When this shift goes unexamined, performance challenges emerge that aren’t about skill, but about misalignment. The role someone was hired for and the role they’re later evaluated on slowly become two different jobs. High performers, in particular, internalize this disconnect. System design flaws turn into self-criticism: Maybe I’m not strategic enough. Maybe I lack confidence. Maybe I just need to try harder.
Using an Industrial-Organizational Psychology lens, this session explores how misfit systems drive burnout, silence negotiation, and erode confidence—not because people are weak, but because incentives and expectations drift. The talk unpacks how impressions actually form in decision-making environments, why working harder often makes talented people less visible, and how inner critics are frequently internalized system failures rather than accurate self-assessment.
The session concludes with practical reframes and tools: how to translate deep technical work into impact, how to make impressions without performance theater, how to protect one’s sense of value in environments that reward barking, and how to silence the inner critic by diagnosing the system rather than fixing oneself.
Workshop: Key Takeaways for Participants
Participants will walk away with:
- A clear understanding of when performance struggles are actually system misalignments
- Tools to recognize and silence inner-critic narratives rooted in organizational design, not personal inadequacy
- A simple diagnostic to identify when they’re being asked to “bark” rather than allowed to “swim”
- Practical language to translate technical contributions into outcome-focused impact
- Strategies to make impressions at key decision points without performative self-promotion
