What if it’s not about you?

I recently had the privilege of interviewing a remarkable tech leader at a local professional network event. She built a decade-plus career in IT operations without a traditional degree—through sheer curiosity and simply refusing to believe the path wasn’t hers to walk.

When I conduct live interviews in front of an audience, I typically take notes so I can come back to a discussion point later. My notes are shorthand scribble to avoid distracting from the conversation, and for very short-term use only; like the next day I likely couldn’t decipher them out of context. But yesterday, she shared an idea that immediately got my think on. I wrote down in capital letters: HANLON’S RAZOR.

She mentioned it when I asked how she navigated tech environments that weren’t always built with people like her in mind.

If you haven’t encountered it: Hanlon’s Razor is a mental model that says, roughly, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Or, if we’re being professional, call it carelessness, obliviousness, or simply not thinking it through.

It’s not a new idea. A version appears in Robert Heinlein’s 1941 novella Logic of Empire: “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” Napoleon said something similar about incompetence. The sentiment has been rediscovered in nearly every era, probably because it keeps showing up as useful.

But applying it to impostor syndrome in a tech environment? That framing was new to me. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Here’s what I understood her to mean.

When you’re a woman in a room where women aren’t the default, or someone who didn’t follow the credentialed path, or simply someone who is newer or different, there are a hundred small moments that can land as rejection. The question redirected to someone else. The interruption. The eyeroll that might have been meant for something entirely unrelated to you. The email that somehow didn’t include you.

Impostor syndrome doesn’t just make you doubt yourself. It makes you interpret every ambiguous signal through the worst possible lens. They don’t think I belong here. They figured it out. I said something wrong.

I’ve lived in those rooms. There were moments earlier in my career when someone would interrupt a contribution I was making to a conversation with an inappropriate comment—and suddenly that comment became the moment, not what I’d actually said. Back then, I said nothing, because the culture had already taught me the math: the cost of speaking was higher than the cost of absorbing it. No framework. No language for it. Just absorption, disempowerment, and feeling small.

What Hanlon’s Razor offers, in that moment, is a different option:

What if they’re just… not thinking about me at all?

Not because the behavior doesn’t matter. Not because systemic exclusion isn’t real. But because the most likely explanation for most of these moments isn’t coordinated malice at all. It’s obliviousness. Thoughtlessness. Social awkwardness. A bad day that has nothing to do with you.

That reframe creates a pause. And the pause is where agency lives.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part that gets misused.

Hanlon’s Razor is not a pass for bad behavior. It is not something an offender gets to invoke to avoid accountability. And it does not apply when there is evidence of malice—a pattern of behavior, explicit statements, repeated targeting. Those things are real and deserve to be named, addressed, and escalated.

This is a tool for the person on the receiving end of an ambiguous moment. It’s about your internal experience and absolutely not about letting anyone off the hook externally.

Hanlon’s Razor changes your state going into that conversation — not whether the conversation happens.

Here’s what this actually looks like in practice.

Something happens. You feel the familiar pull toward I don’t belong here. You apply the heuristic. Is this more likely malice—or ignorance? You take the pause. From that slightly calmer vantage point, you choose your response deliberately rather than reactively.

Over time, that pause becomes a habit. The habit builds into a kind of resilience—not the kind that convinces you everything is fine, but the kind that stops ambiguous signals from draining your energy before you’ve decided what they actually deserve.

That’s long-term empowerment.

The woman who offered me this reframe built her career on making complex things understandable. I think she just did it again.

It also reminded me of something I keep coming back to in my own work: the most powerful professional tools tend to arrive too late. Frameworks, language, reframes—they do the most good at the beginning of an experience, not after the damage is done. I’ve been writing about that idea through a lens I call Shift Left Communication. I wrote about it recently. You can see that post here. The connection to this conversation is more direct than it might seem.