Manu's Vault

The-Twinge

5 min readStatus:Seedling

What It Is

The Twinge is Michael Lopp’s term for the low-grade, pre-verbal unease a manager experiences when something in a status update or conversation is subtly wrong — even before they can articulate what. A project report sounds fine. An engineer seems engaged. But something doesn’t sit right. That feeling is the Twinge.

Lopp introduces it in Chapter 5 of Managing Humans - Lopp - 2019 and makes a specific claim: the Twinge is not mystical. It is accumulated pattern-matching. An experienced manager has lived through dozens of projects, crises, and quietly disengaging engineers. When a current situation echoes a past one, the brain fires a warning signal before conscious reasoning catches up.

The Cognitive Mechanism

Cognitive science has a precise explanation for this phenomenon. Gary Klein’s Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model describes how expert decision-makers work: they do not generate and evaluate multiple options. They match the current situation to a familiar pattern from experience and simulate a course of action in their head. This is fast, largely unconscious, and highly accurate in the domains where expertise has been built.

Daniel Kahneman calls this System 1 thinking — fast, automatic, associative — as opposed to System 2’s slow, deliberate reasoning. The Twinge is System 1 raising its hand. Importantly, Kahneman also demonstrates that System 1 is reliable when the environment provides good feedback and the practitioner has had enough exposure to calibrate their pattern library. Engineering management, with its recurring failure modes (scope creep, quiet disengagement, hidden technical debt), offers exactly that calibration environment.

Dane and Pratt (2007) define expert intuition precisely: “affectively charged judgments that arise through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations.” The Twinge is this phenomenon applied to the manager’s primary job — reading their team’s state.

Acting on the Twinge

Lopp’s advice is not to act on the Twinge immediately or definitively. The Twinge earns the right to probe further, not to conclude. The appropriate response is:

  • Pause: Resist the urge to immediately dismiss or escalate
  • Probe: Ask a follow-up question — “Walk me through where you’re stuck” — to surface what the update obscured
  • Verify: Let the answer either confirm the instinct or dissolve it

This aligns with the 1-on-1 as a signal system: a manager who never gets past status updates in their 1-on-1s is not creating the conditions to receive Twinge-confirming information.

Risk Calibration

Two failure modes exist:

  • Ignoring the Twinge: The manager overrides the signal with surface-level optimism. Problems compound unseen.
  • Over-trusting the Twinge: The manager treats every gut feeling as a crisis. Team trust erodes. Engineers feel surveilled, not supported.

The goal is calibrated follow-through — curious, not accusatory. Salas, Rosen, and DiazGranados (2010) confirm that expertise-based intuition is most reliable when the expert uses it as a signal to gather more information, not as a final verdict.

How Experience Builds It

The Twinge grows with exposure. Every time a manager correctly identifies a problem early — before it surfaces in a retro or escalation — they reinforce the neural pattern. Every time they miss one, they should treat it as calibration data. Managers who reflect on their misses build faster and more accurate pattern libraries than those who simply move on.

Future Connections

Related atomic notes planned for creation: 1on1-Meeting-Formats, Information-Starvation

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4. Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-3713-1

    • Chapter 5: Primary source for The Twinge concept — the manager’s pattern-matching gut signal during status updates

  • Klein, Gary A. (1998). Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press. ISBN: 978-0-262-61146-6. Available: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262611466/sources-of-power/

    • Foundational account of the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model: how experts use pattern recognition to make fast, accurate decisions without deliberate option comparison; the cognitive underpinning of the Twinge

  • Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1.

    • System 1 vs. System 2 framework: explains the fast, nonconscious associative processing that produces the Twinge signal; also addresses conditions under which expert intuition is trustworthy

  • Dane, Erik and Michael G. Pratt (2007). “Exploring Intuition and its Role in Managerial Decision Making.” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 33-54. Available: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amr.2007.23463682

    • Defines managerial intuition as “affectively charged judgments arising through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations”; develops a model linking domain expertise, learning, and task characteristics to intuition effectiveness

  • Salas, Eduardo, Michael A. Rosen, and Deborah DiazGranados (2010). “Expertise-Based Intuition and Decision Making in Organizations.” Journal of Management, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 941-973. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206309350084

    • Integrative review confirming that expertise-based intuition is most reliable as a signal to gather further information; distinguishes valid expert intuition from unfounded gut feeling based on domain exposure and feedback quality

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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