Organizational Neuroscience: Taking Organizational Theory Inside the Neural Black Box is both the most significant and also most complex article I’ve read this month. Its a survey of key findings from the realm of neuroscience that the authors feel will be relevant to “Organizational Researchers”. Unfortunately being a research paper I find the language very stilted but it was still worth the effort.

• Implicit Attitudes: attitudes we hold that we’re not aware of – sometimes ones that are in contradiction to our explicit attitudes. Furthermore Strong Implicit attitudes are quick formed and once formed are hard to change. I’m guessing that these are part of why effective organizational change is so hard.
• Unfairness – being treated unfairly will often provoke a emotional reactions that trump monetary/economic self interest.
• Empathy with respect to fairness – when we see others experiencing pain we feel an echo of the pain ourselves. When it comes to unfairness we take a personal interest in the treatment of others.
• In many cases rationalization is an afterthought our brain uses to explain how it reached a conclusion. In reality our brains perceive a much smaller amount than we think we do. As a result we interpolate. Read More…

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At Agile2011 Kevlin Henney provactively suggested that we don’t learn from mistakes (see: Why we don’t learn from our mistakes, The Optimism Bias), suggesting that we learn more from our successes. This seems to against the core agile principle that we learn from our mistakes (i.e. my motto “Fail Fast” etc). It also seemed to contradict the message in Linda Rising’s keynote that followed Kevlin. This makes me very happy to have seen a pair of articles in the past few days that bridge the gap: How Your Brain Reacts to Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset (a short summary from Science Daily) and Why Do Some People Learn Faster? (a longer item from Jonah Lehrer that ties several ideas together). The upshot both Kevlin and Linda were right. We do learn from our mistakes but not everyone has the mindset to do it.

Read More…

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This quick links is a bit of a potpourri:

Building an Agile Environment – Rachel Davies describes her experiences helping people to model work environments, using craft materials, playmobil characters etc. This helps surface the annoyances, impediments, attractors. Sounds like a great workshop. Next time you ask me if proposed work area is Agile I will try this.

But We Need a Database … Don’t We? – Ron Jeffries tackles one way to design a database in a test driven fashion, without actually having the database. Remember its not the only way its another tool.

Pair Design: Better together; the practice of successful creative collaboration – Stefan Klocek describes Cooper design’s approach to pairing in design. Some valuable ideas even for pure coders.

Estimation Non-Functional Requirements – Mike Cohn offers another approach for estimating the costs/tax of non-functional requirements.

Improving Names in Code – JB has a cute drawing to help us see how to evolve better names in code.

12 Tips to be a better coach – Martin Proulx gives us some things to remember when acting as a coach. My favourites:

• Inner Silence – “To be truly effective at listening to what others are saying … it is critical to block the voice inside your head”
• Keep silent: “After asking a question, never speak first.”

Code Cleaning: A Refactoring Example In 50 Easy Steps – Wouter Lagerweij provides a step by step example of a refactoring he did.  He’s since re-examined using tests to drive the refactoring: Code Cleaning: How tests drive code improvements (part 1).

In From Months to Minutes (1hr presentation on InfoQ) – Dan North examines what can be done with Agile if your turn the dials to 12 (its better than 11 :-). Its a very interesting and provocative take on where you can take Agile. My only concern is that some will listen to this presentation and start throwing away practices because Dan didn’t need them anymore. Remember context is important, Dan’s approach may not work for you.

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For sometime I’ve been publishing Agile Quick Links. Links to articles that Agile folk will be interested in. Now I’m starting NeuroAgile Quick Links, these will references to articles or summaries of papers that I think are of interest to members of the Agile community.

The Conversation is Over. Long Live the Conversation – reacting to an article about the use of twitter like tools in high school, David Rock examines the affects our interactions through facebook, twitter etc. are reducing our empathy and damaging the art of conversation. David talks about the silence in cubicle mazes as people ignore each other and fail to collaborate. Talk your teammates don’t IM or Skype them, real collaboration happens through face-to-face conversation and not over a computer

When We’re Cowed by the Crowd and The Web and the Wisdom of Crowds – we’re all familiar with the Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki) and the idea how a diverse group of people can make some very accurate estimates/guess. In these articles, Jonah Lehrer describes:

The scientists then gave their subjects access to the guesses of the other members of the group. As a result, they were able to adjust their subsequent estimates based on the feedback of the crowd. The results were depressing. All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of cancelling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it’s reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

I wonder what affect this has in planning poker where we get more information than just the raw numbers, also the ideas behind the numbers. Read More…

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One Reason Time Forecasts are so Inaccurate – Mark Graybill – talks about the cognitive issues behind our inability to do accurate time forecasts. Hint your attempts to estimate in hours/days will never get significantly better.

How We Determine Product Success – John Ciancutti – explains how Netflix finds ways to fail cheaply and fast. Think what would happen if you could run many small experiments to test the effects of your changes. That’s just what the folks Netflix  have done. Read More…

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That’s the Way We (Used to) Do Things Around Here – Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito, and Doug Lennick team up to write about understanding the mechanics of change through the lens of neuroscience. As many of you will know this is topic near to my heart.

A brilliant brainstorming technique – Edward Boches – explains how to improve brainstorming through silent listing. I’ve used this and related approach of working in pairs on a number of occasions. Both approaches are faster and seem to generate better results than traditional approaches.

People Know When First Impressions Are Accurate – apparently we know when we’re right.

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Courtesy of a few hours delay from Ottawa to LaGuardia, I have some unexpected time to write a Quick Links.

I’m always explaining to clients the problems with traditional Test Automation approaches. With Why Test Automation Costs Too Much Elisabeth Hendrickson explains why Test Last will always fail. Now she just leaves the job of explaining what to do instead.

Derek Huether found an awesome Scrum Intro Video (by Hamid Shojaee, Founder and CEO of Axosoft) – its only 8 minutes long.

Odopod is an online sketch pad, I’ve not spent enough time playing yet but it has support for animation. Might be a great tool for users of Dan Roam’s “Unfolding the Napkin” and Dave Gray’s  “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers” (Caveat Emptor I only just discovered Dave’s book today and so haven’t read it yet).

Hiring for a Collaborative Team from Esther Derby has a great set of ideas. I would only add one I recently hear from Pascal Van Cauwenberghe in an email to the agile games list where he describes introducing a potential hire to his company by playing the XP game with them.

Caveat Emptor – if you buy any of the books after clicking on my link I get 4% of the price. In all likelihood that means I might be able to afford a coffee or two.

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Its been a busy few months since I last did one of these.

Whenever I collaborate on a presentation, article or some other activity where I can’t see the person I’m working with I use an online post it note tool (i.e. lino.it). Every tool I’ve used so far has some small annoying limitation so I was recently happily surprised to discover Edistorm via @GerryKirk and Hillary Johnson.

In “Mechanical Agile” Daryl Kulak tells five fictional (I hope) stories of teams went from be Agile to Fragile. Very funny as long as these are not your problems.

With “Agile: Not Just for Software Development Anymore” April B. (no last name) described the transition of the DAXKO Association marketing team to Agile.

James Carr describes his experience “Using Innovation Games as Retrospective Activities”. Interesting, I’m currently exploring Innovation Games so this comes at a timely juncture.

Roger Brown has two items this week: “Adventures in Accelerated Learning” which provides a couple of interesting and timely challenges. “Multitasking Gets You There Later”.

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I started this week’s Quick Links last week at home in Canada. This week I’m at a client in the States and seem to have even less time in the evenings to write. How does that happen?

In People, Processes then (Maybe) Technology, Elliot Ross finds another angle one of my favorite thoughts. Tools are just enablers of process. When someone says which Agile tool (i.e. Rally, VersionOne, Danube/CollabNet, ………………) should I use, I reply “wait until you understand how you do agile, then you can decide which if any tool you need”.

Nigel Shaw writes: No Wonder Agile Guys Shun Tools in it he lists some of the many ways that agile tools fail in their attempt to mimic whiteboards. I add to his list: “As good as you make a tool displayed on a screen, it will still suffer from the problem that no one looks at the webpage very often. People walk past a physical story board many times a day, during standup they can touch the stories they worked on. Finally when someone comes up with a bright new idea for the board you implement it minutes with tape, PostIt Notes and white board marker.”

Steven “Doc” List talks about “A Culture of Heroism” and its ill effects on a team.

How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead – the story of Ralph Stayer the CEO of Johnsonville Foods. A great story of he completely changed the way his family Sausage company worked.

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Michael Spayd has written a brilliant distillation of Scrum, as The Tao of Scrum. It boils Scrum down to its soul and essence. (Yes Sandy Scrum does have a soul).

George Dinwiddie reminds us that estimates really are just estimates: The Importance of Precise Estimates.

I love seeing the application of Agile outside of software, John Cass writes: Thinking Iteratively With Agile Marketing.

In Effective exercises for teaching TDD Gojko Adzic writes about a problem I’ve had a few times.

If your presenting at Agile2010, you owe to you audience to read: Three Steps to Make Your Next Speech Your Best by Nick Morgan.

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