This episode has been brought to you by a quick trip to California.

Tom Stafford wrote about his use of Psychology to avoid Bystander Apathy. Interesting his approach point to a specific person (or persons) and tell them exactly what to do has been standard training for first aiders for years.

Sharp Brains had an excellent series “Under­stand­ing the Human Brain and How It Responds to Stress”:

• Octo­ber 17th: The Human Brain and How it Responds to Stress
• Octo­ber 24th: Grey Mat­ters
• Octo­ber 31st: The Lit­tle Brain Down Under
• Novem­ber 7th: Stress Response Explained
• Novem­ber 14th: The Human Brain Likes Balance

Study Hacks described a study of elite vs average violin players. The difference in their practice wasn’t their dedication, on average they spent the same amount of time – it was how they practiced. Elite players spent time stretching their skills, pushing their boundaries and practicing the uncomfortable. In addition elite players consolidated their practice into well defined blocks (two a day) vs. the average who spread their practice through out the day.

Stephanie West Allen shares evidence that SWOT analysis may lead us to dead ends.

Garth Sundem suggests that “Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong”. In an interview with Robert Bjork it is suggested our learning model of attempting to master one skill before moving onto the next might be completely wrong.

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In a New York Times article: “The Rise of the New Groupthink” this week Susan Cain claims that teams and collaborative work give rise to groupthink. Groupthink is not out of the question, as Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate in “The Invisible Gorilla” group think is a risk – cite the example of the Georgian War in 2008:

When Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president of Georgia in 2004. he was only thirty —six years old. He stocked the government with loyal ministers who were also in their thirties and lacked military experience but sympathized with their leader’s views about the importance of reclaiming the breakaway regions from Russian influence. Over the next four years they managed to convince themselves that it was a good idea to fight an army that outnumbered theirs by twenty five to one. It’s not hard to imagine how a group of like—minded government officials could take a set of opinions that none of them held with great confidence individually and aggregate them, by deliberating among themselves and reinforcing one another’s public statements, into a high-confidence conclusion.

Read More…

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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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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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NeuroAgile – the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology and agile/lean software development. For some time now I’ve had an interest in understanding how and why Agile works (see: Does Scrum Work? Hell Yes!!! Why and Why Scrum Works??) while poorly written it was my first attempt at articulating a deeper why.

For sometime now I’ve been reading about Neuroscience (Norman Doidge “The Brain That Changes Itself”, John Medina “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving”, James Zull “The Art of Changing the Brain.”,  Torkel Klingberg “The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory” and David Rock “Your Brain at Work”), cognitive science and psychology (mostly via well researched blogs). What I’m learning that these fields have a lot to tell us about people, their motivations and how they work together. I think  that these things are at the heart of making successful projects. Read More…

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For several years I’ve been trying I’ve been trying to find a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) book that provided a simple and clear explanation of what it is and how it works. With “Relationships Made Easy for the Business Professional” – Dr David Fraser scores well on the first and not as well on the second.

The book’s strength comes from David’s practical business background which he uses to ground his writing and examples. The book fails when its attempting to explain how NLP works.

David describes a 12 step process to help

1. Attention to others
2. Attitude
3. Self-control
4. Wavelength
5. Filters
6. Connection
7. Values
8. Language
9. Self-awareness
10. Attention to yourself
11. Balance
12. Love Read More…

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Sorry for falling off the radar for so long. I’m doing some coaching work in Toronto and find myself working late enough most nights that I don’t have the energy to write when I’m done. On Dec 14, I’m giving presentation at XPToronto (7pm). See the site: http://xptoronto.com/ a bit closer to the date for location details (Ryerson).

CREATIVITY FOR AGILE TEAMS

Creativity can manifest in several ways including creation of something new, refinement of something that exists and problem solving. How do we support, enable and enhance the creative abilities of Agile teams? There are many ways to shape the work environment for greater creativity. We will present a summary of the literature that describes how creativity can be enhanced by providing a safe, nurturing environment, enhancing group interactions, pacing activities that utilize different sensory modes and trusting in the power of subconscious integration.

This session was previously presented at Agile 2010.

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For the past year every time I give my “Learning Best Approaches for Your Brain Talk”, I’ve promised there would be an article on InfoQ. Well I kept to much work in progress and this week I took care of that problem and we’re live: The Science of Learning: Best Approaches for Your Brain

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In the past two days I’ve presented “Learning Best Approaches for Your Brain” to two audiences. First in Toronto for XPToronto and then Quebec City for AgileQuebec. We got fair sized audiences for each and both groups seemed to have a lot of fun. Given my lack of French I’m truly amazed about how engaged the Quebec audience was – neuroscience doesn’t transcend language barriers easily.

I would to thank  the organizers of XPToronto (Lawrence Ludlow, Michael Sahota, and anyone else I missed) you created a great evening. I would especially like to thank Lawrence for picking me up from the airport and bringing me into Intelliware for the day.

I would like to thank Karl Metivier for remembering me from Agile2009, inviting me to Quebec City and driving to pick me up. I would to thank Louis-Phillippe Carignan, Alex and George (sorry I didn’t get last names), for organizing Agile Quebec and growing it, to its current size.

I was asked for my current slides, even with the notes they’re not very helpful. Nonetheless here they are: Learning Best Approaches for Your Brain.

Finally after the presentation I was made aware that I hurt (emotionally) one of my attendees. During my survey he said that he “wanted to learn about Agile”, I wanted to say that this presentation wouldn’t help, but that isn’t what he understood. He felt attacked. Later on I made use of his example again, I can’t remember what I said. He felt attacked again. I apologized in person and he said he didn’t buy it. I accept that. This is my public apology. I pride myself on being a ‘human focused’ Agile coach and obviously didn’t live up to my own standards. For that I’m truly sorry.

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