Aquiring knowledge outside the box

For many people it seems to be difficult to pay attention to information that is not matching their existing beliefs. Even if you are able to search for anything and find an abundance of correct information on the internet you may simply choose to ignore what is not according to your view.

Researchers from University of New South Wales have found that providing people with the right information on its own does not seem to be enough. As one of the researchers, UNSW Professor Enrico Coiera states: “Even if people read the right material, they are stubborn to changing their views." The study was conducted in the area of health, but i would agree that this is true in most disciplines, especially in IT.

In order to avoid being stubborn we need to constantly question our beliefs, and keep an open mind towards new ideas, but evaluate them in a skeptic way. The real difficult part is however to be able to know what to look for if your beliefs and world view is biased. Only remedy i can think of is to obtain and interact with information from very many disciplines and views, even if the information is of no apparent use, and this way at least become biased in very many ways.

Lerning by imitation

Children seem to learn by imitation according to an article by Derek Lyons et al in PNAS. I would go further and say "So do I", a lot.

When imitating he argues that children cant tell which actions are necessary and which actions are irrelevant to achieving the goal, easily resulting in something he calls overimitation. Seems like there is no skeptic filter screening actions being imitated, although children would otherwise be able to identify irrelevant steps as silly.

I guess this occur a lot in IT (among other disciplines) as well. Part of what is done has no real relevance to the problem at hand. The procedures just happen that way as a result of accidents being replicated and accidentally frozen behavior, just because someone happened to originally do it that way. Somebody may finally realize that some parts of procedures are not bringing any value and improve, but that seems to take ages.

Working from home

According to an article in Journal of Applied Psychology it is beneficial both for individuals and companies to arrange for telecommuting.

As a occasional telecommuter i agree that being able to work from home once in a while has positive effects for my personal well being and probably also for my employer.

The authors conclude with the statement that:

there is a downside of higher intensity
telecommuting in that it does seem to send
coworker (but not supervisor) relationships
in a harmful direction. Some of the
complexities of these consequences have
yet to be explored, but the evidence and
theory reviewed here suggest that they can
be managed effectively through informed human
resources policies.

Certain software development methodologies (like XP) rely on close interaction with both colleagues and customers. If you are supposed to do pair programming it will not work if the other person is working from home. Perhaps in the future someone will figure out a tool with which pair programming will be possible over distance, who knows.

A practical way would be to ensure that people still meet often enough for the necessary exchange and feedback too occur and adopt for example some instant messaging tools, although a tool can not replace the real thing.

The study does not directly compare what type of work you do and what kind of feedback mechanisms there are in the workplace or what tools you have access to. I would however guess that as long as the feedback keeps coming it is possible to be as efficient from home as anyone in the office.

Useless policies

Some laws, regulations or policies can be very well motivated or self evident, but others are more difficult to motivate. The policy may for example be a legacy from an earlier era or issue that has ceased to exist. Other are just based on wrong assumptions from the start, perhaps invented to locally optimize some aspect in the organization at the cost of the whole. Bad policies can also be the result of corruption or ignorance.

But what happens to policies that is not current any more in your organization? Typically it seems like they at some point stop being enforced. A policy that is not being enforced is kind of useless. I would further more say that it is even more damaging to society or the organization at large, since it can undermine the trust between individuals in the organization. "If one person can break that policy why can't i, break some other policy?" seems to be the reasoning...

The efficient way of dealing with bad policies would be to just admit that the policy and the policy maker was wrong. In society bad laws are replaced by newer laws eventually, but within an organization it may not be possible to have that kind of overhead. Motivation for the policies should in stead be made clear so that spotting wrong assumptions is possible and enabling corruption to be ruled out as the primary reason for the policy. I wonder if this could actually happen in IT...

Agility and Scrum

I was recently listening to some presentations from a conference hosted by the Belgian Java User Group BeJUG on http://www.parleys.com/. There are at least four excellent presentations that i hope people would listen to.

Kevlin Henney has two presentations dealing with different aspects of being agile (part 1 and part 2) dealing with the necessity of getting feedback and adapting to change when attempting do undertake IT development.

Giovanni Asproni also has two presentations (part 1 and part 2) explaining how Scrum works and can be adopted, and under what conditions Scrum will not work.

Risks and management

Recently i read John Scarpinos column How poor management skills jeopardize software quality dealing with willingness to take risks, fear and lack of communication within IT and a fascinating article in Evolutionary Psychology titled Towards the development of an evolutionarily valid domain-specific risk-taking scale by Daniel J. Kreuger et al.

In business today taking risk seems very attractive to management. Taking a certain amount and type of risk can bring a competitive edge to the manager. The manager willing to take the risk can, if he succeeds make a better result than his colleagues, giving a better opportunity to become a more prominent manager in the future. Somehow it seems like business today is not too different from what evolution has wired into us over time when humans were hunters and gatherers. Fear is in a sense a very normal feeling, i suppose our ancestors were both afraid of the animal they were hunting and of starvation at the same time. Only thing is that today we today seems afraid of managers and failure to get a good result.

I'm sure that at least in some domains there is value to a very rigid Quality Assurance process where by risk is minimized, but i don't subscribe to the idea that QA should be allowed to interfere with business risk taking or innovation. What i more consider problematic is first of all the trend by managers today not to be present taking responsibility for the risks taken when things go bad or not sharing the benefits from the risks taken. Evolution should however have given us the ability to deal with cheaters since this is neither any new kind of behavior... Second problem as i see is that managers don't know or either want to know what kind of risk they are taking. This can be related to a basic lack of communication or lack of presence of the manager. An other way of viewing the problem is that employees out of fear or whatever hide unpleasant issues from their managers.

Managers ruling by fear and authority do however have one significant disadvantage, since they are not likely to get anywhere near a full set of information to base their risk taking on. I would even go further to say that strict formal process oriented approaches will always come second to managers participating in a dialog as equals, being present and acknowledgeable and fair in their actions. Knowingly taking small affordable risks can give great rewards, and if things go bad, just use plan B.

Challange of introducing ideas into orgainzations

Bringing in consultants are often seen as a way of introducing new ideas into an organization. According to a new study done at Warwick Business School this however seems to be misleading.

It seems that managers bringing in new people hire someone like themselves. Any new idea or person introduced will not be accepted if the new person is to unlike the manager and the others in the organization.

The problem is that if the organization gets too similar there will be no diversity and very little difference of opinion, and changes needed may not find a place to evolve. If everybody is of the same opinion there is a great risk that good ideas and opportunities will be lost. Without new ideas there is likely to be stagnation while competition is evolving.

Inside diverse organizations on the other had there already exist a multitude of novel ideas that can be used. What the consultants specifically can do in a diverse environment is to bring ideas into attention. In a non diverse environment there is not very much of a possibility of introducing anything and the only thing left to do is execute whatever is planned.