Cross training

When we see “fractional people”, people who are spread across teams, the most common reason is that they’re one of a limited number of people with a specific skill. There is a real cost to having fractional people in the environment, so when we consider how we could make the overall teams better, “cross training” is often brought up as an action. Let’s hold a training session or write up some documentation so that other people can learn.

Getting out in nature

There are real neurological benefits to getting out in nature. Let’s look at four of those.

Using dates to motivate

I sometimes see teams that make up arbitrary dates to “motivate” the teams to get work done faster. Not only does this not work over the long term, it often makes things worse.

AI and Critical Thinking

While it doesn’t seem surprising that reliance on AI tooling would blunt our critical thinking, I am surprised how quickly it’s happening. AI tooling really hasn’t been in common use for all that long and already there are enough observable effects to be able to have studies on it.

Social proof in meetings

I’ve been in quite a few meetings recently where people are speaking in a passive voice, and saying things like “maybe someone could do this thing”. Naturally nobody does.

Eisenhower Matrix

Sometimes a new piece of work will arrive and it’s not immediately obvious whether we should start it now or if it can wait. A quick triaging technique that I use is called the Eisenhower Matrix1, an approach I first learned from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

  1. Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed the ideas behind this tool, and used them extensively in his work with the military and later in his role as president. ↩

Mob mentality podcast

I was interviewed on the latest Mob Mentality Show, a podcast devoted to mob programming, also known as ensemble work or software teaming.

Survivor Bias

“Survivor bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.”
— Wikipedia”

Cognitive Bias

It would be easy to think that all cognitive bias is a bad thing. When we hear people talking about it, it’s often in the context of the collection of biases that make up racism or sexism or other generally negative things. Yet, the truth is that cognitive bias is the way that our brain manages energy use and is overwhelmingly a positive thing for us.