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.

Perceptual positions & Halloween

I had a client once that went all out for Halloween. Just about everyone showed up in costumes and there were prizes for individual or team costumes. At the time I was there, it was commonplace for work to be outsourced to India so my group decided to do a team costume of “IT outsourced to Mars”.

Should remote workers have cameras on?

For remote workers, the issue of cameras on or off keeps coming up. There’s no question that having cameras on allows for much richer interactions. We can start to interpret body language and can pick up on so many subtle hints that just aren’t possible when the cameras are off.