I’m sure you’re thinking “but I can be angry or sad for hours or sometimes days at a time”, and what’s happening in those cases is that you’re continually retriggering those same emotions over and over again. It’s not the same chemical release over a long time, it’s a continual retriggering of those chemical releases.

What does that mean for practical purposes? It means that if we can interrupt the patterns that we’re following, we’ve got at most another 90 seconds to put up with those negative emotions before we start to feel better.

Why do I only mention negative emotions? Because I’m assuming that you have no interest in interrupting happy emotions. Let’s let the happy ones continue to run.

What could that interrupt look like? It could be as simple as the phone ringing and grabbing your attention. It could be movement to shift your state, particularly movement into a different environment such as walking outside. Just standing up and shaking your body can be a powerful interrupt.

For even more powerful interrupts, almost any of the techniques that I show in the Anxiety Reset will help here. I teach them in the context of anxiety but they’re powerful interruptions and will work in other situations too.

When you’re feeling those negative emotions for long periods of time, you’re just running habitual patterns in your brain, and those patterns can be interrupted.

What’s even better is that the more often we interrupt those patterns, the less we’ll run them. This is just another aspect of Hebb’s law: “Neurons that fire together wire together”. The more we run the same patterns, the stronger they’ll become. The more we interrupt them, the weaker they become.

A related trick is to label emotions when we notice them. The simple act of saying to ourselves “I am feeling angry” or “I am feeling sad” will weaken that effect on us. This technique is called “affect labeling” and is surprisingly effective.

“Behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that merely putting feelings into words can serve as a regulatory strategy”
— Levy-Gigi, E., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2022). Affect labeling: The role of timing and intensity. PloS one, 17(12), e0279303.

The key point here is that if we’re regularly feeling emotions that we don’t want to feel, there are ways to lessen that, and many of them are quite simple to do.

Standard disclaimer: There are no approaches that work for all of the people, all of the time. If what you’re trying isn’t working for you, perhaps you should seek out a professional to find approaches that will work in your context.

However, for the second tasting, the jams were switched and the subjects were trying the jam that they had rejected, not the one they had picked. Two thirds of the participants didn’t even notice that the jams were switched and happily justified why they had selected this new jam. This happened even when the flavours were as different as apple-cinnamon and grapefruit!

I’ve talked before about how “why” questions can be problematic and this is a perfect example. In this case, the people were doubling down on an answer that was completely wrong. This was not the jam they’d picked the first time, and yet they were completely convinced that it was, and were happy to provide justification for what they considered to be good decision making.

This particular effect is called choice blindness, and is defined as a cognitive bias where people fail to notice that the outcome of a decision differs from their original intention, often fabricating justifications for the manipulated result.

But it doesn’t stop there; the experiment had one more twist. When this was all done, they were given a questionnaire asking about their own decision making process.

“Among other questionnaire items, the subjects had to say exactly how they thought they would feel if they had participated in an experiment that tricked them in this precise way. Of course approximately 90% of the subjects said they would never fall for such a trick.”

Not only are we easily tricked, we’re highly confident that we can’t be tricked, and that blinds us to our own weaknesses.

If we want to make better decisions, we need to be very deliberate about that. It’s too easy to convince ourselves that we’re already great, and then to not notice when the decisions we made are actually quite poor.

An interesting thing with humans is that the first problem we bring up is rarely the real problem. For the browser to have timed out, that means the user had probably already been waiting for five minutes. No wonder they were unhappy.

The fix in that case was to replace 4000 lines of Java code with a page and a half of SQL, taking the execution time from 5+ minutes to roughly a tenth of a second. While the technical details were interesting, for this post I want to focus on the framing of the problem.

They approached me with a problem that wasn’t the real problem. Had I just taken that at face value, we would have found some browser setting to make the timeout longer, and while that would have solved the immediate problem, it wouldn’t have made the users any happier.

Why do we do this? Why do we focus on the wrong problems?

There are a couple of reasons. One is what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 and System 2. Our brains have evolved to optimize for energy consumption and System 1 is very fast and uses very little energy. System 2, on the other hand, is much slower, uses much more energy, and is therefore less desirable. Wherever possible, our brains prefer to use System 1 to make decisions.

Unfortunately while it’s fast, System 1 is often wrong. The example above is a perfect example of System 1 thinking: “Let’s just extend the browser timeout”.

What I did in this case was to ask the kinds of questions that force us into System 2. “How could we shorten the entire time so that we don’t need to change the timeout?” Or “what’s the bigger problem we’re trying to solve?”

Questions that can be answered with yes/no, and questions starting with “why” will tend to keep us in System 1 so we want to avoid them. We want open ended questions and those often start with “how” or “what”.

The key to remember is that the first problem is rarely the real problem. Ask some questions. Dig a bit deeper. Force us both to use System 2, so that together we can find a better answer.

⮕ More on Systems 1 and 2

Another related reason for focusing on the wrong problem is called Attribute Substitution. It’s when we’re faced with a computationally difficult problem, and our brains unconsciously replace that problem with a computationally simpler problem and we solve for that instead. We’re usually not even aware that we’ve done this because it’s happened entirely at an unconscious level (System 1).

The good news is that the same questions that will switch us to System 2, will also help us identify that we’ve been tricked by Attribute Substitution, and will allow us to refocus on the real problem.

⮕ More on Attribute Substitution

In this particular case, we ended up with a solution that made everyone happy. That only happened because we were able to step back and see the problem through the lens of System 2.

The interesting point, at least for this article, is how people developed one or the other of these mindsets.

They found that children praised on their intelligence (ie “you’re so smart”) developed a Fixed Mindset. They did more poorly on future tasks, gave up more easily and when given a choice of working on easy or hard problems, picked the easy ones.

Children praised on the effort they put in (ie “you really worked hard on that one”) developed a Growth Mindset. They were more successful, persevered more with challenging tasks and when given a choice of easy or hard problems, picked the harder ones.

As you’ve probably already deduced, people with a growth mindset significantly outperform people with a fixed mindset.

I was reminded of this when my friend Stacey made this observation on LinkedIn: I think I’ve gone from Sonnet telling me “you’re absolutely right” all the time to Opus telling me my ideas are “smart.”

Notice that in both cases, the AI is praising how smart she is, not how much effort was put in. This will directly encourage a fixed mindset in those who hear this messaging on a regular basis.

I would expect it to be fairly easy to tell these tools to not praise us in that way. The fact that this is the default behaviour is certainly troubling though.

The language we use is critically important, and affects us far more than we think.

It wasn’t a large book, and I quickly read through all of it. Yet, while I now “knew” how to do it, I still couldn’t juggle.

I tried the things I’d read in the book and immediately dropped the balls. I picked them up again and this time I managed a few passes before dropping the ball. Over and over and over again, I picked up the balls and tried again. The more I practiced, the more the knowledge of juggling started to make sense. It became what we often call “muscle memory” but is really just unconscious programming. Through this constant practice, I was able to absorb the knowledge of juggling.

This is the essence of Tacit Knowledge; things that have to be experienced, rather than just read.

If I could have absorbed the lessons just from reading the book then this would have been Explicit Knowledge, but juggling isn’t that.

Why is important to distinguish between these? Because it takes very different approaches to learn tacit knowledge than it does explicit. All too often we think that any problem can be addressed by just watching a video or reading an article, and that’s not true. Some things need to be experienced to be understood.

Almost everything that gets written about here is explicit knowledge. While I can certainly write an article to tell you about the mechanics of juggling, until you actually do it, you won’t have learned what you need to know.

A more concrete example for my audience might be Clean Language. I’ve certainly written about that before and I’ve covered the dozen phrases and some of the mechanics, but unless you’ve actually used Clean Language to solve real problems, you haven’t really learned it. Clean is a tool for the client to find their own answers, not for us to find those answers for them.

At the end of a Clean Language session, we often don’t know what solution the client came up with, and sometimes don’t even know what the original problem was. We gave the client some structure, and they found the answers themselves. Try learning that from a book, without significant practice.

This brings us to coaching and training. There’s a difference between what I can write in an article here and what I can do with people who are getting active coaching or training. The latter is far more comprehensive, both in range and impact.

I’m glad that people read the articles I write. The next step is to experience some of that tacit knowledge, and for that we have to actually interact. I make some time available every week and you can book some of that here. Let’s talk.

The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) motivation model identifies six different stages of motivation ranging from Amotivation (not motivated at all) all the way through to Intrinsic (the work is enjoyable for it’s own sake).

When someone is asking for a deadline, that tells us that they’re currently Amotivated and they want at least some motivation. That deadline will shift us into External motivation which will at least get us moving forward, even if it’s the least effective way possible.

We could give them what they’re asking for, or we could try to get them even further to the right. The best results would come from being Intrinsically motivated, but anything further to the right will be a win.

Do we want to do the bare minimum or do we want much better than that? Obviously, the more motivated we are, the better the results will be.

How would we make that shift to the right? At a high level, SDT tells us that there are three key psychological needs, and the more of these that we have, the further to the right we’ll be. They are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy is the psychological need to feel in control of one’s own behaviors and goals, to feel that we have control over our own decisions and actions. That not to say that we’ll always have complete control of any situation - there will always be laws, or rules that we have to work within. This is a sliding scale where more autonomy is better than less autonomy. It’s ok that I’ve been told what to work on, if I can decide how I’m going to do it. If I’m told both what and how then my autonomy has been stripped away.

Management often struggles to give up control to their people and then when less autonomy is provided, they wonder why people are less motivated.

Autonomy is also a key component of psychological safety, and without that our effectiveness drops as well.

Competence is the need to feel effective and capable, know that we have the skills to achieve our goals. Are we able to use our skills effectively in the organization or have we been put in a silo that only allows us to use a subset of those skills?

Relatedness is the need to feel connected to others and a sense of belonging in a social group. Are we actually part of a team working towards a common goal or are we individuals in silos of our own? It’s worth calling out that while we all need other people, we don’t all need the same types or numbers of relationships. There is no “one size fits all”.

Coming back to our starting point, setting a deadline does provide some motivation, although it’s the least effective form, and can have other negative side effects. If we want better motivation, we need to shift people to the right on the motivation model, and for that we need to look towards autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

As is his habit, Dave started asking questions about who the customers were, and why they wanted this fax system. He wanted to understand not just the specific details of what he was asked to do, but more importantly what problem they were trying to solve, and who they were solving it for. Everyone was focused on just their part and so it took some time to figure out the big picture.

Eventually he discovered that one person in the building was unable or unwilling to walk up two flights of stairs to get the daily faxes, and that had somehow escalated into this massive project.

So Dave walked upstairs, picked up the fax machine and physically moved it down to their desk, completely eliminating the need for a multi-million dollar project.

At this point you must be thinking that is so insane that I must have made this story up. Except that I didn’t, it really happened.

The question is why Dave was the only person in a long line of people who had actually looked at the real need. Probably dozens of people had been involved in discussions and planning around this project. Why had nobody else moved the fax machine?

I don’t know the real reason, but I can speculate. It’s likely that when someone first identified that there was a need to make faxes available, someone else saw an opportunity to do something that either made them look good or was intellectually challenging, and they chose to ignore the fact that it wasn’t really needed. Then as they added to that, they found more and more places that it could be used, whether or not those extra things were important to do. So the scope continued to grow and grow.

Before long, they were looking at a multi-million dollar project, with insignificant business value. Despite the lack of value, you can be sure that someone was going to get credit for delivering this large project though.

Then we couple that with the tendency of people to focus purely on the parts that they are personally responsible for, rather than the larger picture. In some cases, that’s because we’ve deferred to some expert that we assume already did the due diligence, and sometimes its because we just don’t want to.

I worked with one guy who strongly argued with me that he shouldn’t have to update XML files because he was hired to write Java, and another who wouldn’t update a ticket in Jira unless their formal job description explicitly stated that they had to. Some people develop tunnel vision and don’t want to focus on anything other than their own part.

Clearly, this project never should have got off the ground but once it did, other problems appeared.

Commitment bias, also known as the escalation of commitment, describes our tendency to remain committed to our past behaviors, particularly those exhibited publicly, even if they do not have desirable outcomes. … Someone experiencing commitment bias might think “I need to stick with this decision because backing out now would be highly embarrassing.” — The Decision Lab

The one thing I do know is that when the fax machine was moved and the project was cancelled, there were a number of people who were now very unhappy with Dave. They were embarrassed, now that their earlier decisions were under review, and it was obvious that this project never should have been funded.

Not a great outcome for Dave, as the work he’d been brought in for was now cancelled, however it was certainly the correct outcome for the company. They could now refocus on things that actually were important.

There are multiple lessons we can take from this:

1. Sometimes we just need to pick up the fax machine. Look for the simple solution, and that means looking at the bigger picture, not just the piece we were asked to do. Anybody can create something complex but it often takes real experience to make something simple.
2. The more committed we are in a direction, the harder it will be to admit, even to ourselves, that it was a mistake. Commitment bias and the related Sunk Cost Fallacy are very real. The earlier we can make the right go/no-go decision, the easier it will be.
3. It often takes real courage to step up and call out the problems. Building an environment of psychological safety will reduce the amount of courage required, but not eliminate it completely. We still need people like Dave, who are willing to say those things that are hard to say.

If you aren’t familiar with it, LEGO Serious Play is a business facilitation technique for helping groups brainstorm difficult and/or abstract concepts. And yes, it uses LEGO bricks as part of that process.

The kinds of problems that are best for LEGO Serious Play are difficult problems that don’t have simple answers. When I’m working in-person with teams, I regularly use Serious Play for retrospectives, or to create team working agreements.

Why LEGO? Isn’t that just a child’s toy?

There are significant neurological benefits to working this way, and I talked about a number of them in this article on learning with LEGO.

In addition to that, when using a large connected build, like the one described in the W3C threat model, there are powerful insights generated from the positioning of items and the connections between them. Having that physical spacial connection, dramatically helps with brainstorming.

The W3C article only shows a simple connected build so I’ve included this picture from one I was involved in. You can see that there are different kinds of connections, with varying lengths, shapes, and levels of rigidity. There is meaning in all of those attributes and that meaning becomes apparent as the build continues.

It’s been a decade since I first took LEGO Serious Play facilitator training, and I’ve used it a lot since then, always with positive results. If you’re interested in trying this with your teams then let’s talk.

See also: How I teach technical practices with LEGO. Not Serious Play but still LEGO and with many of the same benefits.

That doesn’t mean however, that management, or anyone else, can’t ask what improvements are coming out of the retrospectives. The whole point is to be improving and the team should be able to articulate how they are getting better, without being required to reveal how they got there, or what specific conversations happened.

It is completely reasonable to ask the team to demonstrate that they are improving, and in what ways. We can do that without violating the safety and privacy of the conversations themselves.

If we’re doing a retrospective across two teams and the total number of participants is relatively small then not much changes, aside from the fact that we might want to allocate more time.

As we get more and more participants in a retrospective, however, the dynamic starts to change. The more people we have, the less likely it is for individual people to speak up. If we have four people in the meeting, it’s likely that everyone will participate. If we have a hundred in the meeting, we might only have a handful of people speaking up, while everyone else remains quiet.

Does this mean that we can’t do a large retrospective? Not at all, we just need to adjust our approach a bit.

Recognizing that people are more likely to participate if they’re in a smaller group, we need to subdivide the larger group into much smaller ones, allow them to discuss among themselves, and then bring them back to the larger group to share what they learned.

One other difference, is that with a larger group, we may decide to keep more actions. With a single team retrospective, I always stress that fewer is better, and one is enough. In a larger setting, fewer is still better, but one may be too few. If the larger group is made up of five smaller groups then we may want each of those smaller groups to take some action away. There is no perfect answer here, just be aware that this is a case where we may want more actions than we would, from a smaller group.

Let’s look at some examples. Both of these examples were done in person, but that shouldn’t imply that you can’t do them remotely. You absolutely can.

Example 1 : Using Six Thinking Hats

I had a group of about a hundred people, and only three hours so we had to do some preparation ahead of time. In the week leading up to the retrospective, a survey had been sent out to collect high level themes where people thought we could improve. From these themes, we set up a large room with round tables, where each table represented one of those themes. Each table then used the Six Thinking Hats approach to discuss that specific theme, look for ideas, and subsequently select actions that could be taken around that.

When each group had finished discussing their theme at their table, one representative from each table got up and explained what they’d come up with, to the larger group. There was an opportunity for other tables to ask questions and get clarification on what was meant.

Each table had possible actions and as they’d explained what they’d come up with, those actions got added to the larger pool of possible actions.

Then as an entire room, they looked at all the actions from all the tables and voted on the ones they felt would make the most difference.

Example 2 : Using Open Space

I had an entire IT department of more than sixty people, including management, and a full day allocated for this activity. The individual teams had been doing retrospectives on a regular basis, but this activity was different in that we were looking at the entire system, not just one team, and were retrospecting over a one year period.

I had brainstormed with some of the leads ahead of time and we’d put notes up on the walls to represent a timeline of things that had happened during that year. We were careful not make any of these judgmental; these are merely things that happened. The purpose was to be a reminder of what had happened across the year.

After welcoming everyone and briefly walking through the timeline, we spent about half an hour as an entire group, brainstorming topics. Mostly this was done in silence, which often helps move it along faster.

Once we had a smaller number of topic areas, we used those to populate the marketplace for an Open Space, and ran multiple one hour sessions in an open space format.

It’s worth calling out that due to the way Open Space works, it’s entirely possible that some themes will be completely ignored and that’s OK. The ones that people are passionate about will have been discussed.

When all rounds of open space discussions were complete, someone from each discussion presented what they’d learned and what actions they came up with, just as in the example above.

Then as an entire room, they voted on the actions that were most important.

Conclusion

In both examples, we subdivided the larger group into much smaller groups that could then have candid discussions. Then we brought those findings back to the larger group and selected actions. This takes longer, but encourages participation from everyone and gets better results.

One quick note on doing this remotely. In order to subdivide the group effectively, you’ll need breakout rooms and the ability to move people into breakout rooms quickly. I strongly advise you to have one person allocated to just managing the technology. The facilitator will be busy enough keeping an eye on the people, and if they have to also manage all the breakout rooms, then that’s overwhelming. Get someone to help you.