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Reignite your desire to improve (NDC Sydney 2018)
The document discusses strategies for personal and team improvement, emphasizing the importance of behavior interventions, intrinsic motivation, and continuous learning. It notes the risks of complacency, burnout, and the need for effective leadership and management balance. Key advice includes focusing on enjoyable work and leveraging feedback for growth while avoiding reliance on extrinsic rewards for motivation.
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Reignite your desire to improve (NDC Sydney 2018)
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- 2. Hello! I’m Richard Banks Youcan find me at @rbanks54 and https://richard-banks.org 2
- 3. Coffee with afriend 3
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- 5. But why? Mental modelson how to do things We ignore contrary data Historical bias and blind trust 5
- 6. What eventually happens? ￮ Growingmorale and quality erosion ￮ Team “enhanced” by contractors ￮ Disbanding and re-forming ￮ Outsourcing 6
- 7. Hope …won’t help usimprove behaviour
- 8. COM-B Model Behaviour ispart of an interacting system involving many components by Susan Michie, Maartje M van Stralen, and Robert West - https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11 86/1748-5908-6-42 http://www.behaviourchangewheel.com/ 8 Policies
- 9. Behaviour Sources ￮ Capability ￮Physical ￮ Psychological ￮ Opportunity ￮ Social ￮ Physical ￮ Motivation ￮ Automatic ￮ Reflective 9
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- 17. Remember… Interventions Alter the currentsystem Initiate change Pro tip: Use multiple interventions Policies Aid long term adoption of new behaviours 17
- 18. Enablement ￮ You need“Slack” time ￮ 100% busy => 0% change 18
- 19. Education & Training ￮ Lunch-n-learns ￮“I saw this…” emails ￮ Pairing ￮ Code & design reviews 19
- 20. Incentivisation & Coercion Extrinsic motivation(“carrot and stick”) Use sparingly, and only to initiate change Aim for teams, not individuals. 20
- 21. “ The problem withmaking extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. - Dan Pink (Drive) 21
- 22. “ Contrast that approachwith behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself – deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best – there are no shortcuts. - Dan Pink (Drive) 22
- 23. Why all this interventiontalk? We have a team behaviour problem (continuous no-improvement) Without change, things gradually degrade Interventions help initiate change 23
- 24. Modelling People follow actionsnot words
- 25. We model allthe time 25
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- 27. “ You manage things,you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. - Grace Hopper 27
- 28. “ But Richard, I’mfine. I’m not the one with the problem. It’s the rest of my team that needs help! - You? 28
- 29. Are you sure? ￮Are you resting on the “OK Plateau”? ￮ Are you an example of continual improvement to others? ￮ Are you like that dancing guy? 29
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- 31. A note onpassion Passion and interest change more often than we think You can grow passion, and fuel it, by success 31
- 32. “ The reality is,I’m excited by everything on Day 1. And if by Day X things aren’t working the way I hoped, I lose my passion. I have not seen the correlation between my passion and my success. - Scott Adams (Dilbert) 32
- 33. “ Develop passion bydoing work that you find enjoyable and meaningful. The key is to get good at something that helps other people. - Benjamin Todd (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/) 33
- 34. “People rarely succeed unlessthey have fun in what they are doing. – Dale Carnegie 34
- 35. So, you’ve lostthe fun? Get curious. Take time to read widely. Try things for yourself. What problems are you interested in? What “wants” would you love to satisfy? What needs have you never tried meeting? What are others doing that looks exciting? 35
- 36. “ You’ll never discoveranything new by doing the same things you’ve always done - Unknown 36
- 37. A word ofwarning ￮ Burn out is a genuine problem ￮ Don’t try and emulate others ￮ Don’t try to keep a solid green GitHub profile if you don’t enjoy it ￮ Keep a balance in all you do ￮ There’s more to life than tech 37
- 38. Pro Tip: Focus Don’timprove everything at once Stay disciplined Keep your focus tight Attention is precious 38 XIt just takes one moment To look at me and forget what you… XIt’s so easy To break your concentration XThis might be worth clicking Especially if it looks amusing XTurn off notifications You don’t need them. Honestly. XYou can’t multitask And you can’t improve without focus
- 39. New Years Resolution? ￮ Whatwould your work be like if you actually followed through on any of this? ￮ Don’t you want something better than what you currently have? 39 🎉🎆 ✨
- 40. Tangent Time Why Resolutions (mostly)Don’t Succeed
- 41. “ Psychological reasons we don'tsucceed include overthinking how arduous our resolutions will be, and leaving ourselves mental get-out clauses. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-psychology- behind-why-we-cant-keep-new-years-resolutions- 2018-1 41
- 42. 2016 Study onNYR Kaitlin Woolley - Cornell University Ayelet Fishbach - University of Chicago Participants believe that both enjoyment and importance are significant factors in whether they stick to their resolutions. 42
- 43. Findings? The enjoyment factorwas the only thing that mattered. (a.k.a. “fun”) Lesson: if you get immediate reward from a change, you’re much more likely to stick with it. 43
- 44. Improve what you enjoy Automatewhat you don’t (or eliminate it) 44
- 45. “Everything you haveever done is because you wanted something and decided to do something about it. – Dale Carnegie 45
- 46. Recall Job Satisfaction? Discover somethingyou enjoy that will help others Master it to increase your passion and enjoyment 46 😍
- 47. Improvement Go deep orgo wide?
- 48. Do we evenneed to? ￮ Shall we ask the COBOL programmers? ￮ Or the FoxPro developers? ￮ Or the Sybase admins? ￮ Or the dot matrix printer repairers? ￮ Or Flash designers? ￮ Or Silverlight gurus? ￮ Or VAX/VMS operators? 48
- 49. 49 What would happenif your team kept deepening their current skills? What if they kept learning new skills each quarter?
- 50. “ One strategy forgetting ahead is being incredibly good at a particular skill; you need to be world-class to stand out for that skill. In my case, I layered fairly average skills together until the combination became special. - Scott Adams 50
- 51. Skill Acquisition ￮ Cognitive ￮Associative ￮ Autonomous 51
- 52. “ Amateurs are contentto let their efforts become bottom- up operations. People get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. - Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) 52
- 53. “ Experts keep payingattention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. - Goleman 53
- 54. “ To improve, wemust watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes - K. Anders Ericsson 54
- 55. On Experts What separatesexperts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine. Ericsson labels this “deliberate practice.” 55
- 56. 56 “Mistakes are notjust opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new.” - Daniel Dennet (Intuition Pumps)
- 57. 57 “Sometimes you don’tjust want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them — if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix” - Daniel Dennet
- 58. “ Ideally that feedbackcomes from someone with an expert eye and so every world class sports champion has a coach. The feedback matters and the concentration does, too — not just the hours. - Goleman 58
- 59. “ If you personallyrest on the OK plateau, don’t be upset when everyone around you does the same thing - Me 59
- 60. Try These Making itpractical
- 61. Keep making bad fixes? Try“5 Whys” Debugging Stop fixing symptoms. Fix root causes. 61 5
- 62. Got other quality problems? Trywriting automated tests before making code changes. Run WCAG tests, SonarQube and other analysis tools during your build. Conduct a bug bash. Run usability tests. Dig through exception logs and support tickets. 62
- 63. Already know itall? Prove it. Answer StackOverflow questions ￮ Pick a question on a topic you know well. ￮ Find questions with no answers ￮ Be the answerer 63
- 64. Rely too muchon tooling? Fix a bug or add a feature without • using your IDE of choice • using the debugger • logging output 64
- 65. Disconnect the Mouse! Implement abug or feature without ever touching the mouse. Learn your keyboard shortcuts and see how much faster you can get things done. 65
- 66. Pick up new concepts Completea code kata in a language you don’t know, but are curious about. 66
- 67. Improve Teamwork Complete akata using strong-style pair programming. Complete the same kata using mob programming. Now try doing some proper work with the same techniques 67
- 68. Deliberate Practice - Speed Aimto complete a code kata in a personal best time. Record an attempt, and watch it back to see where you pause and waste time, or where tooling slows you down. Feedback: Get someone else to see where they think you lost time. 68
- 69. Ever get stuckin search loops? Implement your next feature without using Google, StackOverflow, reference docs, blogs, or phoning-a-friend. 69
- 70. Struggle to Focus? ￮Try the Pomodoro technique ￮ Turn off those notifications! ￮ Disable social media (Timewarp) ￮ Book a meeting room and work in there for a while 70
- 71. Improve your communication? Pick atopic, concept or technique you know or want to learn. Organise a lunch-n-learn with your team and speak about it in 2 week’s time. Ask for feedback on your presentation and flow. 71
- 72. Share Knowledge ￮ Write“Today I Learned” team emails ￮ Share code review notes with the team ￮ Write blog posts or create short videos 72
- 73. Still too easy? Messwith future you Write code using variable and method names like TempMethodNNN and TempVarNNN. Submit the PR, and wait for feedback. Now try refactoring it so it makes sense again. 73
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- 76. It’ll be uncomfortable. You’ll makemistakes. Be receptive to feedback. Always be discovering.
- 77. Find the funin what you do and Find ways to help others
- 78. 78 Thanks! You can findme at ￮ @rbanks54 ￮ [email protected]
Editor's Notes
- #4 “I need your advice on productivity” “We got some good initial traction from changing to an agile approach, but the early gains seem to have dried up. What should I do?” Could also have said “We’ve tried improving things and they worked for a while but then…<shrug />” “Teams now just says ”We’re doing pretty well. There’s not much to improve on”” You may also see it in “team” behaviours where Everyone works on their own thing, and efforts to collaborate struggle to take hold Only one person is allowed to generate ideas (the micromanaging “architect”!) No one talks about new things in the industry or explores news ideas. Agile embraces the idea of continuous improvement, but a lot of teams and individuals have reached a state of… <next slide />
- #6 Mental model of how “things should be done”. Initial improvements align people to a shared model. An established, shared model is established people start ignoring data that shows it has “gaps”. Because it’s ours. we love, and blindly trust our model because it worked for us in the past.
- #7 Morale and quality issues Team “enhanced” by contractors Downsized Outsourced
- #11 Workload and fatigue
- #12 Workload and fatigue Learned helplessness D.S. Hiroto (1974) – Learned helplessness experiment: Participants split into three groups. One group was subjected to a loud and unpleasant noise but were able to terminate the noise by pressing a button four times. The second group was subjected to the same noise, but their button was not functional. The third group was subjected to no noise at all. Later, all human participants were subjected to a loud noise and a box with a lever which, when manipulated, would turn off the sound. Just like in the animal experiments, those who had no control over the noise in the first part of the experiment generally did not even try to turn the noise off, while the rest of the subjects generally figured out how to turn the noise off very quickly. P.S. Learned helplessness is linked to depression
- #14 Cultural norms: Team pressure to stick to the status quo Management oversight/restrictions Morale/Negative team culture (words and attitude) Office layout and lack of collaboration areas
- #16 Automatic processes External praise (pleasing others) Conflict avoidance Maintaining status/power Fear of failure Reflective: Career protection/progression Being proven right (fixed mindsets) Personal agendas
- #24 Initiate change Break inertia
- #26 Also Twitch Also Fortnite (https://twitter.com/bbcrb/status/1034109031378550784) Also language use (generational words) Lessons from the dancing guy – NEXT SLIDE [Video URL : https://youtu.be/fW8amMCVAJQ]
- #30 OK Plateau? Example? Dancing guy?
- #45 Or minimize waste to make the time spent on it much lower Use that time to further invest in what you enjoy doing And to discover new things to enjoy
- #50 Do BOTH!
- #52 Cognitive - Intellectualizing the task, discovering new strategies to perform better, and making lots of mistakes. We’re consciously focusing on what we’re doing Associative - We’re making fewer errors, and gradually getting better. Autonomous - We turn on autopilot and move the skill to the back of our proverbial mental filing cabinet and stop paying it conscious attention. The “OK Plateau”
- #56 Fixed or Growth mindset?
- #58 Practice without feedback is useless Get feedback from those that have more experience (even if they have less ability)
- #64 This Helps others (job satisfaction) Deepens your knowledge If you’re wrong – you’ll be told Side benefit – SO Rep.