The 1980s TV character Angus “Mac” MacGyver is a secret agent with a unique ability to improvise solutions on the spot with odd combinations of found objects. A characteristic MacGyver solution: “Alright MacGyver, think. Rope…a smoke alarm…sheets of plywood…yeah. It just might work.” [...]
Psychological frameworks are a fascinating feast. There’s a huge number of items on the menu, including contemporary psychometrically validated tests like DISC, widely used profiling tools like Meyers-Briggs and the Enneagram, practical workplace-oriented assessments like StrengthsFinder, and [...]
If you have an intention to work with cognitive bias, there is no more powerful or beneficial place to direct your attention than the planning fallacy. Anyone who’s been within a stone’s throw of project management knows about this one. First defined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky in 1979, [...]
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust you,” said Pat to Chris skeptically. Within this black cloud of a sentence—sure to drop plenty of rain on any relationship—there is a very faint silver lining: the fact that Pat is willing to say it out loud to Chris. More typically, a lack of trust [...]
“We have too many meetings!” It’s a common enough cry, but what lies underneath it is, “We have too many boring/ineffective/time-wasting meetings!” Whether or not you can make meetings less frequent, what can you do to make the meetings you have more meaningful? The practice of stable [...]
Bonding with a group of like-minded people is a thrilling experience. Clubs and fraternities, communities of faith, and reunions often have this quality. We understand each other, we’ve had a lot of shared experiences, we can almost finish one another’s sentences. Our tribal impulse has deep [...]
A compelling piece of recent research about team effectiveness comes from Google’s Aristotle Project. It’s among the best and most thorough investigations of what makes corporate teams work well together. The key finding was that the number one predictor of team effectiveness is “psychological[...]
Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is a compelling, deeply researched argument that human brains have two systems for engaging in thinking. What he calls "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional. "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. System 1 is the source of[...]
In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock introduces the SCARF model, a useful paradigm for understanding what motivates all of us, at work and beyond: Status: how important are you to others? Certainty: how well can you predict what’s going to happen to you? Autonomy: how much control do [...]
From the frat initiation in Animal House to the bachelorette party in Crazy Rich Asians, humans love to use rituals to highlight the seasons of life. It’s no accident that “ceremonies” have found their way into the mainstream of software development in the form of daily standup meetings and [...]