Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

by The Pragmatic Programmers

  • Your mistake was a hidden intention.

  I particularly like that last one: perhaps your mistake wasn’t such

  a mistake after all. Freud would like that one, too.

  Go grab the oblique strategies or some other oracle and see what it

  means to you today.

  Try that before reading on.. . .

  STOP

  Shakespeare’s Brain Teasers

  Some patterns are so unusual that they “wake your brain up.” That

  is, they actually overclock your brain (to use the CPU metaphor

  again) briefly to attend to this novel input.

  For instance, kids make up awesome words. From active verb

  forms such as imaginate22 to mash-ups such as prettiful and

  the curiously skewed flavoring (as in, “I’m not flavoring that food

  today”). It’s a pity that we adults don’t do more of this, because

  there’s more to these shifting word forms than meets the ear.

  William Shakespeare engaged in a lot of this sort of verbal reengi-

  neering. In fact, he’s credited with coining quite a few phrases that

  we use to this day:23

  • “Full circle”

  • “Method to the maddness”

  21. See http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies.

  22. See my IEEE article “Imaginate” [HT04].

  23. Described in Brush Up Your Shakespeare! [Mac00].

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  HARVESTING PATTERNS

  121

  Change Is Good

  It’s been said that only wet babies like change. We are

  creatures of habit. But ingrained habit isn’t the best thing

  for the brain; you don’t make new connections that way,

  and you’ll become increasingly blind to other alternatives.

  Think about your morning routine. The order you perform

  your daily preparations in is probably pretty consistent, right

  down to small details such as which tooth gets brushed first.

  You want to mix that up and get out of the rut.

  Use a different hand. Park on the other side. Change the

  part of your hair. Use a different kind of towel. Start shaving.

  Stop shaving. Eat earlier or later.

  These small changes are good for your brain; they help

  change the wiring and prevent neural ruts. Seriously. Your

  brain is tuned to be adaptive; if there’s nothing to adapt

  to, it will get “flabby,” metaphorically speaking.

  • “Neither rhyme nor reason”

  • “Eaten out of house and home”

  In addition to adding new phrases to the lexicon, Shakespeare

  would repurpose certain key words to create a sense of wonder

  and surprise. For example, he might use a noun to serve as a verb

  (as in, “he godded me”). This technique, known as a functional shift,

  causes a sudden peak in brain activity.

  Because it’s an unexpected input, the brain has to

  do some work to figure out the full meaning. But

  interestingly, researchers discovered that you’ll

  understand what the word means before under-

  standing its function in the sentence.24 This tech-

  nique helps keep the text active and keeps the

  reader engaged—breaking the reader out of the

  usual rut of standard idioms and clichés. It’s a verbal whack on

  the head.

  24. See http://www.physorg.com/news85664210.html for details.

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  GET IT RIGHT

  122

  Although using a functional shift will create a brain burst in your

  readers, it will likely cause agita (that is, dyspepsia of the soul) on

  the part of one’s copy editor. But it’s still a very cleverful technique.

  4.6 Get It Right

  In this chapter, we’ve looked at some of the properties of R-mode

  thinking. Your R-mode processes are subtle and cannot be forced

  into action.

  Yet these ways of thinking are vital to achieving a balanced, full-

  throttle approach to problem solving and creativity. You don’t want

  to focus on R-mode at the exclusion of L-mode, and you don’t want

  to continue to focus on L-mode to the exclusion of R-mode. Instead,

  you want to structure your learning and thinking to support an R-

  mode to L-mode flow.

  Start to pick up on subtle clues, and begin to harvest your R-

  mode’s existing output. Give your R-mode processes more of a

  chance to function using techniques such as morning pages, writ-

  ing, and non-goal-directed thinking time (aka walking).

  Finally, since memory is a frail and expensive mechanism, be pre-

  pared to write down the gems of insight that your R-mode may

  deliver, whenever—and wherever—that may be.

  Next Actions

  New Habits

  ! Do morning pages for at least two weeks.

  ! Hone a quick wit. Look for connections or analogies between

  unrelated things.

  ! Involve more senses when faced with a tricky problem. What

  works best for you?

  ! Read something different from your usual material, for exam-

  ple, fiction, not science fiction, and so on.

  ! Try a different genre of movie, vacation, music, or coffee.

  ! Order something you’ve never had at your favorite restaurant.

  ! Turn each problem around. What can you learn from the

  reverse?

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  GET IT RIGHT

  123

  Try This

  ! Deliberately vary your morning routine or other consistent

  habit.

  ! Hold a design session using Lego blocks or office supplies.25

  ! Take a class or start a hobby that involves more R-mode pro-

  cessing. Work on it daily.

  ! Use the buddy system: have a buddy help keep you motivated,

  and discuss your progress.

  ! Think of a metaphor, or set of metaphors, that would largely

  describe your current project (it may be helpful to think in

  terms of something very tangible). Try to come up with a few

  jokes about it using metaphor or exaggeration.

  ! Look at experts you know. What “quirky” habits now make

  more sense to you?

  ! What words can you add to your workplace lexicon?

  25. You get extra credit if you can use a red stapler.

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  I never set out to be weird. It was always the other

  people who called me weird.

  Frank Zappa

  Chapter 5

  Debug Your Mind

  Intuition is great, except when it’s not.

  It’s a popular vision that leaders are dili-

  We are not rational

  gent, thoughtful decision makers. They

  creatures.

  gather all the relevant facts, weigh them,

  and come up with the logical, rational

  decision. But in fact, that idealized process is basically never fol-
r />   lowed, even by expert, high-pressure decision makers.1

  Instead, we make decisions and solve problems based on faulty

  memory and our emotional state at the time, ignoring crucial facts

  and fixating on irrelevant details because of where and when they

  occur or whether they are brightly colored. Especially if they are

  brightly colored.

  We need to debug the system.

  The modern idea of “debugging” a computer comes from a real

  bug—a moth trapped in a relay of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calcu-

  lator (see Figure 5.1, on the following page). While running a series

  of cosine regression tests, the operators spotted an error. Looking

  into the matter, they found the moth. The operators removed the

  bug, dutifully taped it to the log book, and so truly debugged the

  system.2

  1.

  This is pretty well-worn territory; see, for example, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work [Kle04].

  2.

  The term itself has a long and rich history which has been strongly associated with a “bogeyman.”

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  CHAPTER 5. DEBUG YOUR MIND

  125

  Figure 5.1: The first bug in the system (Sept. 9, 1945)

  Although that’s a fine metaphor (and occasionally literal truth)

  in hardware systems, the idea of debugging your mind is, well,

  kind of gross. But we really do have “bugs” in the way we think—

  fundamental errors in how we process information, make deci-

  sions, and evaluate situations. James Noble and Charles Weir sum

  up the problem nicely:

  “Development is always done by people; clients and users are

  people; and under strict genetic testing most managers can be

  shown to share at least 50% of their genetic code with homo monti-

  pythonus.”3

  Unfortunately, the human mind is not open source. None of us has

  ready access to the source code to fix these bugs, but I can help

  show you where they occur so that you can be more aware of the

  influence of these erroneous processes on your thinking. We’ll look

  at four broad categories of problems:

  • Cognitive biases: How your thinking can be led astray

  • Generational affinity: How your peers influence you

  3.

  Process Patterns for Personal Practice: How to Succeed in Development Without Really Trying [WN99].

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  MEET YOUR COGNITIVE BIASES

  126

  • Personality tendencies: How your personality influences your

  thoughts

  • Hardware bugs: How older portions of your brain can override

  the smarter portions

  Being aware of these bugs is the first step to mitigating them.

  5.1 Meet Your Cognitive Biases

  Cognitive biases come in several flavors. These mental “bugs” can

  affect your decision making, memory, perception, rationality, and

  so on. There are a lot of them. Wikipedia lists some ninety common

  cognitive biases. I’ve met some folks who surely had a few more

  than that.

  Here are some of my personal favorites:

  Anchoring

  Just seeing a number will affect how you then predict or

  decide some quantity. For instance, if I keep mentioning

  something about having 100 books for sale, I’ve primed you

  with that number. If I now offer you a book for $85, you’ll tend

  to anchor on the 100, and the 85 sounds like a bargain.

  Fundamental attribution error

  We tend to ascribe other people’s behavior to their person-

  ality, instead of looking at the situation and the context

  in which their behavior occurs. We might excuse our own

  actions more easily (“I was tired; I felt a cold coming on.”).

  But people who are normal in all respects can be driven to

  extraordinary actions, including theft, murder, and mayhem,

  especially in time of war or personal crisis. It doesn’t have

  to take such extreme conditions; as we saw earlier, context

  is everything. Remember that behavior is oftentimes more

  because of reaction to a context than because of fundamental

  personality traits.

  Self-serving bias

  This is the tendency to believe that if the project is a success,

  I’m responsible. If it tanked, then I’m not. This behavior is

  probably a protective mechanism, but remember that you’re

  part of the system—whether it turns out well or not.

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  MEET YOUR COGNITIVE BIASES

  127

  Need for closure

  We are not comfortable with doubt and uncertainty—so much

  so that we’ll go to great lengths to resolve open issues and

  to remove uncertainty and reach closure. But uncertainty

  can be a good thing: it leaves your choices open. Forcing

  premature closure, as in Big Design Up Front (BDUF),4 cuts

  off your options and leaves you vulnerable to errors. Artifi-

  cially declaring a decision, such as the end date of a project,

  doesn’t remove the inherent uncertainty; it just masks it.

  Confirmation bias

  Everyone looks for choice facts to fit your own preconceptions

  and pet theories. You could argue that this entire book (and

  most books) are giant examples of confirmation biases of the

  author.

  Exposure effect

  We tend to prefer things just because they are familiar. This

  includes tools, techniques, or methods that aren’t working

  well anymore or that are even actively causing harm.

  Hawthorne effect

  Researchers have noticed that people have a tendency to

  change their behaviors when they know they are being stud-

  ied. You’ll see this when you introduce a new practice or a

  new tool on a team. At first, while everyone is watching—and

  everyone knows they are being watched—results look great.

  Discipline is high, and the excitement of something new

  fuels the effort. But then the novelty wears off, the spotlight

  moves away, and everyone slides inexorably back to previous

  behaviors.

  False memory

  It’s actually pretty easy for your brain to confuse imagined

  events with real memories. We’re susceptible to the power of

  suggestion; as we saw earlier, memory isn’t written to some

  static store in the brain. Instead, it’s an active process—so

  much so that every read is a write. Your memories are

  constantly rewritten in light of your current context: age,

  4.

  BDUF was a popular design technique that demanded heavy initial investment

  in design and architecture despite uncertainty and volatility in the details that often invalidated the design.

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  MEET YOUR COGNITIVE BIASES

  128
/>   experience, worldview, focus, and so on. That incident at your

  sixth birthday party? It probably didn’t happen that way, and

  it may not have happened at all.

  Symbolic reduction fallacy

  As we saw earlier, L-mode is anxious to provide a quick sym-

  bol to represent a complex object or system, which loses at

  least the nuances and sometimes even the truth of the matter.

  Nominal fallacy

  A kind of symbolic reduction problem; this is the idea that

  labeling a thing means you can explain it or understand

  it. But a label is just that; and naming alone does not

  offer any useful understanding. “Oh, he’s ADHD” doesn’t

  enhance understanding any more than “She’s a Republican”

  or “They’re from Elbonia.”

  And all this is just the beginning. Our irrational nature could take

  several books.5

  Failure to Predict

  It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

  Yogi Berra, Philosopher

  Symbolic reduction is an especially pernicious problem because it’s

  so deeply ingrained in our usual analytical, programmatic think-

  ing. Indeed, the only way the brain can keep up with the complex-

  ity of reality is to reduce large, complex systems to simple, easily

  manipulated symbols. This is an essential mechanism in the brain

  and a very useful one in computer programming and knowledge-

  based work. But if you take it for granted, you fall into the symbolic

  reduction fallacy.

  We’ve seen examples of the symbolic reduction fallacy before; for

  instance, when you’re trying to draw a human hand, the L-mode

  reduces the complexity of light, shadow, and texture to “five lines

  and a stick.” That reduction can be thought of as taking complex

  reality and treating it as if it were comprised of very basic, archetyp-

  ical elements: platonic solids.

  5.

  And it has; see the excellent Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions [Ari08] for more.

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  129

  Named for Plato, these ideal forms supply a sort of universal, com-

  monly understood set of building blocks.

  Think of a kid’s building block set

  with cubes, blocks, cones, archways, and The future hides in the

  columns. From these basic shapes, you platonic fold.