Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 2
cal thinking, creativity, and invention—all those mind-expanding
skills—are all up to you. You don’t get taught; you have to learn.
We tend to look at the teacher/learner relationship the wrong way
around: it’s not that the teacher teaches; it’s that the student
learns. The learning is always up to you.
It’s my hope that Pragmatic Thinking and Learning can help guide
you through accelerated and enhanced learning and more prag-
matic thinking.
2.
That is, platforms.
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AGAIN WITH THE “PRAGMATIC”?
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What Are Agile Methods?
The term agile methods was coined at a summit meet-
ing in February 2001 by seventeen leaders in software
development, including the founders of various devel-
opment methodologies such as Extreme Programming,
Scrum, Crystal, and, of course, our very own pragmatic
programming.
Agile methods differ from traditional plan-based methods
in a number of significant ways, most notably in eschewing
rigid rules and discarding dusty old schedules in favor of
adapting to real-time feedback.
I’ll talk about agile methods often throughout the book,
because many of the agile ideas and practices fit in well
with good cognitive habits.
1.1 Again with the “Pragmatic”?
From the original The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to
Master [HT00] to our Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing imprint, you
will notice that we have a certain preoccupation with the word prag-
matic. The essence of pragmatism is to do what works—for you.
So before we begin, please bear in mind that every individual is
different. Although many of the studies that I’ll reference have
been conducted on large populations, some have not. I’m going
to draw on a large variety of material ranging from hard scientific
fact proven with functional MRI scans of the brain to conceptual
theories, as well as material ranging from old wives’ tales to “Hey,
Fred tried it, and it worked for him.”
In many cases—especially when discussing the brain—the under-
lying scientific reasons are unknown or unknowable. But do not
let that worry you: if it works, then it’s pragmatic, and I will offer
it here for your consideration. I hope many of these ideas will work
for you.
But some folks are just plain wired dif-
Only dead fish go with
ferently; you may be one of them. And
the flow.
that’s OK; you shouldn’t follow any advice
blindly. Even mine. Instead, read with an
open mind. Try the suggestions, and decide what works for you.
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CONSIDER THE CONTEXT
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What Is Wetware?
e
wet•ware ||wet we( )r|: etymology: wet + software
|
Noun, humorous. Human brain cells or thought processes
regarded as analogous to, or in contrast with, computer
systems.
That is, using the model of a computer as an analogy to
human thought processes.
As you grow and adapt, you may need to modify your habits and
approaches as well. Nothing in life is ever static; only dead fish go
with the flow. So, please take this book as just the beginning.
I’ll share the pragmatic ideas and techniques I’ve found in my jour-
ney; the rest is up to you.
1.2 Consider the Context
Everything is interconnected: the physical world, social systems,
your innermost thoughts, the unrelenting logic of the computer—
everything forms one immense, interconnected system of reality.
Nothing exists in isolation; everything is part of the system and
part of a larger context.
Because of that inconvenient fact of reality, small things can have
unexpectedly large effects. That disproportionate effect is the hall-
mark of nonlinear systems, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the real
world is decidedly nonlinear.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the universe.
John Muir, 1911, My First Summer in the Sierra
Throughout this book, you’ll find activities or differences that seem
to be so subtle or inconsequential that they couldn’t possibly make
a difference. These are activities such as thinking a thought to
yourself vs. speaking it out loud or such as writing a sentence
on a piece of paper vs. typing it into an editor on the computer.
Abstractly, these things should be perfectly equivalent.
But they aren’t.
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EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS STUFF
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These kinds of activities utilize very different pathways in the
brain—pathways that are affected by your very thoughts and how
you think them. Your thoughts are not disconnected from the rest
of the brain machinery or your body; it’s all connected. This is just
one example (and we’ll talk more about the brain later in the book),
but it helps illustrate the importance of thinking about interacting
systems.
In his seminal book The Fifth Discipline:
Everything is
The Art and Practice of the Learning Orga-
interconnected.
nization [Sen90], Peter Senge popularized
the term systems thinking to describe a
different approach of viewing the world. In systems thinking, one
tries to envision an object as a connection point of several systems,
rather than as a discrete object unto itself.
For instance, you might consider a tree to be a single, discrete
object sitting on the visible ground. But in fact, a tree is a connec-
tion of at least two major systems: the processing cycle of leaves
and air and of roots and earth. It’s not static; it’s not isolated. And
even more interesting, you’ll rarely be a simple observer of a sys-
tem. More likely, you’ll be part of it, whether you know it or not.3
TIP 1
Always consider the context.
Put a copy of that up on your wall or your desktop, in your con-
ference room, on your whiteboard, or anywhere you think alone or
with others. We’ll be returning to it.
1.3 Everyone Is Talking About This Stuff
As I was mulling over the idea of writing this book, I started to
notice that a lot of people in different disciplines were talking about
the topics in which I was interested. But these were in very different
and diverse areas, including the following:
• MBA and executive-level training
• Cognitive science research
3.
Suggested by our old buddy Heisenberg and his quantum uncertainty principle, the mor
e general observer effect posits that you can’t observe a system without altering it.
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WHERE WE’RE GOING
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• Learning theory
• Nursing, health care, aviation, and other professions and
industries
• Yoga and meditative practices
• Programming, abstraction, and problem solving
• Artificial intelligence research
When you start to find the same set
of ideas—the same common threads— There’s something
showing up in different guises in these fundamental here.
very different areas, that’s usually a sign.
There must be something fundamental and very important lurking
under the covers for these similar ideas to be present in so many
different contexts.
Yoga and meditative techniques seem to be enjoying quite a bit of
mainstream popularity these days, and not always for obvious rea-
sons. I noticed an article in an in-flight magazine around October
2005 that trumpeted the headline “Companies Now Offering Yoga
and Meditation to Help Fight Rising Health-Care Costs.”
Large companies have not historically embraced such warm-and-
fuzzy activities. But the meteoric rise of health-care costs has
forced them to take any course of action that might help. Clearly,
they believe the studies showing that practitioners of yoga and
meditative techniques enjoy greater overall health than the general
population. In this book, we’re more interested in the areas related
to cognition, but greater overall health is a nice side benefit.
I also noticed that a number of MBA and executive-level courses
promote various meditative, creative, and intuitive techniques—
stuff that fits in perfectly with the available research but that has
not yet been passed down to the employees in the trenches, includ-
ing us knowledge-worker types.
But not to worry, we’ll be covering these topics here for you. No
MBA required.
1.4 Where We’re Going
Every good journey begins with a map, and ours appears in the
front portion of this book. Despite the linear flow of a book, these
topics are entwined and interrelated, as the map shows.
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WHERE WE’RE GOING
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After all, everything is connected to everything else. But it’s some-
what difficult to appreciate that idea with a linear read of a book.
You can’t always get a sense of what’s related when faced with
countless “see also” references in the text. By presenting the map
graphically, I hope you get the opportunity to see what’s related to
what a little more clearly.
With that in mind, the following is roughly where we are headed,
despite a few side trips, tangents, and excursions on the way.
Journey from Novice to Expert
In the first part of the book, we’ll look at why your brain works as
it does, beginning with a popular model of expertise.
The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition provides a powerful way of
looking at how you move beyond beginner-level performance and
begin the journey to mastery of a skill. We’ll take a look at the Drey-
fus model and in particular look at the keys to becoming an expert:
harnessing and applying your own experience, understanding con-
text, and harnessing intuition.
This Is Your Brain
The most important tool in software development is, of course,
your own brain. We’ll take a look at some of the basics of cog-
nitive science and neuroscience as they relate to our interests as
software developers, including a model of the brain that looks a lot
like a dual-CPU, shared-bus design and how to do your own brain
surgery of a sort.
Get in Your Right Mind
Once we have a better understanding of the brain, we will find ways
to exploit underutilized facets of thinking to help encourage bet-
ter creativity and problem solving, as well as harvest and process
experiences more effectively.
We’ll also take a look at where intuition comes from. Intuition, the
hallmark of the expert, turns out to be a tricky beast. You need
it, you rely on it, but you also probably fight against using it con-
stantly, without knowing why. You may also be actively suspicious
of your own and others’ intuition, mistakenly thinking that it’s “not
scientific.”
We’ll see how to fix that and give your intuition freer reign.
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WHERE WE’RE GOING
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Debug Your Mind
Intuition is a fantastic skill, except when it’s wrong. There are a
large number of “known bugs” in human thinking. You have built-
in biases in your cognition, influences from when you’re born and
from your cohort (those born about the same time as you), your
innate personality, and even hardware wiring problems.
These bugs in the system often mislead you by clouding your judg-
ment and steering you toward bad, even disastrous, decisions.
Knowing these common bugs is the first step to mitigating them.
Learn Deliberately
Now that we’ve gotten a good look at how the brain works, we’ll
start taking a more deliberate look at how to take advantage of the
system, beginning with learning.
Note that I mean learning in the broadest sense, covering not only
new technologies, programming languages, and the like, but also
your learning of the dynamics of the team you’re on, the character-
istics of the evolving software you’re building, and so on. In these
times, we have to learn all the time.
But most of us have never been taught how, so we sort of wing
it as best we can. I’ll show you some specific techniques to help
improve your learning ability. We’ll look at planning techniques,
mind maps, a reading technique known as SQ3R, and the cogni-
tive importance of teaching and writing. Armed with these tech-
niques, you can absorb new information faster and easier, gain
more insights, and retain this new knowledge better.
Gain Experience
Gaining experience is key to your learning and growth—we learn
best by doing. However, just “doing” alone is no guarantee of suc-
cess; you have to learn from the doing for it to count, and it turns
out that some common obstacles make this hard.
You can’t force experience either; trying too hard can be just as
bad (if not worse) than slogging through the same old motions.
We’ll take a look at what you need to create an efficient learning
environment using feedback, fun, and failure; see the dangers of
deadlines; and see how to gain experience virtually with mental
grooving.
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WHERE WE’RE GOING
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Manage Focus
Managing your attention and focus is the next critical step in your
journey. I’ll share with you some tricks, tips, and pointers to help
you manage the flood of knowledge, information, and insights that
you need to gain experience and learn. We live in information-rich
times, and it’s easy to get so swamped under the daily demands of
our jobs that we have no chance to advance our careers. Let’s try
to fix that and increase your attention and focus.
We’ll take a look at how to optimize your current context, manage
those pesky interruptions better, and see why interruptions are
such cognitive train wrecks. We’ll look at why you need to defocus
in order to focus better in the mental marinade and manage your
knowledge in a more deliberate manner.
Beyond Expertise
Finally, we’ll take a quick look at why change is harder than it
looks, and I’ll offer suggestions for what you can do tomorrow
morning to get started.
I’ll share what I think lies beyond expertise and how to get there.
So, sit back, grab your favorite beverage, and let’s take a look at
what’s under the hood.
Next Actions
Throughout the book, I’ll suggest “next actions” that you can take
to help reinforce and make this material real for you. These might
include exercises to do, experiments to try, or habits to start. I’ll list
these using checkboxes so you can check the items you’ve done,
like this:
! Take a hard look at current problems on your project. Can you
spot the different systems involved? Where do they interact?
Are these interaction points related to the problems you’re
seeing?
! Find three things you’ve analyzed out of context that caused
you problems later.
! Put up a sign somewhere near your monitor that reads “Con-
sider the context.”
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GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
23
About the Figures
You may notice that figures in this book don’t look like the
typical shiny, mechanically perfect drawings you’d expect
from Adobe Illustrator or something similar. That’s quite