Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 18
extravert end of the scale.16 The other twenty-five percent of
us wish they’d leave us alone.
• Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N): How you obtain information.
Of all the personality traits, this one axis is probably the
largest source of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
The sensing person emphasizes practicality and facts and
15. MBTI Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [Mye98].
16. Statistics in this section cited in Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types [KB84].
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Not All Rewards Are Welcome
Most companies reward teams with praise and recognition
that isn’t necessarily suited to all personality types. What
works for extraverts, in particular, may not work with all pro-
grammers.
Do you just itch at formal cake-’n’-paper-plate celebra-
tions? For many introverts, being brought in front of the
crowd, even for recognition and praise, is acutely uncom-
fortable. What might be a great reward for a novice prob-
ably won’t be appreciated by an expert, and vice versa.
Given a wide range of temperaments and skill levels, per-
haps it’s a good idea to have a wide range of rewards as
well.
stays firmly grounded in the details of the moment. Intuitive
people are very imaginative and appreciate metaphor, are very
innovative, and see many possibilities—life is always around
the next corner. Intuitives may skip off to a new activity with-
out completing any. Sensors view this as flighty; intuitives
view the sensors as plodding. Seventy-five percent of folks are
sensing. In this book, we’re trying to lean toward the minority
and encourage more listening to your intuition.
• Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): How you make decisions. Think-
ing people make decisions based on the rules. Feeling people
evaluate the personal and emotional impact, in addition to
the applicable rules. The T’s strict view of the rules may seem
cold-blooded to the feeling folks. The thinking folks view the F
folks as “bleeding hearts.” The population runs 50-50 on this
axis, with a gender bias: more females tend to the F side and
males to the T side.
• Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): Your decisions are closed or left
open-ended: judge quickly or keep perceiving. If you strongly
favor early closure, you are a J. Js are uneasy until they
have made a decision. Ps are uneasy when they have made
a decision. This axis also runs about 50-50 in the general
population.
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Depending on which side of the fence you fall on any axis, you get
that letter. The combination of the four attributes defines your tem-
perament. For instance, an extraverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving
personality is coded as ESFP. An introverted, intuitive, thinking,
judging personality would be INTJ.
You can take a short test to determine your own MBTI score; vari-
ous flavors are available on the Web and in the books cited.
The study of temperament types is most interesting when consid-
ering relationships between people. Strong Ns vs. strong Ss will
generate friction when trying to work with each other. Strong Js
and strong Ps probably shouldn’t try to hammer out a schedule
together. And so it goes.
It’s probably most important to realize this: when other people react
differently than you would in a given situation, they aren’t crazy,
lazy, or just plain difficult. And neither are you. It doesn’t matter if
you think the MBTI categorization is accurate or not: people oper-
ate based on different temperament types; it’s almost like with a
different operating system, if you will, like Windows vs. Mac or vs.
Linux.
There are many ways to work out a solu-
You can’t change
tion and compromise. The only thing that
people.
is certain not to work is to try to change
the other person’s temperament to match
your own. That’s a recipe for disaster. A bleeding-heart F type is
not going to be convinced to ignore human suffering and just follow
the rules, and a rigid T type is not going to be swayed by the drama
and deviate from the rules. In either case, you’re going against the
grain. You might get your way depending on the situation, but the
other person sure isn’t going to like it.
This is important background information to keep in mind when
collaborating with others:
They may well have a different set of bugs than you do.
TIP 22
Al ow for different bugs in different people.
Think about that when constructing an argument.
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EXPOSING HARDWARE BUGS
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Next Actions
! Take a personality test. How does that compare with your co-
workers and family? Do the results resonate with you or not?
! Pretend you are the complete opposite type from yourself on
each axis. What would the world look like to that kind of per-
son? How would you interact with that person?
! If you don’t already, hang out with people who have opposing
personality types to yourself.
5.4 Exposing Hardware Bugs
Finally, let’s look at some low-level bugs in the system—hardware
bugs, if you will.
Your brain was not created all in one shot; it’s been built on and
built up over time. The neocortex, which is what we’ve largely been
talking about so far, is a relatively recent addition to humankind.
There are older areas of the brain that underlie these more
advanced areas. And they ain’t pretty.
These older areas of the brain are hardwired for more primitive,
survival instinct behaviors. These areas supply the “fight or flight”
response—or just a plain old emergency shutdown when the going
gets really tough. This is where you’ll find the roots of territorial
behavior and one-upsmanship.
Underneath our surprisingly thin veneer of culture and civilization,
we are in fact wired very similarly to the aggressive alpha dog who
marks his territory with urine. You can readily observe this behav-
ior on the urban street corner, at the corporate boardroom, at the
suburban party, and at the corporate team meeting. It’s just how
we are.
If you don’t believe me, consider a recent report in the journal
Nature17 about a very modern problem—road rage. In this study,
the leading predictor of a tendency for road rage was the amount
of personalization on a vehicle: custom paint job, decals, bumper
stickers, and so on. Even more amazing, the content of bumper
stickers didn’t seem to matter, just the quantity. Five “Save the
17. June 13, 2008. “Bumper Stickers Reveal Link to Road Rage,” online at
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080613/full/news.2008.889.html.
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EXPOSING HARDWARE BUGS
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Whales” stickers could actually prove more dangerous than one
“Right to Bear Arms” sticker, for example. Why? We’re marking our
territory.
In 1989, Dr. Albert Bernstein originally published Dinosaur Brains:
Dealing with All Those Impossible People at Work [Ber96], a popular,
accessible exposé of the low-level wiring in our brains. He called
this level of processing lizard logic in honor of its more primeval
nature. Let’s take a closer look at this level that still influences our
behavior.
Lizard Logic
Dr. Bernstein describes the following aspects of the reptilian
approach to dealing with life’s challenges. Here’s how to act like
a lizard:
Fight, flight, or fright
Whether it’s a real attack, or just a perceived one, become fully
aroused immediately. Be ready to start swinging or run like
hell. If the situation is really bad, just freeze with fear. Maybe
the bad thing will go away. This works really well when you’re
giving a presentation and someone asks a pointed question
about your work.
Get it now
Everything is immediate and automatic. Don’t think or plan;
just follow your impulses and focus on what’s most exciting
rather than what’s most important. Use sports metaphors a
lot. Answer email and IM or surf the Web; that’s always more
exciting than real work.
Be dominant
You’re the alpha dog. Claw and scratch your way to be the
leader of the pack so you can abuse everyone below you. The
rules apply to everyone else—but not to you. Urine marking is
optional.
Defend the territory
Sharing is for insects. Never share information, tips, tricks,
or office space. Mark your territory just like a puppy, and
protect your interests, no matter how trivial. If someone does
something without you, cry foul and demand to know why you
weren’t included.
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If it hurts, hiss
Don’t bother to fix the problem, but spend all your energy
fixing the blame on someone instead. Cry foul, as often as
you can. Let everyone know that it’s just not fair.
Like me == good; not like me == bad
Everything can be categorized into one of two buckets: good
and evil. Your side is always good. Any other side is inher-
ently evil. Explain this to your teammates often, preferably in
lengthy sermons.
See anyone you know in these behaviors? A pointy-headed boss,
perhaps, or arrogant co-worker?
Or worse, yourself ?
Monkey See, Monkey Do
As I mentioned earlier when discussing the Drey-
fus model, we are natural mimics. Most of the
time, that’s a positive benefit, especially when
learning from a mentor or other exemplar who’s
already proficient in that skill. But there’s a down-
side to our natural tendency for mimicry. Emo-
tions are contagious, just like a biological pathogen such as
measles, or the flu.18
If you are around happy, upbeat people, it will tend to lift your
mood. If you’re hanging out with depressed, pessimistic people who
feel like losers, you will start to feel like a depressed, pessimistic
loser as well. Attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, emotions—they are all
contagious.
The mob really does rule.
Acting Evolved
These lizardlike behaviors are inherent in the wiring, not in the
higher-level cognitive thought processes. Thinking takes time;
these actions and reactions work more quickly than that, and with
less effort.
That’s yet another reason why email is so pernicious.
18. See Emotional Contagion [HCR94].
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EXPOSING HARDWARE BUGS
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A Heaven or a Hell
As we’ll see later in Section 7.6, Imagination Overrides
Senses, on page 212, you can physically rewire your brain
depending on the thoughts you think. Unfortunately, that
cuts both ways: negative thoughts can rewire your brain
just as easily as positive thoughts.
Repeated negative thoughts form a sort of TV show—a
film that you can replay in endless syndication. Each time
you play Negative Movie, it gets more and more real and
increasingly important in your psyche.
You can tell from the dialogue that this is a repeat (“You
always...”, “You never...”) or by the characters (the Cable
TV Police, the Net Police, the Legion of Idiots...). Most of
these negative movies are dramas and usually far more
dramatic than real.
As you start to replay one of these favorite films, try to catch
yourself and remember that it’s only a movie.
You can change the channel.
“The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a Heaven
of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost.
In the old days of letter writing, the time it took to write longhand
and the built-in delay before sending (awaiting the postal carrier)
both allowed the cooler neocortex to intervene and remind you that
perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea.
But Internet time short-circuits the neocortex and exposes our rep-
tilian responses. It allows you to fully vent your initial visceral reac-
tion, whether it’s in an email, a blog comment, or an IM. Although
that fast, violent reaction might be a fine thing when faced with a
predator in the jungle, it’s less helpful when trying to collaborate
on a project with co-workers, users, or vendors (well, it might help
with predatory vendors...).
TIP 23
Act like you’ve evolved: breathe, don’t hiss.
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NOW I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK
151
You know what it feels like to have that rush of intense feeling
come up—when the boss sends you a snippy email or that rude
driver cuts you off to exit without signaling.
Breathe out, deeply, and get rid of the stale air. Breathe in, deeply.
Count to ten. Remember that you’re the evolved one. Let the lizard
; reaction pass, and allow the neocortex to process the event.
Next Actions
! Notice how long it takes you to get over your initial reaction to
a perceived threat. How does your reaction change once you
“think about it”?
! Act on that impulse but not immediately. Plan for it; schedule
it. Does it still make sense later?
! Write a new movie. If you’re troubled by a given film that keeps
replaying in your head, sit down and craft a new one—this
time with a happy ending.
! Smile. There’s some evidence that simply smiling can be as
effective as antidepressant medications.19
5.5 Now I Don’t Know What to Think
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the
surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90
million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some
indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
As we’ve seen earlier in the book, intuition is a powerful tool. It
is the hallmark of experts. But your intuition can be dead wrong.
As we’ve seen in this chapter, your thinking and rationality are
fairly suspect as well. Our perspective is skewed all the way from
our personal values to understanding our place in the cosmos, as
Douglas Adams points out in this section’s opening epigraph. What
we think of as “normal” isn’t necessarily so. You can be misled
easily by your internal wiring, in addition to prejudices and biases
of all sorts, and think everything is just fine.
So, where does that leave us?
19. Personally, I’m pretty sure chocolate is involved as well.
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NOW I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK
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Remember back in the discussion on learning, when I said you
want to create an R-mode to L-mode flow? That is, you start off
holistically and experientially and then shift to the more routine
drills-and-skills to “productize” the learning.
In a similar vein, you want to lead with intuition, but follow up with
provable, linear feedback.
TIP 24
Trust intuition, but verify.
For example, you might feel in your gut that a particular design or
algorithm is the right way to go and that other suggestions aren’t