Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Page 26
The inner game theory has the solution: instead of issuing a stream
of instructions to the student, the idea is to teach the student
awareness and to use that awareness to correct their performance.
Awareness is an important tool in becoming more than a novice.
For example, in the The Inner Game of Music [GG86], the author
relates the story of teaching a concert string bass player.
9.
A feedback gap is the length of time between performing an action and receiving feedback about it.
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The author had been teaching in a manner similar to the ski
instructor: hold your elbow this way, your head like this, lean that
way, now play comfortably. And of course, the poor student looked
like a stiff pretzel.
So the music teacher tried something dif-
Just be aware.
ferent. He had the student play just as
he was but directed him to really observe
every aspect of his playing—how did it feel, where was everything
positioned, what passages were difficult, and so on. Then, without
explanation, he corrected the student’s posture and finger place-
ment and guided his hands through a few bars of the piece. The
instruction was the same: observe all of these aspects; how does it
feel now? Now go ahead and play the piece. Consistently, his stu-
dents now showed great improvement after this kind of awareness
exercise.
This is a key aspect to playing the inner game: don’t focus on cor-
recting individual details, but just be aware. Accept what is as a
first step, and just be aware of it. Don’t judge, don’t rush in with a
solution, don’t criticize.
You want to try to cultivate nonjudgmental awareness: don’t try to
get it right, but notice when it is wrong. Then act to correct it.
TIP 36
See without judging and then act.
Going Beyond Tennis
Now you may have noticed that these examples are largely in
the kinesthetic domain—they involve muscle memory and physi-
cal skills. But there is more to it than that. Performing music, for
instance, has been shown by functional MRI scans to activate vir-
tually every center in the brain.10 From operating the instrument
to reading the notes, listening to the other musicians, following the
abstract principles of chord progression and such, both L-mode
and R-mode are active and cooperating along with lower-level mus-
cle memory. So even though we’re talking about skiing and playing
10. See This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession [Lev06] for more.
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LEARN ABOUT THE INNER GAME
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a string bass, the lessons can be applied to software development
and other endeavors as well.
For instance, the idea of being fully aware
of “what is” before acting to correct it is Don’t just do something;
especially true when debugging. Too often stand there.
programmers (myself included) seem to
jump in to fix an apparent bug without fully evaluating what’s
really wrong first. Fight the urge to rush to judgment or to a poten-
tial fix prematurely. Be fully aware of how the system is behaving,
and only then decide what part of that is “wrong” before moving on
to devise a solution. In other words, don’t just do something; stand
there. June Kim describes the following technique to help become
fully aware.
Suppose you are doing test-first design. You added a new test and
the code that will make the test pass. Thinking the test will surely
pass, you click the button. What? There is a failing test that you
never expected. Your heart rate goes up, your field of vision nar-
rows, your adrenaline pumps. Breathe in deeply, and first take
your hands off the keyboard. Read the error message carefully.
Raise your awareness. What’s happening?
Now close your eyes, and imagine where the source of the error
resides in the code. Think of it like the epicenter of an earthquake.
You may feel the ground shake here and over there, but the epi-
center is way over there. What will the code look like? What about
code around it? Imagine the code and its neighbors before opening
your eyes.
Once you can imagine the code, now open your eyes, and navigate
to the code in question. Does it look like what you expected? Is it
really the cause of the error?
Now close your eyes again, and imagine a passing test. When you
can imagine the test code, open your eyes, and type it in. Check
whether it is the same as you imagined. Now just before you hit
the test-all button, ask yourself, what will happen when I hit this
button? Then click the button and see.
It may sound like a trivial exercise, but it really does make a differ-
ence. The next time you find yourself trapped in an ad hoc hack-
spin-loop, try it. The idea is to raise your awareness; explicitly con-
trasting your imagined version of the code with the real code helps
accomplish that.
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PRESSURE KILLS COGNITION
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And it’s not just about debugging. The same is true when gather-
ing requirements—especially when an existing system is involved.
Jerry Weinberg maintains that most clients will tell you their most
serious problem, and its solution, in the first five minutes you
talk with them.11 It’s vital to listen to what the client has to say,
instead of letting your attention wander to the cool solution you’re
dying to try. You can brainstorm solutions later, but first, be aware
of what is.
The inner game ideas focus on feedback to grow expertise. You are
training, and then listening to, the inner voice of experience. But
that works only if you can listen to the inner voice of experience.
Listen, listen, listen. Unfortunately, it isn’t always that easy, as
we’ll see next.
7.5 Pressure Kills Cognition
The Inner Game series sums up this idea with the phrase, “Try-
ing fails, awareness cures.” That is, consciously trying generally
doesn’t work as well as simple awareness. In fact, trying too hard
is a guarantee for failure.
The mere presence of a looming deadline can panic the mind into
failure. For example, there’s a well-known psychology study that
was done with seminary students.12
The experiment took a group of seminary
Deadlines panic the
students on the day of the Good Samari-
mind.
tan lecture. Against this backdrop of being
good stewards of the earth and helping
and serving your fellow man, the r
esearchers set up an encounter.
They took one set of students and explained to them that they had
a critical meeting with the dean of their school right after the lec-
ture. It was across campus, and they could not be late—their future
careers depended on it. They then arranged to position an accom-
plice, dressed and acting as a homeless beggar, right in their path
to the dean’s office.
11. The Secrets of Consulting [Wei85].
12. From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior [DB73].
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Pressure Hangover
You might disagree with this notion of pressure. You might
think you are at your most effective when faced with an
imminent deadline. While that might have some validity
for L-mode activities (and I’m highly suspicious of that),
it’s a certain disaster for creativity and R-mode activities,
according to Dr. Teresa Amabile.∗
As part of a ten-year study on creativity in the workplace,
Amabile and colleagues discovered just the opposite: you
are the least creative when you feel time pressure.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. Not only are you less cre-
ative when battling the clock, but there’s a sort of after
effect: a time pressure “hangover.” Your creativity suffers on
the day you’re under the gun and remains depressed for
the next two days as well.
That’s why it’s a good idea to end a project iteration on a
Friday. That’s why you really do need some down time after
an unscheduled, panicked crunch.
Allow recovery time for your time-pressure hangover.
∗.
Cited in The 6 Myths of Creativity [Bre97]. Thanks to June Kim for finding
this one.
Sad but true, these devout students, under the
pressure of an important meeting, practically
walked on the beggar’s head in their mad rush
to get to the appointment. But a second group
was told they had that same crucial meeting, only
they were given some spare time between events—they weren’t in
a rush. The students in this second group stopped to help the beg-
gar; they took him to the infirmary, cleaned him up, and so on.
But when the mind is pressured, it actively begins shutting things
down. Your vision narrows—literally as well as figuratively. You no
longer consider options. What’s worse, you’re shutting out most of
the R-mode entirely: it’s the L-mode that handles time. When you
perceive time as being critical, the R-mode can’t get a chance to
work at all.
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There goes your search engine, your creativity, and your ingenuity.
The ski instructor or the bass instructor that we read about earlier
can freeze up your mind in a similar fashion by unleashing a
torrent of verbal instruction. Again, R-mode is shut out.
I had an interesting experience along these lines a few years back. A
couple of us attended a problem-solving workshop by Jerry Wein-
berg.13 One of the exercises involved a simulation of a manufac-
turing operation. The group of ten to twelve people was split into
workers, managers, customers, and so on; buffet tables in the con-
ference room became the factory, and index cards tracked produc-
tion, orders, and the like. Of course, in the tradition of all good
simulations, it was a bit of a trap. You couldn’t meet the needs of
production by ordinary means. So, the pressure begins to build,
and the folks in the managerial roles start making bad decisions,
followed by worse decisions, followed by disastrous decisions. The
participants in the worker roles begin to scratch their heads as to
why their comrades are starting to act like they’ve had lobotomies.
Mercifully, that’s about when the simulation ended. Alistair Cock-
burn was in the course with me, and he aptly described what we
all felt: a sort of tingling sensation as your brain came back on line,
almost as if your mind had literally gone to sleep, as an arm or leg
will do when cramped in an uncomfortable position.
We need to ease up on the pressure.
Grant Permission to Fail
I said earlier that errors are important to success. The other impor-
tant lesson from the Inner Game series is the idea that permission
to fail leads to success. You don’t actually need to make errors, as
long as it’s OK if you did. It sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but
once you play with the idea, it makes a lot of sense.
TIP 37
Give yourself permission to fail; it’s the path to success.
The bass instructor related a common problem. Many of his very
talented students would simply freeze up in the spotlight and not
13. See Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach [Wei86]
and http://www.geraldmweinberg.com for Jerry’s current offerings.
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PRESSURE KILLS COGNITION
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perform at their best. So, he took to a little bit of subterfuge. He’d
lead the students out onto the stage, under the unforgiving glare
of the spotlights, but explain that the judges weren’t ready yet.
They were still working on paperwork from the last candidate. The
microphones weren’t even on. So go ahead, he’d say, and just run
through the piece once as a warm-up.
Of course, he was lying through his teeth.
The judges were, in fact, listening intently. And they were hand-
somely rewarded; the students performed excellently. They were
free to. They were explicitly given permission to fail. For whatever
reasons of cognitive or neuroscience, once you make it OK to fail,
you won’t. Perhaps, this too, helps shut down our overactive L-
modes.
With the pressure off, you can be attentive. You can be comfortable
and just observe—remember the first tenet, that awareness trumps
trying. It’s hard to just be aware and comfortable with a flawed
performance under the harsh light of scrutiny or to let an idea
blossom to fruition in its own time when there’s a deadline looming.
A “brainstorming” session where ideas get shot down as soon as
they’re uttered has the same debilitating effect.
Instead, it is very possible to create “fail-
ure permitted” zones on a normal software Create “failure
project. The key is to create an environ- permitted” zones.
ment where the cost of failure is near zero.
In a brainstorming meeting, all ideas get written on the whiteboard
(or whatever). There’s no cost or stigma if the idea doesn’t progress
much further.
Think about the agile practice of unit testing. Here,
you’re free to have a unit test fail—even encouraged. You learn from
it, fix the code, and move on.
Prototyping gives you a similar freedom. Maybe it will work out,
maybe not. If it doesn’t work out, you can use the lessons—apply
the experience—and use that in the next iteration.
On the other hand, if failure is costly, there will be no experimen-
tation. No risk taking. No learning. Just a frozen mind, like deer in
the headlights, bracing for the inevitable bloody impact.
But what if the actual environment really is risky? It’s all fine and
well to say you need an environment where failure is OK, but what
if you’re sky diving? Or running Olympic bobsled or luge? What can
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IMAGINATION OVERRIDES SENSES
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you do to increase your chances of success in challenging environ-
ments such as these?
7.6 Imagination Overrides Senses
The aptly named inner game really can be played inside. In addition
to gaining experience in the real world, you can gain experience
inside your head as well.
Suppose you’re sitting in the movie theater, watching the big car
chase at the climax of the movie. Your pulse is rapid, your breath-
ing shallow, your muscles clenched.
But wait, you’re not actually in the car chase. You’re sitting in a
comfortable upholstered chair, in the air-conditioning, with a drink
and popcorn, watching flickering images projected on a screen. You
are not in any danger at all.14
Yet your body reacts as if you’re in real danger. And it doesn’t have
to be a movie; a book would work as well. It doesn’t even have to
be happening in the present moment. Remember that really mean
bully in grade school or that awful teacher? First love? These are
just memories, but the remembering can cause appropriate phys-
ical responses. It turns out that your brain isn’t very good at dis-
criminating between input sources. Real-time sensor data, memo-
ries of past events, and even imagined circumstances that haven’t
happened all result in the same physiological responses (see Fig-
ure 7.1, on the next page).
The entertainment industry is counting on it.
In fact, the situation is a little bit worse—the memory or imagin-
ing of events often overrides more accurate real-time sensor data.