i watched Kevlin Henney’s talk from NDC 2011 on cognitive biases tonight. about 15-20 min in he references a study on how the brain learns from success and failure.
we learn better from success because of how we’re wired in the brain.
this should inform us in a lot of contexts – that goes for the rest of the biases mentioned in the talk, too.
some of those contexts:
- failed projects – learning from, what you change next time
- strengths-based thinking
- reviews, retrospectives
- learning all sorts of new stuff
- how you teach stuff, trying to get others to learn
- business startups (perhaps motivation for lean startups)
- creating prosess based on revealing failure…
- estimates – expecting them to get better next time
- budgets (optimism, large numbers)
- comprehension of complexity in code
- adding people to a project mid-project
- testing
- usability (from programmers’ perspective)
- multitasking, in work and life
- meetings
- planning
- tolerance for randomness, variation in software development