Tag Archives: people

brains learn more effectively from success than from failure

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

 

all creative work must be done in isolation

Creating Perfect Solitude for Creative Focus – Leo

Collaboration and connecting with others is a beautiful thing, but in the end, creation is done in solitude. All great art is done in isolation. All creative work must be done by shutting out the outside world, sitting down, and creating.

a case for knowledge workers having separate offices, including software developers. a big part of knowledge work is creative by nature.