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