-- Linda Rising
My first experience of Linda Rising was through her fabulous book, "Fearless Change." That is the most inspiring book I've ever read about organizational change and is packed with strategies and patterns for doing so. Ariel and I continue to use the language developed in the book to talk about our own work in affecting change on our client.
She's here today to give us "some bad news" and tell us "some bad things about" us. Much of the information she's going to present will be too difficult for us to absorb and the natural reaction will be to "explain it away."
I'm strangely intrigued.
Linda's definition of deception: "consciously or unconsciously leading another or yourself to believe something that is not true." We'll start here. Her claim is that we naturally deceive ourselves or others - constantly. So it's a natural extension of this to conclude that we are constantly screwing up our estimates.
We are hardwired to deceive. We are hardwired to be optimistic, to see what we want to see. Then we rationalize away any incongruent results between our optimistic choice and reality. We are all biased, prejudiced, etc... There is no way around this. According to Linda, we cannot do anything about it.
Along with the confidence in your own intelligence comes the illusion of rationality. But you are not rational and you are certainly not more or less rational than anyone more or less intelligent than yourself. In fact, the smarter you are, the more you deceive yourself and the more clever your rationalizations become.
One example goes back to a scientific discovery made in 1847 that doctors who washed their hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies saved more lives of women an infants. But this discovery did not affect many doctors' decisions to wash their hands. They continued their non-hand-washing practices even in the face of scientific evidence.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck. Wow, that is grim.
Back to the world of everyday work. How about hiring? In an experiment, a number of interviewers were given the same information for a job candidate. Some interviewers were given some 'positive' information about the candidate first, and the others were given somewhat 'negative' information first. Those interviewers who received positive information first about a candidate gave significantly higher predictions of success. In fact, this tendency was exaggerated when the element of time pressure is added.
More stats on deception: On average, during a typical conversation there are 3 lies every 10 minutes. A survey of college professors revealed that 93% believed they were above average. And so on.
OK, this presentation is really about the real world. The practice of deception is passed onto our children. We teach them to deceive in a socially acceptable manner (i.e., pretend to like every present you get from family members on Christmas). We eat more from larger containers, when served larger portions, or when at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Yet we deceive ourselves by underestimating how much we eat. Sedentary people (such as programmers) show an increase in the hormone ghrelin, which increases appetite. So internally, even your own body deceives you into thinking you need to eat more than you actually do.
Getting back to our software story estimates, we can now draw conclusions about our (in)ability to estimate. Linda used to believe that mathematical models and tons of data from past projects would point the way to better estimates. But she saw that she was wrong. In her experience she was never able to make better estimates based on any of her tool, models, or truckload of data.
So should we even bother? Should we build in some mechanism for tuning our estimates to a less optimistic number? Linda has one suggestion: stop using numbers. Estimates represented by numbers are inherently deceptive. They give the illusion of being something that can be added, subtracted and multiplied. But estimates do not have these properties by nature. So getting away from numbers will alleviate some of the tendency to deceive oneself and others into confusing an estimate with a calculation. "Use t-shirt sizes or gummy bear colors," she says. Anything but numbers.
Linda's goal is to get us thinking about this and for me she has succeeded. And there has to be more than just estimating that is getting colored by our constant deception of ourselves and others - interviewing practices (as noted above), team dynamics, and decisions made during pairing are a few that spring to mind.
Crap! I just realized Cyrus is giving out estimating decks at our booth. They have numbers all over them! I must stop them! I'm off!
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