Choice blindness

The excellent book “The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic” talks about an experiment done with supermarket customers, where they were asked to sample and then choose between two different kinds of jam. After that decision was made, they were asked to try the jam they had selected again and then explain why they had selected it.

Jira API: Sprints

If you’re extracting data from a scrum board then at some point, you’ll need to extract sprint data, which is stored in two different places, inconsistently.

Start and end points for flow metrics

If we want to be tracking flow metrics, we need clearly defined start and stop points. When we’re talking at a team level, these are often described as Definition of Ready (DoR) for the start point and Definition of Done (DoD) for the stop point.

Goodharts Law

Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The first problem is rarely the problem

Years ago at a client, I recall being asked how they could change the browser timeout to make it longer. They explained that what they were doing was taking too long, the browser was timing out, and users weren’t happy.

Does a mature scrum team need a facilitator for their daily scrum?

A question came up this week that seems simple on the surface but got interesting as we started to unpack it. The question was “does a mature scrum team need a facilitator for their daily scrum?”

Craving certainty - why we distrust probabilistic forecasts

When faced with the question of “when will we be done?”, the most factually accurate answer we can give is one from a probabilistic forecast. Yet counter-intuitively, despite being the most correct answer, it’s usually not the one many people want. What they want is a deterministic answer, even if it’s less accurate.

Growth vs Fixed mindsets and the influence of AI

In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck talks about the difference between the Growth and Fixed mindsets. I’d encourage you to read her words on this, but in a nutshell, people with a growth mindset believe that their intelligence can expand and develop, whereas people with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is fixed and what you’ve got now is all you’re getting.

Collecting metrics for no reason

I’ve worked in many places where an edict has come down from senior management to start collecting metrics, without any direction. While usually well intentioned, these requests are frequently poorly considered and poorly implemented. Many times I’ve asked “what decisions are going to be made from these” and nobody knows.

Tacit knowledge

When I was a teenager, I read a book called Juggling for the Complete Klutz, which seemed just perfect for me. It came with three bean bag balls, and instructions on how to use them.