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.
Knowing when to Quit
In general, none of us are as good at decision making as we like to think we are. In particular, there is one mistake that we make frequently and that’s not recognizing when it’s time to quit.
Eisenhower Matrix
Sometimes a new piece of work will arrive and it’s not immediately obvious whether we should start it now or if it can wait. A quick triaging technique that I use is called the Eisenhower Matrix1, an approach I first learned from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
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Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed the ideas behind this tool, and used them extensively in his work with the military and later in his role as president. ↩
Attribute substitution
Attribute substitution is a situation where, when we are faced with a computationally difficult decision, we will often substitute a more easily calculated decision in it’s place and answer that instead, without even realizing that we did this.
Book recommendations for Agile Coaches
I talk a lot about neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, body language, and other topics as they relate to Agile methods and I’m frequently asked: “What books do you recommend as an introduction?” There is no single best book to start with so I’m giving you a bunch of categories to pick from.