"We're doing pretty well. There's not much to improve on" #sigh It's so, so easy to get improvement fatigue. To become overly familiar and comfortable with the little dysfunctions in how you and your team work. To stop improving and start missing out on the fresh ideas and experiments that could elevate your team beyond the level they're currently working at. Let's explore the common problems teams often become comfortable with, and ideas for addressing them. Let's explore what you could try that can help your team think differently, to challenge the status quo, and to help you and your team reinvigorate your desire to improve and to raise your game to the next level!

1. (re)Ignite Your
Desire to
Improve

2. Hello!
I’m Richard Banks
You can find me at @rbanks54
and https://richard-banks.org
2

3. Coffee with a friend
3

4. 4

5. But why?
Mental models on how to do things
We ignore contrary data
Historical bias and blind trust
5

6. What eventually
happens?
￮ Growing morale and quality erosion
￮ Team “enhanced” by contractors
￮ Disbanding and re-forming
￮ Outsourcing
6

7. Hope
…won’t help us improve behaviour

8. COM-B Model
Behaviour is part of an interacting system
involving many components
by Susan Michie, Maartje M van Stralen, and
Robert West -
https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11
86/1748-5908-6-42
http://www.behaviourchangewheel.com/
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Policies

9. Behaviour Sources
￮ Capability
￮ Physical
￮ Psychological
￮ Opportunity
￮ Social
￮ Physical
￮ Motivation
￮ Automatic
￮ Reflective
9

10. Capacity
10

11. Capacity
11

12. 12

13. Opportunity
13

14. 14

15. Motivation
15

16. Interventions

17. Remember…
Interventions
Alter the current system
Initiate change
Pro tip: Use multiple
interventions
Policies
Aid long term adoption
of new behaviours
17

18. Enablement
￮ You need “Slack” time
￮ 100% busy => 0% change
18

19. Education &
Training
￮ Lunch-n-learns
￮ “I saw this…” emails
￮ Pairing
￮ Code & design reviews
19

20. Incentivisation &
Coercion
Extrinsic motivation (“carrot and stick”)
Use sparingly, and only to initiate change
Aim for teams, not individuals.
20

21. “
The problem with making
extrinsic reward the only
destination that matters is that
some people will choose the
quickest route there, even if it
means taking the low road.
- Dan Pink (Drive)
21

22. “
Contrast that approach with
behavior sparked by intrinsic
motivation. When the reward
is the activity itself –
deepening learning, delighting
customers, doing one’s best –
there are no shortcuts.
- Dan Pink (Drive)
22

23. Why all this
intervention talk?
We have a team behaviour problem
(continuous no-improvement)
Without change, things gradually degrade
Interventions help initiate change
23

24. Modelling
People follow actions not words

25. We model all the time
25

26. 26

27. “
You manage things, you lead people. We went
overboard on management and forgot about
leadership.
- Grace Hopper 27

28. “
But Richard, I’m fine. I’m not
the one with the problem.
It’s the rest of my team that
needs help!
- You?
28

29. Are you sure?
￮ Are you resting on the “OK Plateau”?
￮ Are you an example of continual
improvement to others?
￮ Are you like that dancing guy?
29

30. Personal
Reignition
Change starts with you

31. A note on passion
Passion and interest change more often than
we think
You can grow passion, and fuel it, by success
31

32. “
The reality is, I’m excited by
everything on Day 1. And if by
Day X things aren’t working
the way I hoped, I lose my
passion. I have not seen the
correlation between my
passion and my success.
- Scott Adams (Dilbert)
32

33. “
Develop passion by doing
work that you find enjoyable
and meaningful. The key is to
get good at something that
helps other people.
- Benjamin Todd
(https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/)
33

34. “People rarely succeed
unless they have fun in what
they are doing.
– Dale Carnegie
34

35. So, you’ve lost the
fun?
Get curious. Take time to read widely.
Try things for yourself.
What problems are you interested in?
What “wants” would you love to satisfy?
What needs have you never tried meeting?
What are others doing that looks exciting?
35

36. “
You’ll never discover anything
new by doing the same things
you’ve always done
- Unknown
36

37. A word of warning
￮ Burn out is a genuine problem
￮ Don’t try and emulate others
￮ Don’t try to keep a solid green GitHub
profile if you don’t enjoy it
￮ Keep a balance in all you do
￮ There’s more to life than tech 37

38. Pro Tip: Focus
Don’t improve everything at once
Stay disciplined
Keep your focus tight
Attention is precious
38
XIt just takes one moment
To look at me and forget what you…
XIt’s so easy
To break your concentration
XThis might be worth clicking
Especially if it looks amusing
XTurn off notifications
You don’t need them. Honestly.
XYou can’t multitask
And you can’t improve without focus

39. New Years
Resolution?
￮ What would your work be like if you
actually followed through on any of
this?
￮ Don’t you want something better
than what you currently have?
39
🎉🎆
✨

40. Tangent
Time
Why Resolutions (mostly) Don’t Succeed

41. “
Psychological reasons we
don't succeed include
overthinking how arduous
our resolutions will be, and
leaving ourselves mental
get-out clauses.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-psychology-
behind-why-we-cant-keep-new-years-resolutions-
2018-1
41

42. 2016 Study on NYR
Kaitlin Woolley - Cornell University
Ayelet Fishbach - University of Chicago
Participants believe that both enjoyment and
importance are significant factors in whether
they stick to their resolutions.
42

43. Findings?
The enjoyment factor was the only thing that
mattered. (a.k.a. “fun”)
Lesson: if you get immediate reward from a
change, you’re much more likely to stick with it.
43

44. Improve what you
enjoy
Automate what you don’t
(or eliminate it)
44

45. “Everything you have ever
done is because you wanted
something and decided to
do something about it.
– Dale Carnegie
45

46. Recall Job
Satisfaction?
Discover something you enjoy that will help
others
Master it to increase your passion and
enjoyment
46
😍

47. Improvement
Go deep or go wide?

48. Do we even need to?
￮ Shall we ask the COBOL programmers?
￮ Or the FoxPro developers?
￮ Or the Sybase admins?
￮ Or the dot matrix printer repairers?
￮ Or Flash designers?
￮ Or Silverlight gurus?
￮ Or VAX/VMS operators?
48

49. 49
What would happen if
your team kept deepening
their current skills?
What if they kept
learning new skills each
quarter?

50. “
One strategy for getting ahead
is being incredibly good at a
particular skill; you need to be
world-class to stand out for
that skill. In my case, I layered
fairly average skills together
until the combination became
special.
- Scott Adams
50

51. Skill Acquisition
￮ Cognitive
￮ Associative
￮ Autonomous
51

52. “
Amateurs are content to let
their efforts become bottom-
up operations. People get to
that “good-enough”
performance level, where
they can go through the
motions more or less
effortlessly.
- Daniel Goleman
(Emotional Intelligence)
52

53. “
Experts keep paying attention
top-down, intentionally
counteracting the brain’s urge
to automatize routines.
- Goleman
53

54. “
To improve, we must watch
ourselves fail, and learn
from our mistakes
- K. Anders Ericsson 54

55. On Experts
What separates experts from the rest of us is
that they tend to engage in a very directed,
highly focused routine.
Ericsson labels this “deliberate
practice.”
55

56. 56
“Mistakes are not just opportunities for
learning; they are, in an important sense,
the only opportunity for learning or
making something truly new.”
- Daniel Dennet (Intuition Pumps)

57. 57
“Sometimes you don’t just want
to risk making mistakes; you actually want
to make them — if only to give you
something clear and detailed to fix”
- Daniel Dennet

58. “
Ideally that feedback comes
from someone with an expert
eye and so every world class
sports champion has a coach.
The feedback matters and the
concentration does, too — not
just the hours.
- Goleman
58

59. “
If you personally rest on the
OK plateau, don’t be upset
when everyone around you
does the same thing
- Me
59

60. Try These
Making it practical

61. Keep making bad
fixes?
Try “5 Whys” Debugging
Stop fixing symptoms.
Fix root causes.
61
5

62. Got other quality
problems?
Try writing automated tests before
making code changes.
Run WCAG tests, SonarQube and other
analysis tools during your build.
Conduct a bug bash. Run usability tests.
Dig through exception logs and support
tickets.
62

63. Already know it all?
Prove it.
Answer StackOverflow questions
￮ Pick a question on a topic you know
well.
￮ Find questions with no answers
￮ Be the answerer
63

64. Rely too much on
tooling?
Fix a bug or add a feature without
• using your IDE of choice
• using the debugger
• logging output
64

65. Disconnect the
Mouse!
Implement a bug or feature without ever
touching the mouse.
Learn your keyboard shortcuts and see
how much faster you can get things
done.
65

66. Pick up new
concepts
Complete a code kata in a language you
don’t know, but are curious about.
66

67. Improve Teamwork
Complete a kata using strong-style pair
programming.
Complete the same kata using mob
programming.
Now try doing some proper work with
the same techniques
67

68. Deliberate Practice
- Speed
Aim to complete a code kata in a
personal best time.
Record an attempt, and watch it back to
see where you pause and waste time, or
where tooling slows you down.
Feedback: Get someone else to see
where they think you lost time.
68

69. Ever get stuck in
search loops?
Implement your next feature without
using Google, StackOverflow, reference
docs, blogs, or phoning-a-friend.
69

70. Struggle to Focus?
￮ Try the Pomodoro technique
￮ Turn off those notifications!
￮ Disable social media (Timewarp)
￮ Book a meeting room and work in
there for a while
70

71. Improve your
communication?
Pick a topic, concept or technique you
know or want to learn.
Organise a lunch-n-learn with your team
and speak about it in 2 week’s time.
Ask for feedback on your presentation
and flow.
71

72. Share Knowledge
￮ Write “Today I Learned” team emails
￮ Share code review notes with the
team
￮ Write blog posts or create short
videos
72

73. Still too easy?
Mess with future you
Write code using variable and method
names like TempMethodNNN and
TempVarNNN.
Submit the PR, and wait for feedback.
Now try refactoring it so it makes sense
again.
73

74. Recap

75. Recovery
Steps
75
1 2 3

76. It’ll be
uncomfortable.
You’ll make mistakes.
Be receptive to
feedback.
Always be discovering.

77. Find the fun in what
you do
and
Find ways to help
others

78. 78
Thanks!
You can find me at
￮ @rbanks54
￮ richard.banks@readify.net