Habits – Goals and Limits

Robert Bogue November 9, 2016 No Comments

It was immediately after my divorce when I stumbled on a flash of insight. I’d clean out the house each week until I had two trash cans filled. Perhaps it was less insight and more that my trash company would only take two trash cans per week. This created a limit for my cleanup. I ended up setting the goal to do two trash cans a week so that I could make progress each week. This, ultimately, was how I stumbled on the basis for building short-term habits.

My habit of two trash cans per week served me well for several months as I purged the leftovers from my divorce – both physically and mentally. I don’t still clean the house to fill two trash cans, but I do still read a book each week – another different habit I started at the same time. Sometimes the habits that you create aren’t needed forever, they’re just needed for a while. When you need a short-term habit, having both a goal and a limit create a sustainable pace. It’s that sustainable pace that will help you reach your goals.

South Pole

In the early 1900s, it was heady stuff to be an explorer. The chances of death were high; however, the bragging rights were impressive. To be the first man to set foot on the South Pole was a great spot to be in history. It means that your name would be remembered forever. There were two men who were up for the challenge.

The first was a rugged veteran of the cold climates: Robert Falcon Scott had already explored deeper into Antarctica than anyone had ever done before. He had set new records. However, he had a reputation for the kind of ego and bravado that you’d expect from someone who had done so much. He was more the hare than the tortoise as it came to exploring. (See the fable, The Tortoise and the Hare.)

The second explorer was a Norwegian by the name of Roald Amundsen. His preparations were focused towards reaching the North Pole until he learned that other explorers had already reached it. So, in a relatively last-minute move, he redirected his efforts towards the South Pole instead. Amundsen was more like the tortoise in the story. With no real reputation to protect, he preferred to make careful, consistent progress over short bursts with the necessary recovery times in between.

Amundsen was certainly in it for the glory, but he had an innate sense that even a victory would be hollow if he couldn’t make it back – or if he lost toes or fingers to frostbite. Risk-taking is an essential part of exploration, but the risks that Amundsen took were more measured. On days when he could have made more progress, he chose instead to use that time to renew and refresh the team. They rested so that the next day they could make their goal.

On January 17, 1912 Scott reached the South Pole. Unfortunately, he and his team failed to make it home. They died of starvation and cold on the return journey. They were also 34 days late to be considered the first humans at the South Pole. Amundsen and his team had been there and done that. Obviously, Scott’s party was found and in their journals it was discovered that they had made it – only to fail on their trek back home.

Certainly bad luck plays a part in who succeeded and who failed, but the idea of a sustainable pace has a powerful influence on who will – and who won’t – be successful.

Sustainable Pace

When in junior high (or middle school) I was in physical education. We were supposed to run around the track a few times. I took off in an all-out sprint and maintained that for a few minutes. One of the more conditioned runners told me that I couldn’t sprint the entire race – that I should settle into a sustainable pace so that I’d be able to last the whole race. I didn’t heed the advice and ended up in the “second half” of the pack of runners at the end, but I never forgot the offhand comment.

I realized that most things in life – even those things that don’t require a long-term habit – aren’t something that you can sprint through. You can cram all night before the big test but you can’t cram for life. When you deprive yourself of sleep, you quite literally prevent your brain from converting your memories into long-term storage.

Software development has had a long history of lone heroes who write software over a weekend to meet an impossible deadline. It’s littered with burnt-out developers and frustrated organizations as their projects lurch forward at times and sputter and stop through long troughs of reduced productivity. As agile development approaches started becoming popular, one of the advanced topics for the leaders of the projects was how to develop the sustainable pace and how to keep the engine running relatively consistently.

Obesity has become a national epidemic – or so they say. Dieting has become big business and fad diets come and go. However, if you listen to the experts – who aren’t hawking a miracle pill or exercise video – you’ll hear that they suggest that you change your lifestyle. They recommend eating desserts – in small portions and sparingly – to keep your body from feeling starved, and more importantly to keep you from feeling that you’re depriving yourself.

Good diets are small changes in the way that you eat that, over time, create a large impact. Small changes are sustainable. Big, sweeping changes are like fad diets – just as likely to leave you in a worse spot than when you started.

Setting the Limit

When it’s something that you don’t want to do, it might seem easy to set the limit for the behavior, but strangely that’s not always the case. If you’ve got something nagging at you – like a cluttered home – there’s a tendency to try to “push through” decluttering. Certainly, there are times when this works. If you can put in an additional 10% or 20% than you’re comfortable with and you’re just done with it, the stretch to do the extra work may work in your favor.

Burnout

However, what happens if you press on and you don’t get done? You get discouraged. In fact, it’s possible that you’ll even reach burnout. Burnout isn’t about being too busy, doing too much work, or being overwhelmed. Burnout is, at its core, the belief that nothing will ever change. Burnout is a form of learned helplessness. (Find more on learned helplessness in The Paradox of Choice.)

We arrive at burnout when we don’t set limits for ourselves because we have no yardstick to measure our progress; and we arrive at the end of a day, week, or month utterly exhausted because we’ve pushed ourselves as far as we can go. (More on in The Art of Learning.)

Finding Flow

Flow is that highly productive state that we can get into where we’re super effective. While we don’t understand everything there is to know about the underpinnings of why flow works or how it works from a neurochemical perspective, we do know that it’s a desirable place to be. The Rise of Superman revealed that the gap between skills and challenge for maintaining flow is about 4%. When you get above 4% challenge, you end up falling out of flow.

Ideally, we want to set our limit high enough to trigger flow by creating that 4% gap between our current skills (or capacity) and what we set our goals to be (the challenge). So when setting our limits, we don’t want them to be so low that they’re boring and easy – nor should they be so ambitious that we exhaust ourselves.

The Glucose Imperative

Sometimes too much of a good thing can have its own long-term implications. We’ve all got what biologists call a “glucose imperative”. That is, we get a little shot of dopamine to reward us for things which are high in calories. It’s a holdover from a time when food was scarce and we needed a lot of glucose to feed our power-hungry brains. In today’s world, where we’ve largely solved the scarcity of food, the glucose imperative drives us to consume more calories than we should.

Health experts advise us to set a limit to the number of calories that we take in to prevent excessive weight and obesity. When we don’t set limits to our food intake, our weight typically creeps up over time. The limit, set at the right place, isn’t something that we can’t bend occasionally, like for a celebration where we can consume a few more calories in the form of a cake; but is instead a yardstick for us to ensure that we’re not burning ourselves out and that we’re staying in a highly productive state.

Setting the Goal

I won’t spend much time explaining why you need a goal. There are many books that will extol the virtues of setting a goal. While setting a goal, the limits are like the brakes in a car, and the goal is the gas. Goals are the motivation to get things done – not the motivation to stop.

Without goals it is easy to get stuck in a view of the world that doing nothing is the right thing. It’s easy to think that the world is scary or that I might fail. Too often people without goals believe it’s too much work. It’s easy to do nothing, and in the long run get nothing done.

The Habit

With the guard rails in place, habits can be formed. The goal prevents undershooting and doing nothing, while the limit prevents overshooting, exhaustion and burnout. These guard rails are like the gutter guards that they deploy for kids to learn bowling. In adult bowling, gutters on the sides of the lanes “eat” the ball if you get out of bounds. Kids with relatively poor aim would always end up in the gutter and have no fun. By deploying gutter guards, kids can just roll the ball down the alley and see what they get.

Forming a habit – whether short-term or long-term – is easier when you know what the boundaries are. If the habit is well-defined – through those boundaries – it becomes possible to form and maintain it for the time that’s necessary.

In my own world, my objective is to spend roughly an hour per day reading and writing. While this doesn’t always happen, it is a center point around which I try to base my day. I get up in the morning and write or read until 8AM, when I transition to my other work duties. When I get up early at 5 or 6 AM I can get more time in for writing. When I get up later I get less time. The goal I set of no less than 2 hours per week and no more than 10 hours per week have kept me able to enjoy reading and writing – and also to be productive.

There are many clichés about Rome not being built in a day and “how to eat an elephant” that speak to the need to break things down. It’s the habit that addresses each of the chunks of the larger goal. It’s the habit that sits between the limit and the goal.

Book Review-The Heretic’s Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity

Robert Bogue November 7, 2016 2 Comments

Years ago I came to understand how learning worked in the trades model. The apprentice was – literally – following the instructions of a journeyman or master to complete small repeatable tasks. The journeyman would start to detach from the small repeatable tasks. The journeyman would realize that there are multiple ways to get to the goal. The master became fluent in multiple approaches. The result was the ability to move fluidly between completely different techniques. The master recognizes the limits of the various approaches and picks the tool out of the toolbox that perfectly fits the situation. (See my review of Presentation Zen for a more detailed discussion of following, detaching, and fluency.)

I’ve mentioned in my previous reviews of The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices and Dialogue Mapping that Paul Culmsee and I have a long-term friendship, despite being nearly literally half a world away from one another. I’ve still not had the pleasure of meeting his coauthor Kailash Awati, but I look forward to that day. What I know is that Paul thinks deeply about complex, unsolvable problems that Horst Rittel would call “wicked”. That gives you a perspective that there are no solutions to problems. There are only factors that lead to more or less success.

It’s this ambiguity of what works and doesn’t that underlies Paul and Kailash’s latest book, The Heretic’s Guide to Management: The Art of Harnessing Ambiguity.

Harassing Ambiguity

Before I get to the meat of the review, I have to admit that somehow in my head the title says harassing ambiguity and not harnessing ambiguity. I can’t explain where that comes from other than to say that I can see Paul and I poking an amorphous ambiguity with sticks trying to get it to form into something that we can get our arms around. Whether this is an indication that I don’t get enough sleep and my dreams have become weird, or it’s a statement that I see Paul as liking to poke at ambiguity to get it to reveal itself, I can’t really say.

What I know is that harnessing ambiguity directly is sort of like trying to hold on to Jell-O. It doesn’t really work out all that well. The tighter you hold the more liquid the Jell-O becomes. There’s a light touch needed to guide discussions to reduce ambiguity. There’s a dedication required to try the same thing over and over and expect a different result. (See The Halo Effect for more about probabilities and how you can expect different results from doing the same thing.) Consider a batter in baseball. Will every swing connect? The best players have batting averages that are roughly one third of the pitches they face. They literally try the same thing over and over and only succeed about every third time.

We believe that we live in a certain world where A+B=C, but ambiguity creeps in and A+B only sometimes equals C. Sometimes it equals D. The problem is that we can’t understand things to the level necessary to predict exactly what is going to happen. Ambiguity about the input variables leads us to not know the results.

The Need for Certainty

The problem with ambiguity from a human perspective is that our brains are literally not wired for ambiguity. We’re cause-and-effect engines. In the study of learning, we know that things like delaying the outcome or inserting even the smallest amount of randomization has a huge negative impact on our learning. (See Efficiency in Learning for more in approaches to learning and impacts.) There are primitive regions of our brain that are responsible for handling ambiguity and emotion and pattern-matching – but our executive functions are formed in the neocortex. Our rational, conscious selves seem to be centered in the neocortex, far from the land where everything is ambiguous.

Johnathan Haidt modeled this as the Rider-Elephant-Path model, where our rational rider keeps the illusion of control. (See The Happiness Hypothesis for more.) Daniel Kahneman describes it as System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Gary Klein talks about recognition-primed decisions in Seeing What Others Don’t and Sources of Power. Knowledge management speaks of explicit knowledge which can be codified, and tacit knowledge which is known but can’t be quantified. Tacit knowledge can’t be quantified because it doesn’t have a small finite set of rules and the lack of ambiguity necessary to describe it in language. (See Lost Knowledge and The New Edge in Knowledge for more on knowledge management.)

Reiss stumbled across this need for closure in the development of his 16 desire model for predicting behavior, as discussed in Who Am I? and The Normal Personality, with the “order” dimension. Order includes more than just organization though that is the obvious outcome. Order is the need for everything to have a place. It also is associated with a need for black and white thinking. The need for closure means that you need to be able to label people and situations with something that alleviates the cognitive complexity of viewing it as a unique situation or person.

Certainty and the difference between the ways we think – or the different models for thinking that exist – abound in the literature.

Commodore 128

It was year ago when I was playing with my first computer, a Commodore 64. It was fun, I learned BASIC, and I wanted to do more. The natural progression was to a Commodore 128. The Commodore 64 had a CPU called 6502 at its core. The Commodore 128 had this 6502 CPU but also had a Z80 CPU as well. In the Commodore 128, it would boot up in 6502 mode and you could tell it to transition to the Z80 to run a completely different operating system, CP/M.

I’m reminded of this because the more we know about neurology the more we realize that there are relatively distinct systems that can be in operation –those systems can message each other (as the Commodore 128 did) but can’t both be active at the same time.

Ambiguous Risk

As it happens, there are risks that are different than others. Some risks have known probabilities and they become a math problem for our brains to solve. We can engage our executive function and solve for the best possible situation. However, other risks are unknown risks for which there is no math problem to solve. The equation isn’t known and there are no good methods for computing probability. These risks are processed differently in our brains. We don’t engage our executive function – our system 2; in these situations we rely on our basal brains. We rely on our differencing engines.

Relating to Certainty

When you are faced with a need to delay gratification, to wait for something to come in the future, how do you abide by that, if you’re not able to accept uncertainty? When ambiguity creates stress in your psyche, you’re driven to quell that anxiety. Imagine the stress that you can create in the mind of a small child when you ask them to delay their gratification. That’s exactly what Mischel did when he asked children to forego the marshmallow in front of them for a short time in exchange for the promise of two marshmallows. From a logical point of view, this is 100% interest for a small delay – a pretty big reward. (For more on the marshmallow experiment see
Emotional Intelligence, Willpower, and How Children Succeed.)

It’s a simple test and the observation of it showed some of the strategies that children who are good at delaying gratification used – but that’s not the important part of this test. The important part is that, when Mischel followed up with these children, this simple test early in life predicted their success later in life. More interestingly, he learned that he could develop the skills of those who waited for the marshmallow in others, and could make a dramatic change in their lives as well.

This delayed gratification experiment offered something else of value that is ambiguity. The children weren’t given a fixed time that the experimenter would be back. They were told soon or shortly. This is ambiguous at best. Did they have to wait 30 seconds or 30 minutes?

Delayed gratification, when the delay isn’t well known, is ambiguity. Learning to accept delayed gratification is just one way that learning to accept and manage ambiguity can impact your life.

Innovation

The real problems in life are the ones that have no specific timeline and no predefined formula. Something as simple as picking a college may appear straight forward, but with no predefined criteria or relationship of the criteria, it becomes a problem for which there is no one right solution and only probabilities of future successes. These are the problems that confront us when we live life fully. Our innovations have some probability of being hyper-successful, and some probability of being laughably bad. Those probabilities are neither known nor fixed.

However, those who are better able to innovate may ultimately be more successful through their acceptance, and sometimes even embrace, of the ambiguity of how things will end up. Innovation relies on an acceptance of ambiguity as a basic building block.

The Need for Cognitive Closure

The Heretic’s Guide to Management does a great job of explaining how to work with folks who have a lower tolerance for ambiguity. It explains how to use familiar concepts to help them cope with a situation where their ambiguity tolerance is pushed beyond the edge. These techniques for a facilitator to help temporarily bias the ambiguity that the participant can take are what the authors call “Teddies”. Teddies are useful tools – sometimes used inappropriately – to soothe the participants to the point where they can relate to other participants and the problems.

The gap in coverage in The Heretic’s Guide to Management is that it doesn’t help you understand how to improve the overall capacity of the participants to handle ambiguity. I am hoping that the authors follow up with some coverage of this important topic. Too many times I find people that I’m working with who have a strong need for cognitive closure. They aren’t able to cope with ambiguity at all. They’re concrete, sequential learners – and actors. If they can’t see the direct outcome they don’t do it. Effectively, they want to become unfeeling and just do what has to happen.

Feeling Electrons

Richard Feynman acknowledged the advantage that hard sciences like physics have over “soft” sciences like psychology and said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!” In other words, electrons behave the same way whether they’re having a good day or bad day. Electrons follow the same rules without complicating factors like feelings. Or do they? I remember a high school science project (not in MY high school) which showed that electrons don’t flow in one continuous stream like was commonly accepted (even by electrical engineers). I won’t pretend to understand this discovery, since it requires quantum mechanics and it’s been a long time ago. The reason this came to mind was that our understanding of physics relies upon very large averages of things happening.

We’re talking massive quantities of atoms and particularly electrons. As was mentioned in The Black Swan, the differences tend to average out. However, in the study of psychology, we’re generally interested in only one person or a very small number of people. Even organizational psychology looks at the interactions of a few thousand people. As a result, the differences that get factored out in physics don’t get factored out through averaging in psychology, organizational psychology, or leadership. You have to deal with all of the peculiarities of each person. Perhaps someday we’ll find out that electrons really do have feelings – we just haven’t cared about their feelings before.

Universal Solutions

In The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, a great deal of time was spent attempting to debunk the idea that there was one best practice that could be applied universally to any problem and would magically address the need. Obviously, this one best practice doesn’t exist. This time, it’s less about individual best practices, but instead the focus is squarely on the mistaken belief that there’s one business management model – or optimization model – that works best for every organization.

Taylor started the movement with Scientific Management, which at its core was the same goal of every model: get more productivity and less waste. Taylor had consultants walking around with stopwatches trying to time operations and reorganize people into better – more productive – spots. Backlash ensued as people resented being rearranged like cogs in a wheel.

Total Quality Management (TQM) followed scientific management after a 40-year delay. The idea here was that quality wasn’t an add-on to manufacturing, but instead an integrated part of the system. This is at the heart of the ISO 9000 certification and its derivatives that manufacturers seek to achieve. Ironically, despite the general understanding that the certification drives quality, it actually only says that you do what you say and you say what you do. It says that you document, not that you’re producing quality solutions, and in more than one organization the development of the quality system actually caused quality to go down.

As TQM started to lose favor, Lean Manufacturing started to gain prominence. We moved from the ideas of Edward Deming, to copying the Toyota Production System (TPS) with its ascribed acceptance of ideas from every level of the organization. Despite the promotion there are reports that even in the Toyota Production System not everyone was listened to. Still, the system worked. There were enough psychological constructs that allowed for progress to be made over the prevailing management approaches of the day.

Lean has been (I believe, incorrectly) simplified to the elimination of anything that doesn’t add value to the customer. Sometimes the approach is that if the customer won’t pay for it then we shouldn’t do it. Of course, this is an oversimplification because there’s always a need to sharpen your saw – though the customer won’t pay for it. Lean transformation projects often focus on the same sorts of things that systems thinking would tell us are important: flows and stocks/buffers. (See Thinking in Systems for more on systems thinking.)

Lean is interesting because lean concepts have been leveraged in industries outside of manufacturing with some success and some notable issues. Like its application to manufacturing, it works when it works and it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. Thinking in Systems explains that, by removing counter-reinforcing loops, reducing stocks, and doing the other optimizations necessary in lean, you necessarily make the system more vulnerable to wild swings – in the name of performance.

I remember working with a manufacturer working towards lean who sourced some components from China. Everything worked well until the Chinese manufacturer missed a few deadlines and there weren’t sufficient buffers in the system to deal with the delays. There were some very high freight bills as things had to be shipped airfreight instead of via sea, just to keep production lines from shutting down.

Making Maps

There’s an interesting point to map-making and one that’s not obvious. When making a map, we believe that the importance is on what we add to the map. We look to see whether we’re adding roads, businesses, rivers, etc. However, the art to map-making isn’t about what you add. The art to map-making is in what you leave out. The value of maps is in ignoring and eliminating the unimportant from the map that you’re making. Great map-makers create beautiful representations of reality that contain only what you need and none of what you don’t.

When we do studies to try to create new ways of doing things and documenting their successes, it’s a sort of map-making process that’s used. The objective is to identify those things that are changed in the experimental condition that are different from the control condition. However, controlling for other variables and trying to eliminate them can be difficult. As a result, most study designers don’t really know that the items they identified as important are truly the important items.

It’s only when the map is complete with the things that change that someone else can replicate your results – this is the way that science is tested. Far too few research papers that are published in well-respected, peer reviewed journals can be replicated. In most of these cases, it’s assumed that they can’t be replicated because some important aspect of the experimental condition has been omitted.

Fermi and Drake

Enrico Fermi was a college professor that demonstrated the wisdom of crowds. By using some well-ranged guesses, his students were able to relatively accurately guess at the number of piano tuners in Chicago. By guessing at the size of the market and the frequency with which the piano tuners are needed (or at least used), the resulting number was roughly right. The only conditions for success? An ability to make reasonable guesses, and enough people to factor out biases.

Compare this to the results of the Drake equation, which is used to estimate the number of detectable intelligent life in the galaxy. In other words, it predicts how many alien species we might find. The Drake equation is different in that we have no framing context of what the right values may be, and so the results are widely varied.

On the one hand, we can believe that we can factor out the uncertainty and ambiguity in things that surround our lives and our business. However, there are times when it’s simply not possible to factor out ambiguity, because we have no context for what a life without ambiguity would look like for real.

Shoot the Messenger

The predecessors to the Pony Express had a hard job. When a messenger arrived with good news for a king they might be rewarded. When they arrived with bad news – well, there’s a reason that there’s the saying, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Messengers literally lost their lives delivering bad news to the kinds who didn’t like it – which, didn’t by the way, change the news.

However, practitioners of various methods often get blamed for the method’s failure. It’s “you’re not doing it right” that is blamed for a lack of success, rather than acceptance that the model itself has holes or doesn’t work in certain circumstances or that it was just an unfortunate set of circumstances. The beauty of being a model-maker is that you can always blame the practitioner for the failure of the model – unless of course you’ve not managed to get some other sucker to be the practitioner and you’re doing it yourself.

Many programs have dismissed the failures of the program to succeed based on the failings of well-meaning practitioners who may have executed the model flawlessly. However, this is what happens when a model fails as a result of a gap – what happens when something succeeds because of the people?

Agile Software Development as a Management Fad

I’ve had the pleasure of watching the growth of agile development over the course of my career. I’ve seen what amounts to the entire hype cycle of the approach. Agile development is built off of a few solid psychological principles. It relies on iteration. It insists on personal commitment. It has real value in many situations – and some limits where it’s not effective.

Early on in the hype for agile methodologies, of which there were several, criticisms from traditional developers were that the agile development projects weren’t succeeding based on it being a better approach. Instead, they were succeeding based on the fact that it was the better developers who were attracted to it and who were executing those projects.

The criticism is appropriate. The developers who were at the top of their craft were also those who were trying new things and trying to develop software better. So those who wanted to give agile development a try were the better developers. However, the question is whether agile succeeded because of good developers or if it worked on its own. This is the chicken or egg problem. Were they better because they wanted to try it, or did they become better because they did? In truth, the answer is probably a little of both.

Self-selection is a problem with statistical research. You tend to get the people to volunteer who are the most interested. Thus, their responses don’t represent people at large. They represent the people who are interested. In political polling this bias may factor out. Those who are interested in the survey are interested enough in showing up to vote. However, in many other cases, the self-selection problem can invalidate research.

I anticipate that in the future there will be an agile management model which will leverage the same core tenants of agile development for non-software development projects. It will be the latest management fad (like lean is) and it will work in some cases and won’t work in others.

Agile development is a model (or really a set of models) that is designed to solve a range of problems with good people most of the time. Someone will decide it’s the one model to rule them all, and will ultimately frustrate practitioners when they fail and their failure is blamed on them.

Getting What You Want by Pursuing Something Else

There’s a concept that surfaced in A Philosopher’s Notes about indirectly getting something you want by seeking something else. It references Hindu gods”

Lakshmi is the traditional Goddess of Wealth. The problem is, if you go straight after her (by constantly chasing the bling) she’ll tend to avoid you. Saraswati’s the Goddess of Knowledge. If you go after her (by pursuing self-knowledge, wisdom and all that goodness), an interesting thing happens. Apparently, Lakshmi’s a jealous Goddess. If she sees you flirting with Saraswati she’ll chase after you.

This indirect access of the things you want – wealth or wisdom – occurs in The Heretics Guide to Management as well. Here, the anchors are more clear. When you’re willing to work hard (or do purposeful practice, as the book Peak would say) you can achieve the success that you want. Perhaps you can even harness ambiguity and you won’t need The Heretics Guide to Management.

Article: Ten Development Lead Interview Questions You Should Know

Robert Bogue November 4, 2016 No Comments

Every development lead will need to know these questions, which will reveal the skills and technical knowledge of a candidate, their creativity in creating their own tools to solve problems, as well as their ability to train, support, and lead a development team. If you’re thinking about becoming a development lead, check out the article, “Anatomy of a Software Development Role: Development Lead,” for a comprehensive overview of what the job entails.

Part of the developer.com series, Top 10 Interview Questions. Read more…

The Deep Water of Affinity Groups

Robert Bogue November 2, 2016 No Comments

I’ve read more than a few marketing books. The list with book reviews of marketing books include Brand, Demand, Fascinate, Guerilla Marketing, and The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I’ve also spent a lot of time working through neurology and psychology, which has led to perspectives on how people make decisions and how, though we like to believe we’re rational creatures, we’re really anything but.

While writing up my book review for Incognito, I realized that none of the books that I’ve read really discussed in any detail how people behave when they feel like they’re in a group together. There have been discussions of what happens when people are separated in the “us and them” groups. (Such as the Nazi concentration camps, which was the subject of Man’s Search for Meaning.) However, understanding how to create and leverage affinity groups hasn’t been a topic of deep study. I subsequently read Influencer, and again I was surprised at how little there was about how identifying with a group is an important social pressure. There’s the comment or two about how innovators can work against you, because they’re not perceived as being in the group with the rest of the population, but still very little on how one identifies with a group and how powerful that can be. (By the way, the idea that early adopters can hurt you runs slightly contrary to the thoughts in Diffusion of Innovations.)

Rational Decisions

Before we can dip our toes into the murky water of how we make decisions, we have to dispense with the delusion that we make decisions rationally. Thinking: Fast and Slow showed us that our automatic system (System 1) can lie to our rational system (System 2), and we won’t know the lie happened. Incognito spoke extensively about how we rationalize what we’ve already decided subconsciously. The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch spoke of the Elephant-Rider-Path model that says that our rationality is a tiny rider sitting atop of a massive elephant of emotion that drives us. Sources of Power spoke of Recognition-Primed Decisions (RPD) and how hard it was to get experienced fire captains to acknowledge that they had built a mental model based on their experience and had used that – without being cognitively aware of it. Over and over again, there is evidence that we don’t make rational decisions – we rationalize the decisions that we’ve already made emotionally or unconsciously.

Giving up the fiction of rational decisions opens us up to the question about how we are influenced to make decisions. We can start to look at the hidden messages that we attach to our behaviors and investigate the small forces that act on us when we’re making decisions, such that even a small nudge in one direction or another can send us down a radically different path. (See the Butterfly Effect for more on small changes and large outcomes.)

Connecting with Others

We are, at our core, social beings. We’re designed to be connected to one another. I described in detail how experts, including Robin Dunbar, think about the groups of people that we have stable social relationships with in my post, High Orbit – Respecting Grieving. We’re connected to others and we deeply desire to remain connected to others. This is so true, that even when we’re asked to raise problems when we discover them, if the culture isn’t open we’ll often hold back on important information because it’s negative. We don’t want someone to not like us just because we made a mistake.

It’s like we’re constantly stuck on the elementary school yard vying for the attention of the “cool kids” or the “cute guy/girl”. Somehow our brains never get past the first feeling of rejection, and continue to play out a drama of trying to be accepted over and over again. We yearn to be connected because our evolutionary biology drives us to be so. (See Spiritual Evolution for more on how our evolution shaped us.)

At the heart of all of our desire for affinity groups – and the reason that we look for them everywhere we go – is this deep desire to be connected. As social creatures with the longest child-rearing times, we simply need to be in a community – any community – to ensure our survival as a species. Being connected to social groups increases our probably of survival and therefore reproduction – and create the cycle over again. Our evolution drove us towards a natural awareness of the importance of groups.

Brand Marketing

Often people see brand marketing and believe it has to do with fonts, colors, and logos. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that brand marketing is about selling someone an experience that they can’t get on their own. The brand sells the allure of being a jet pilot or race car driver (Tag Heuer). The brand sells exclusivity (Rolex). The brand sells simplicity and uniqueness (Apple). Brands are all about the feeling that the user gets when they buy your product. Sure, Starbucks makes a great coffee, but have you ever been just to say that you went?

The fonts, colors, and logos are just designed to signal to the consumer that they’re in the brand promise. That needs to be as clear as possible to prevent the erosion of the brand. The brand itself isn’t these technical details. Again, the brand is the feeling that it evokes inside of you. The stronger the brand, the clearer the brand promise and message are.

Brand promises are difficult to get right, because you never know what will resonate with your audience. A small motorcycle manufacturer with a lousy quality record was able to capture a substantial portion of the market with an outlaw image. Harley Davidson found that their market wanted the “bad boy” image more than any of the other images of efficiency, reliability, or value. The consumers wanted to express their rebel side, and Harley Davidson gave them that.

In the fast-food category, the McDonalds brand signals low cost and high consistency. Brands like Chipotle (owned by McDonalds) has a brand promise about good, non-burger, food delivered fast. Competitors have tried other approaches. Wendy’s famous “Where’s the beef?” campaign touted their portions (or ratios). Burger King’s marketing was focused on delivering the message that you can “have it your way!”

Each brand has one—or more – brand promises that you’re trying to get in your life. If you’re looking for more meat in your food, stop at Wendy’s. If you want it your way, then Burger King may be your answer. The idea is that, by resonating better with what the real users want, you’ll get more of the market and thus have success. From the consumer side, we’re looking to identify with the brand’s promise. We want to be seen as someone who has the exclusivity of Rolex or the ruggedness of Tag Heuer.

Putting On Brands

We wear brands as a way to enhance our status. We’ll wear the Nike swoosh on our shirt. We’ll make sure that the mighty apple is on our car to signify our love of all things that Apple makes. We cloak ourselves in the brands to attach our self-image and our self-worth to the image that the brand is selling. We credential ourselves with brands all the time. By connecting to the brand we are able to allow our ego to compensate for a weakness and build ourselves up. (See Change or Die for more on our ego.)

We cloak ourselves in things that make us appear to be more than we are. Folks with a high status motivation (See Who Am I? for Reiss’ 16 motivators) have to cloak themselves in the best things. They have a high need to be perceived as above or in the elite group. They’ll drive a Land Rover and not a Jeep; or a Ferrari, not a Corvette. To those obsessed with status, they have to cloak themselves in whatever brand seems to be the best.

The word “cloak” here is used because it implies that we’re trying to hide our true selves. We don’t necessarily feel like we are the best, that we’re worthy of the best, or that we are what the brand implies – but we want to be.

Connecting Brands to Connectedness

Once we understand our need for connectedness and the fact that brands centrally make a brand promise, we can connect our need for connection and the idea of brands together. Brands are connecting us to that ideal self. That is, brands allow us to pretend to be the person we really want to be. We don’t have to actually be a better person; we can buy something and instantly become it. It seems like more and more of us are electing the easier path of buying our ego a tool to help us believe that we’re our ideal self – and that people will want to be us or be around us.

We’re not connecting as well today as we did a generation ago. Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone clearly shows that all of the data points to the fact that we’re losing our connectivity in social groups. We’re joining social clubs less frequently and we’re attending church less regularly. (See The Great Evangelical Recession for more on church attendance — or lack thereof.)

Brands represent the equivalent of relational candy. They provide the feeling of connectedness without an actual connection. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: there are times when a little sweet is just what we need to feel better. However, a steady diet of candies – or brands – isn’t necessarily good for our health.

Somewhere in the middle, between brands and our need for connection, are the groups that we belong to. They don’t have the clarity of message as a strong brand but, by nature of their mission, focus, and membership, they can signal a message that makes you feel even more connected and more alive.

Creating Strong Affinity

A brand creates a very wide but very shallow influence on people. The affinity or attraction to the brand message is broad enough to impact a large number of people – but the relative impact will be weak. You won’t “take a bullet” for Tag Heuer, but you might buy a watch. Certainly in the realm of marketing, our goal is often to create a purchase transaction and so even a small brand impact is sufficient. However, the same powers that drive brands can drive stronger influences for a smaller group of people. In fact, the more exclusive the brand, the more impactful the influence can be. Ferrari may not sell a lot of cars, but people pay a lot for the cars they do sell. The fewer people who can partake of the brand, the more powerful it can be.

Most small groups, however, are not brands in the traditional sense. Instead they’re the groups that we belong to. These are where we have some level of real connectedness, not just an illusion, as well as a shared experience. If you want to create real impact in a group, the kind of impact where someone might really “take a bullet” for someone else, you need to create a small group of people with a common objective. Collaborative Intelligence touched on the dynamics of building teams when the stakes – and egos – are high. While it can be difficult to create the kind of tight bonding that makes a team work well – and allows team members to impact one another – it’s definitely possible.

Paintball

Many years ago when I was only a handful of years into the Microsoft MVP program, there was a product team member, Lawrence Liu, who really knew how to create a community. He instituted a pre-MVP Summit paint ball excursion where all of the SharePoint MVPs who had come to the event would pair off on teams and battle. At the time it seemed like a great opportunity to exact relatively harmless revenge on some of the other community members with whom I was upset. However, there were deeper forces operating. We got an opportunity to see each other differently. We got to build a shared experience that would tie us together. As a result of the struggle that we went through together, we bonded more closely than we would have been able to if we had sat in a room and talked all day. It’s through this experience that I can glimpse an understanding of how military teams become bonded for life.

The genius of the event was that it was able to create a struggle to win – which pulled the folks on the team closer together. It simultaneously built an opportunity for respect of the members of the other team who were playing well. It even gave us a respect for the folks who were willing to go above and beyond. This included the two people who brought gully suits. Of course, by the fourth time the event was run, its power to bond us had waned. By then Lawrence had moved on and we didn’t replace the event with another suitably useful event. Instead the group had grown beyond the 50 or so people we used to have and we didn’t find events that were suitably able to pull us together.

Wider Ripples

The paintball experience was just for the SharePoint MVPs. However, it was connected to the MVP Summit, a quasi-annual gathering in Redmond where we’d visit with other MVPs and the Microsoft product teams making the products that we were using. These events were often boring events punctuated by a few minutes of sparky conversations. While engineered as sessions for the product teams to share their thoughts and MVPs to provide feedback within the confines of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), they didn’t always meet this mark. By the time the event happened, the product teams were often too far along in their processes to hear the feedback that the MVPs were providing. I vividly remember some rather direct and perhaps uncaring feedback occurring too late in process to resolve issues in a product release plan. However, in the midst of this there were interesting interactions with other MVPs with other areas of specialty.

I’ve long since learned that the best conversations that I have at a conference or event may be at the breakfast or lunch table. People are often so self-absorbed in what is going to happen that they fail to be in the moment and attend to those they are with. For me, I strike up conversations at tables and try to learn as much as I can about the people at the table and what makes them tick. As a consultant I get the opportunity to get called into a lot of different industries and organizations and I love that. Sitting down with people at a conference broadens that circle even more. Never is that more true than at the MVP Summits.

MVPs represent one of the most diverse groups I’ve ever met. You can have someone who is recognized as a community champion for Xbox sitting next to a SQL Server DBA who responds to thorny issues in the forums. On the whole, the folks at an MVP Summit are more technical and less relational but not exclusively so. This is a particularly energizing time because the MVPs know that they’re “with their own”; that is, people who share a passion for sharing what they know with others – even if the technology isn’t the same.

I’ve built a respect for all MVPs, and not just the SharePoint MVPs that I played paintball with, because of these conversations – and honestly because the impacts of the paintball connectivity were diffused through the entire MVP group. The proximity of location and time allowed me to automatically transfer some of the affinity to the SharePoint MVPs to the larger group. The SharePoint MVPs were some – but not all of the people sitting at the tables.

Shared History

Paintball represents a part of the shared history of the group. Any of the guys who were there can take me back at any time by talking about the day. In doing so, they rekindle the spirit of teamwork, cooperation, and interdependency that existed that day. Even less impactful events have power over us today. Consider bumping into someone from elementary school – even someone whom you would have considered a rival back then. For most people, this reconnection will be a positive one. Even if it’s a fleeting moment and you don’t stay in touch, most people experience this as an intensely positive experience, because of the connection to the history that we all feel as if we’ve lost. Thinking, Fast and Slow illuminates the sunk-cost fallacy, where we overvalue investments we’ve already made. We tend to value the things that we’ve spent. Similarly, we tend to value our history greatly

Rarely is it that I meet someone from my past when it’s a negative experience. Most often the power of shared history and the desire to recapture it outweighs any negative memories I have of the person themselves. We like to think of our memories as immutable, that they can’t be changed. However, Redirect invested a great deal of time in explaining the process of story editing – that is, changing our beliefs about our memories. While this is an active process, there’s a passive process that happens where we redefine the conflicts that we had with someone and see it with the perspective of time. (Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology describes the malleability of memory more clinically.)

When you’re locked in a battle for the “right” way forward, your perspective and the urgency of doing the right thing, whatever the issue is, will seem to be the largest thing. However, the passage of time has a tendency to refocus us on relationships and people and reduce our focus on being right or on things. Bowling Alone‘s focus on generational differences exposed that we’re more active in community, groups, and philanthropy during our later years than we are early on in our twenties. As a result, for the most part, you’d rather have a conversation about old times with someone who was your rival than you would look the other way as they come down the street.

Pay It Forward

The idea of reciprocity is woven deep into our makeup. It shows up on the negative side as vengeance. (See Who Am I? for more on vengeance as a value.) On the positive side, we see reciprocity show up in marketing and sales – if we give the customer something, they’ll want to give us something back. The groups that we become a part of give us something that we all need – that is, belonging. Reciprocity works its way in and we naturally want to give back to the group – which we do by giving to the members.

In a sense, groups take our natural tendency to reciprocate and allow us to accomplish it through the group as “pay it forward.” That is, we get some value from the group through membership – or perhaps through someone specifically helping us – and in turn we help someone in the group. This creates a virtuous cycle or a positive reinforcing loop. (See The Fifth Discipline and Thinking in Systems for reinforcing loops.)

Us and Them

At our core, we’re all trying to define the groups that we belong in. We have an affinity with in-group words. (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) for more about research on affinity of in-group words.) It’s woven deep into our collective consciousness. To be exiled – to be excluded from the community group – used to be a death sentence. When we more obviously needed communities than we need them today, if you were on the outside, you were outside the protection from the community, and your chances of death were much higher.

In the 80s there was a popular brand of clothing called Members Only. Because it was an 80s fad, it’s become the butt of jokes in Seinfeld
and Shallow Hal about people being “the last member”. However, the brand’s core message – that you can be a part of a members-only group – has inherent appeal to us as humans. Warehouse clubs like Sam’s Club and Costco describe their customers as members because of the membership fee that’s charged, which proves that we’ll pay money to be a part of a store that we can spend our money on.

Groups of Power

It was a disturbing trend. Larger store chains were starting to force independent grocers out of the business as early as the late 1920s and 1930s – though the real pressure would come much later. Market capitalism was allowing some more powerful grocery chains to expand and to choke independent grocers out of the business through their economies of scale. They could buy food cheaper and therefore sell it cheaper. In an industry that works with very thin margins, even a few percentage points of price reduction can be the difference between survival – and lack of survival. So what’s the small grocer to do? The answer is to form your own group, as happened in 1926, when 100 independent retailers came together to form the Independent Grocers Alliance, which most people from small towns simply know as their hometown IGA.

I can remember the IGA grocers in the small towns and communities that I visited throughout Indiana and on vacations out of the state. While the larger cities’ grocery markets were dominated by larger chains, IGA seemed to be woven into the fabric of the small communities. While there are still IGA stores in some of the small towns that I visit, they are fewer and fewer each year. Despite their seemingly losing battle, the concept of gathering together a large group of independent businesses to harness greater buying power and to gain some of the economies of scale that their competitors were enjoying was genius.

They aggregated the power of many independent entities in the service of the greater good. This isn’t unlike how communities were started, wagon trains were gathered, or any of the other ways that we’ve banded together as a society and it represents an awareness of our interconnectedness and our need for other people to survive – and thrive.

Family

Perhaps the most powerful affinity group for most of us is our family. Our nuclear family is obviously the people that we spend the most time with and with whom we have the most shared experiences; but more broadly, family is a big deal.

For some, blood lines are critical. Whether you’re a monarch of a country in Europe or simply a proud family from Kentucky, who marries whom and the legacy of your family name has a big impact. Family is – because of blood – something treated special.

In truth, if you got a call from a cousin you barely remember asking for a place to stay or a bit of small financial help, you’d likely help out without much of a second thought. You would turn to your spouse and utter only, “they’re family.” And, in all but extreme circumstances, that may be all that needs to be said. Family has an inherent affinity to it.

In the context of building affinity groups, I’m not suggesting that you marry into a family to become one of them; but rather I’m suggesting that there is an affinity to family that is strong, and therefore if you are looking for help, family may be a good place to go.

The Impact of Affinity

I started with the idea that affinity groups allow you to exercise influence over others. Certainly the psychological forces that are working are strong enough to influence others. However, before considering how to influence others, it’s important to reflect on how affinity causes us to behave differently. You can measure your affinity for others by measuring what you’ll do.

Doing for Others – That Which You Wouldn’t Do For Yourself

An interesting demonstration of commitment to another for me is the observation that you’ll do something for them that you won’t do for yourself. For instance, if you would hire out having someone remove wallpaper for you – but you are willing to go and remove wallpaper for a family member – that represents a very strong statement to me. It’s one of the ways that I measure how important other folks are to me. One might wonder why I wouldn’t hire it out for them. Besides the rather obvious reason that it’s less socially acceptable, there’s also the reason that the fact that I’m doing it myself conveys more meaning and importance.

While this is a high bar for what you would do for others, and it’s probably something reserved for very few people, it is a crystalline way of demonstrating how much influence someone has on another person.

Doing for Others – That Which You Wouldn’t Do For Money

A second level of commitment is when you’ll do something for someone else who won’t do it for money. I’ve spoken about my video studio in the past. While we’re considering allowing folks to rent the space, it won’t be me doing the video work in the studio. However, from time to time, folks come by who need a “head shot” for a web site or a business card. I’ll sometimes do these photos as a favor for folks when I wouldn’t do them for a fee. Why wouldn’t I do them for a fee? Well it isn’t a business I want to start. It’s not that I can’t do a good job or that I don’t enjoy it. It’s that I don’t want to do it all day, every day. The bar for reaching this level is much lower than the bar for doing things that I wouldn’t do for myself, but there’s a certain level of affinity that I have to have to be willing to extend myself.

Doing for Others – That Which You’ll Do for Money

Still a lower level of affinity is one where you’ll overextend yourself with work to do something. If you’re a consultant, this means going over your typical commitment. If you’re an employee it means doing a job on the side. You’re still expecting to be paid. However, you don’t have time really – -you’re giving up something important to you. Whether that’s resting at home, time with the family, or time at a club, you’re making some sort of a sacrifice.

Going Deep

For me, the concept of affinity groups is about how we’re connected to one another. It’s about how we make our decisions and how we fulfil our inherent need to be connected. Affinity groups allow us to recognize that we’re all part of the same human race, that we’re a part of an elite group of the human race, and we can recognize that we’re all unique and different – all at the same time. The next time you make a decision, maybe consider how affinity groups played a part in that decision.

Book Review-Grit: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up

Robert Bogue October 31, 2016 No Comments

You can’t make it very long in business without a bit of grit. The statistics are daunting. Within 5 years, 80% of the businesses that were started won’t be around any longer. You can’t raise a family without a bit of grit. There are many times when you’ll wonder as a parent, “Am I doing this right?” In area after area of our lives, it’s easy to see where grit is required to accomplish our goals and live life to the fullest. That’s why Martin Meadows’ book Grit: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up is such an important read.

The Trough of Disillusionment

Gartner created the idea of a “hype cycle” to graphically represent the emotions behind the release of new technologies, tools, and techniques. After the initial trigger, there is the peak of inflated expectations, followed by the trough of disillusionment. This is followed by the slope of enlightenment, and ultimately ends with the plateau of productivity. Gartner doesn’t run the line to the right far enough, though: there’s also some level of “sunsetting” that happens for every technology where it falls out of favor.

The beauty of the model is that it explains quite well how new technologies are adopted. Like Everett Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations, it contains a model for the classic pattern that innovations diffuse with. However, the hype cycle is about the emotions felt through the diffusion process. While its name is associated with the “hype”, or hyperbole, the labels for the sections make it clear that, at its heart, we’re talking about the emotional component of the adoption.

Everything we do in life seems to follow a similar cycle. We fall in love and have our inflated expectations that we’ll never fight. We start a new job, and there’s nothing wrong with this organization. Over time, we begin to see things more accurately – or perhaps too pessimistically – and believe that perhaps our new love isn’t the right one for us, or this organization is sicker than the last one. (The Paradox of Choice discusses some of the factors that can lead us to buyer’s remorse about our choices.)

Our real defeat in whatever we’re doing comes from the trough of disillusionment, when we allow our mind to decide for us that what we’re doing isn’t worth it, isn’t going to work, or isn’t what we want. Grit is the mental toughness that can prevent our minds from believing that we’re not good enough to be successful or that the goal isn’t worth the work. We don’t get exhausted as much as we think and feel that we are exhausted, and we become it.

Mental Toughness

There are three general views on mental toughness. There’s the naïve view that you just power through it. You lace up your Nikes and “Just Do It.” There’s the view that it’s some meditative state of nirvana that can only be reached by a backpacking expedition to Tibet. Then there’s the view of those who have been in the trials that required mental toughness. (One example is the book, which is like a journal of a man who has walked a hard road, called The Road Less Traveled.)

Each month, I sit with a group of CEOs to talk through where we are, and to get advice on how to move our businesses forward. And each month, I’m amazed at the challenges that life throws at us. Collectively, the challenges are crazy. One guy had an opportunity with a large oil company disappear because the agent managing the introduction literally died. Industries he was pursuing have collapsed out from underneath him. Another member of the group watches his fortune rise and fall based on the oscillations of the retailer’s whims. Each month, I watch these guys get pounded on by fate, and wonder whether they’ll “make it”, or whether their current project is just another failure on their road to success. (See Rising Strong Part 1 and Part 2 for more on the role of failure and getting back up.)

I’ve been in business this time around for over 11 years. There have been several times when I have considered giving up and moving on. I’ve considered the idea that I’d take a job somewhere and “hide out” long enough to regain my strength and will to fight again. I never pulled the trigger because everything didn’t line up quite right, but it’s something that I’ve considered.

It’s hard not to consider whether what you’re doing is right. If you’re trying to reach your peak, you’ve always got to be mentally rehearsing and evaluating what you’ve done. (See Peak for more about peak performance and what you do to achieve it.) Self-evaluation is a requirement when you’re trying to be the best you can be, and this self-evaluation drives you to the question about whether “it” will work, whatever “it” is.

Whether you’re a Navy Seal candidate who is trying to get past the limits of your body’s toughness through the pain and fatigue or you’re a business man who has struggled for years, the key to success doesn’t rely on your physical capacity or your business idea: the key to success rests on your ability to keep your head in the game.

Willpower

Grit is — in part — the same as willpower. (See my review on Willpower if you want to compare perspectives.) The Psychology of Hope considers it an essential ingredient for hope (and therefore happiness). While there are many that say it’s essential, the definitions sway between authors. Some believe that willpower is about self-control. Others believe that willpower is about “get up and go.” Obviously there are other perspectives as well. Willpower might be a shortcut way for describing a category of mental processes that are used to overcome barriers put in our way. (See Demand for how little a barrier needs to be to stop us.)

The problem with willpower is that isn’t a single thing. There are differing abilities to cope with different kinds of adversities in different areas of our lives. Willpower may be the resolve to push through our struggles – but everyone experiences their struggles differently. It’s hard to “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”, as the old Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler” points out.

Stockdale Paradox

Jim Collins in Good to Great discusses the Stockdale Paradox, which he explains as, “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Grit taken to its extreme is that unwavering faith. I’ve always had a problem with discerning between when you should continue to persevere and when it’s time to find another passion to pursue.

I call this spot where there’s a paradox that has no answer the “and then the magic happens” point of the story. That is, there’s no way to predict what will happen. You don’t create a special set of magical conditions that move you from one reality to another. Only by random chance, dumb luck, and perseverance are you successful. In fact, as I have come to accept more-and-more that life is a series of probabilities and not certainties, I realize that sometimes just the act of continually trying is enough to be successful. (See The Black Swan for more about probabilities and our failure to predict.)

Ringside Seat

For the battle that rages in my head as I attempt to discern when it’s time to try something new and when it’s time to “double down” and make another push to make my latest dream a reality, there are arguments like, “Better to live to fight another day”, and “nothing hard ever came easy to anyone.” Good grit isn’t always deciding to push through things. Good grit is deciding when to move to the next challenge.

Maybe it’s time for you to get your own Grit.

Article: Ten Interview Questions Every Functional Analyst Should Know

Robert Bogue October 28, 2016 No Comments

Bridging the gap between subject matter experts and the architects and developers who create solutions is hard work—but it’s work that the functional (or business) analyst is up for. Interviewers may challenge candidates with these ten questions so they’ll know that the candidate has the skills to help transform desires and dreams into developed code. The Anatomy of a Software Development Role: Functional Analyst can help you find out more about the role.

As part of the developer.com series, Top 10 Interview Questions. Read more…

Book Review-Raising a Modern-Day Knight: A Father’s Role in Guiding His Son to Authentic Manhood

Robert Bogue October 24, 2016 No Comments

It’s been several weeks now since I got to attend a knighting ceremony. The queen wasn’t present and I wasn’t in a castle. It was my friend who was knighting his son. This ceremony and symbolic act of recognizing him as a man I would find out later from a book Raising a Modern-Day Knight: A Father’s Role in Guiding His Son to Authentic Manhood. I was curious what else the book had to say about raising boys, so I started reading and learning about knighthood.

The Meaning of Knights

We’ve all heard stories of knights in the middle ages. They wear shiny plate armor and ride in on a white horse. They joust and play games, they rescue damsels in distress, and they slay dragons. Wait, perhaps I slipped out of history and into mythology and lore somewhere along the way. That’s one of the interesting things about knights. They move from being a real figure in history into a mythical legend.

That seems to be in no small part because of the code of conduct they lived by – the honor that they carried so close to their hearts. Knights learned how to uphold a set of moral ideals that most of the people of the time couldn’t aspire to. As a result, knights eventually became nobility. Like the lords they served, they were set apart.

As a result, knights are the superheroes of the middle ages.

Of Pages and Squires

How does one become a knight? You start as a page. At this stage, you’re instructed on the basics of becoming a knight – not just the mechanics of weapons, but also the chivalric code of honor that a knight is expected to uphold. In this entry level position, you’re trained by squires – until you are promoted into that rank.

Squires continued their training with knights – or, more accurately, one specific knight – who refined the mechanics of weapons and clarified what it meant to uphold the code of honor. In a classic apprentice, journeyman, and master approach, pages became squires and squires became knights. (For more about the apprentice, journeyman, master progression, see my post.)

The moment that a squire became a knight was a big deal – it was a ceremony.

Ceremony

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our love of ceremony. Teenagers are skipping their graduation because they don’t want to “waste their time.” We treat life transitions as if they’re just something that happen. We don’t demark them with a feast or banquet or ceremony. In our hurry up, get it done and move on to the next thing world, we’re not interested in recognizing others for their hard work.

When you don’t have a clear ceremony to recognize the achievement, how does one know when they’ve achieved a goal? Sure, a piece of paper is nice and it appeals to your logical side, but where is the emotion of accomplishing the goal? Where’s the pride? Even the Buddhists, who are widely regarded as not having an interest in attachment or pride, acknowledge that pride isn’t all bad. (See Emotional Awareness
for more on the views on pride.)

Young men and boys today rightly struggle to when know they become a man. Is it when they learn to drive? Turn 18? Turn 21? Get married? Have sex? The problem with trying to help boys and young men know when they’re a man is that there’s no one defining event that truly turns a boy into a man. There are multiple different yard sticks to be measured on. The challenge is how do you know which yardstick to use?

The Meaning of a Father

It’s no secret that children need their parents – both their father and their mother – and that there’s a large number of social issues that come from fathers being absent. (See Our Kids for more on the importance of fathers.) A son not knowing when he becomes a man isn’t the biggest issue. The biggest issue is a son not knowing what it’s like to be a man. The biggest problem is that our sons don’t know what the code is that they’re to live by. The example that a father sets can serve as a guidepost or a lighthouse as to what they should do themselves.

There are a set of values – unique to each father to some extent – which need to be passed down to our sons so that they can know what their personal code of honor should be. I’ve softened this from the single view of one code of honor because of my awareness that we’re all different and have different values. (See The Normal Personality and Who am I? for more.)

Code of Conduct

Despite the need to apply our own “coat of arms” to the process of developing an honorable code in our children, Raising a Modern-Day Knight offers these suggestions for the foundation:

Loyalty “For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).
Servant-leadership “Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave” (Matthew 20:26-27).
Kindness “What is desirable in a man is his kindness” (Proverbs 19:22).
Humility “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3).
Purity “Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, show yourself an example of those who believe” (1 Timothy 4:12).
Honesty “Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another” (Ephesians 4:25).
Self-discipline “Have nothing to do with worldly fables. … On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7-8).
Excellence “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win” (1 Corinthians 9:24).
Integrity “He who walks in integrity walks securely, but he who perverts his ways will be found out” (Proverbs 10:9).
Perseverance “Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary” (Galatians 6:9).

This seems like a good place for us to start.

The Fellowship of Knights

Ultimately, it’s more than a father or a code of conduct that helps a boy become a man. A father has the potential to be the largest influence on a boy in his journey to manhood, and the code of conduct that he sets forth will be the foundation for how the son forms his own values; but the influence of the outside world and particularly the other noble men in his life shouldn’t be understated.

I’m thankful for the powerful friends I have who can also help my sons learn how they need to conduct themselves. I don’t mean powerful in terms of money or prestige. I mean powerful in the sense that they have a strong sense of the men that they want to be. I appreciate their friendship with me and by extension their watchful eye over my sons.

While we no longer live in villages where everyone could support the growth and development of our children, it still takes a village to raise a child. It’s just that today’s village is much more virtual. The days when all the neighbors knew where the children were and were watching over all of them are gone. We’re locked inside our own little worlds so it’s not the same, but the need for other powerful men in the lives of our son remains. (See Bowling Alone for being locked away in our own little worlds.)

Recognizing the Need

Fathers: our sons need us. Even when they push us away. Even when they tell us we’re a bad father. Even when they tell us that they don’t like us. They’re still listening and watching. Keep up the fight. Call in reinforcements if you need to, but don’t give up on your sons. If you recognize the need perhaps it’s time to decide how to create your own ceremony, so that you can go through the process of Raising a Modern-Day Knight.

Article: Ten Interview Questions Every Project Manager Should Know

Robert Bogue October 21, 2016 No Comments

The project management role may not be specific to software development, but there are certainly specific skills that are needed for managing software development projects. Project manager candidates should be prepared to answer these ten questions when competing for a position. The Anatomy of a Software Development Role: Project Manager can help you find out more about the role.

As part of the developer.com series, Top 10 Interview Questions. Read more…

Article: Ten Development Manager Interview Questions You Should Know

Robert Bogue October 18, 2016 No Comments

Development managers are anchors for getting development projects done. The role has a greater impact on the success of the entire development team. If you’re gunning for this role, you’ll need to be able to answer these ten questions that interviewers may ask you. if you want to know more about the development manager role, you may want to see Anatomy of a Software Development Role: Development Manager.

The development manager is the first role we cover as a part of the new developer.com articles series, Top 10 Interview Questions. Read more…

Book Review-The End of Memory: A Natural History of Aging and Alzheimer’s

Robert Bogue October 17, 2016 No Comments

It’s a thief. It steals. It steals the things which everyone holds dearest. It deprives us of what we believed we could never be deprived of. It’s a cruel and ruthless villain without remorse, as it takes the best and brightest among us and clouds them in confusion and contradiction, dimming or diminishing their light before the end of life. This villain is Alzheimer’s Disease and one of our dear friends has become its victim. She is an amazing woman who is being robbed of her identity, her memories, and her history.

That’s what caused me to read The End of Memory: A Natural History of Aging and Alzheimer’s, and what has caused me to decide to continue to seek more information. I want our friend Mary back. Not the shell that the disease has left behind, but all of her. Unfortunately, The End of Memory doesn’t answer all the questions but it does clear up some misconceptions about the disease.

Prevalence

Who is going to get Alzheimer’s disease? That’s a terrifying and confusing question. More women seem to have the disease; however, the disease gets progressively more common based on age, and women live longer than men. It’s estimated that it impacts 10% of people over sixty-five and nearly 50% of those over eighty-five. There are numerous other factors that impact whether you’ll get the disease. For instance, a mutation of “presenilin 1” seems to cause early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

In fact, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, had several sections of genes where indicators were for Alzheimer’s, so that no one would know what his genetic risk factors were. The risk factors aren’t isolated to one gene or one chromosome. In fact, chromosome 21 – the one associated with Down’s Syndrome – controls the production of Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP), which as we’ll see plays a major role in Alzheimer’s. Presenilin 2 is another marker for early onset Alzheimer’s disease, but genetically speaking it’s far and away from Presenilin 1 – and chromosome 21.

The last and perhaps most interesting gene is apolipoprotein E or APOE. There are three variants of this gene. The variant APOE2 reduces the risk for Alzheimer’s substantially (but not dramatically) for the roughly 7% of people that have it.

While genetic markers can account for a non-trivial portion of Alzheimer’s cases, it falls way short of a majority vote into whether you’ll develop the disease or not. The way that you know if you have the disease – besides the obvious cognitive impairment – is the presence of plaques and tangles.

Plaques and Tangles

Alzheimer’s Disease is notable because, historically, it’s been diagnosed post-mortem. The victim’s brain was examined posthumously, and the presence of what are called plaques and tangles are supposed to indicate the presence of the disease, as it was with patient zero. However, there’s a problem. These plaques and tangles appear in people without any (even mild) cognitive impairment at the time of their death. Conversely, some patients experiencing dementia have no plaques and no tangles. So it seems that most of the disease’s long history has been focused on the artifacts of the disease, but not necessarily the cause.

Plaques in the Intercellular Space

The first of two diagnostic criteria is the presence of plaques which reside in intercellular space (that is, the space outside the neurons of the brain). Plaques are the clumps of discarded amyloid beta proteins. They come together because their shape makes them sticky. However, what is amyloid beta? Well, it’s a part of the amyloid protein that has a variety of uses in the neurons of the brain. In the brain it is rare in that a protein is created and then sliced up by special enzymes. Some of the frequently unused segments of the amyloid are called amyloid beta. The role of amyloid and the amyloid precursor protein aren’t well understood, but it’s clear that there are many functions.

Plaques have been the target of therapies to improve the results for patients with dementia – and presumably Alzheimer’s disease. Some therapies have demonstrated marked reduction in plaques with no change in the cognitive impairment of the patient. This is bad news for trying to point to the plaques as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. That means that the cause is elsewhere, perhaps in the tangles.

Tangles: Twisted Girders of the Neuron

Neurons have really interesting shapes. They reach out and touch other neurons via axons. Something has to maintain that shape of the cell. That’s the job of tau. Tau is a protein that allows a neuron to form its shape – and therefore its connection with other neurons. Tau is a normally rigid protein that keeps its shape, thereby maintaining the shape of the neuron. However, tau can also be changed to allow neural plasticity. This plasticity can be accelerated through the introduction of phosphorylate. When in periods of higher learning, the tau experience high levels of phosphorylation, and can therefore change shape.

The problem comes when tau become tangled because of too much flexibility. These tangles are like the twisted girders of buildings torn apart by a tornado or a bomb. The original structure is absent, and all that remains is a mess. In the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease tangles – the mess of tau – are the intracellular indicator of problems.

Interestingly, the rate of tangles nearly directly predicts the level of cognitive impairment for a patient. That is, by looking at the number of tangles, you can reasonably predict the cognitive impairment – except in some outlying cases.

Newness of Alzheimer’s Disease

While digging into the disease, the obvious question might be, when did it start to develop? The answer is a bit trickier to understand, because cognitive impairment was historically seen as a natural consequence of old age. It’s difficult to retrospectively look at the historical records and separate the normal from the abnormal.

The incidence of Alzheimer’s has increased p over the last century; but how much of that is improved understanding of the diagnostics of cognitive impairment, and how much is due to our longer lifespans? In the year 1800, Americans of European descent numbered about five million – fewer than the number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease today. By 1900, it’s estimated that 4% of the population was over sixty-five, and population had grown to seventy-six million.

The key challenge is that cognitive impairment was considered normal. It was what was expected when you became old. Instead of it being recognized as a condition afflicting people, it was the normal. So in trying to look at the records to see if 300,000 or more of people over sixty-five had dementia is like trying to find a polar bear in a snow storm.

Due to improvements in medicine and safety, our life expectancy is increasing by about one year for every four years of time. Notwithstanding some limits to this process, such as the Hayflick limit to the number of times that a cell can divide, it appears that we’re increasing the life expectancy dramatically, and as a result will have a greater number of people who can count themselves lucky to be “old.” While this creates a need for care facilities to care for our elderly, it also creates an interest in preventing the cognitive impairment that used to be “normal” for elderly. (See Being Mortal for more on the care of the elderly.)

Correlations and Questions

Through the study of Alzheimer’s, some very peculiar correlations have appeared. One of the most famous studies of Alzheimer’s was what’s called “The Nun Study.” In this study, many of the members of the Sisters of Notre Dame agreed to be monitored for the development of the disease. From a statistical point of view, this was great because so many of the variables of their lives were similar and therefore could be discounted as contributing factors. One of the predictive factors that emerged was a small bit of writing that the nuns did sixty years before the onset of the disease.

Nuns write a small essay about their desire to enter the sisterhood. The density of ideas in that essay – the natural writing with multiple pieces of information tightly encoded into the few words that they are given – is a significant predictor of whether they’ll get the disease or not. Nuns who wrote dense prose were less likely to get the disease than those whose essays were less tightly packed.

While the prevalence of tangles tightly tracks the progression of the disease, this is an early warning sign that spans decades. It’s been well-studied that Alzheimer’s occurs less frequently in patients that are well-educated.

Interestingly, it seems that it may be the case that education forestalls the progression of the symptoms of the disease. So it appears that education may create a sort of cognitive reserve that can hold back the disease for a while. It’s believed now that if patients with higher education live sufficiently long they’ll encounter the disease and the onset of symptoms will be more rapid for them. In my typical glass half-full mentality, I’ll take the reduction of symptoms and rapid onset as a win.

Unrelated to Alzheimer’s, but complicating the measurement of the progression of the disease, is something called “terminal drop.” This is a precipitous drop in cognitive capacity in the months leading up to death. So is a person suffering from symptoms of the disease, or are they approaching death?

Cynics seem to be more prone to the disease, while those who enjoy regular leisure activities – particularly those which cause a person to be mentally active – seem to build cognitive reserve that helps to protect someone from the symptoms of the disease.

Spread of the Disease

With advances in imaging techniques, we’re able to peer into the heads of patients and see in more detail how the disease is progressing than we’ve ever been able to before; and with this, we’ve discovered some odd “coincidences.”

One of the factors of cognitive processing speed is the myelin sheath. Myelin is a fatty sheath that surrounds neurons and makes them more effective at communication. Myelin is produced by the oligodendrocytes, which are found in highest concentrations in the entorhinal cortex. This is the area most impacted by Alzheimer’s and is the interface between the hippocampus and the neocortex. The entorhinal cortex is one of the last areas developed in the brain, and one of the last areas to receive myelin.

It’s the entorhinal cortex that seems to be ground zero for Alzheimer’s disease. It’s where the disease seems to cause the most damage.

Glucose (Sugar) in the Brain

There are some researchers that are calling for Alzheimer’s disease to be called Diabetes Type III. Diabetes mellitus exists in two forms, both of which impact glucose levels in the blood. Diabetes Type I is associated with the destruction of the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, such that the body no longer produces insulin. Type II diabetes is associated with increased resistance to the insulin being produced. Insulin is important to the regulation of blood glucose levels, because it allows for the absorption of the glucose in the blood.

Glucose is the necessary energy component for us to function, but elevated levels of unabsorbed glucose in our blood is associated with a large number of comorbidities. In essence, our bodies function with a ratio of glucose in the blood that falls in a relatively narrow range. Glucose levels in the blood are constantly changing, but an adult should on average have a blood glucose of approximately 100mg per deciliter. This is measured through a test called Hemoglobin A1c or HbA1c. This measures the average glucose over a three-month period. The HbA1c lab values are typically converted back into an average blood sugar using a standard formula.

Diabetes has long been known as a factor in the development of dementia; however, what has been less clear is whether that was the result of the comorbidities related to diabetes, or whether it’s related to the diabetes itself. Because Alzheimer’s is sensitive to vascular issues, and diabetes has an impact on vascular malleability as well as a tendency to increase cholesterol, the relationship seemed reasonable and no specific cause was identified. However, research is beginning to indicate that the brain’s processing of glucose is impaired with Alzheimer’s.

The brain is a power-hungry organ. Taking up two percent of our body mass, it consumes roughly 20% of our glucose. As we learned in The Rise of Superman, it has a maximum sustainable energy use, and because of that, various areas of the brain may be switched off to accommodate the power needs of other parts of the brain. It’s not hard to believe that even minute changes in the management of glucose in an electro-chemical system could have dire consequences.

Unfortunately, this is where the trail ends at the moment. There is a belief that the disease may be triggered by changes in insulin resistance. There’s a higher rate of dementia in patients with elevated glucose levels (but not yet meeting the threshold for diabetes), but we don’t understand yet how changes in blood sugar impact the processing of glucose in the brain.

Power Loss

A few years ago my wife and I were showering together when she fainted. It was a terrifying experience for me. I’d never seen someone faint so closely. (It’s a small shower.) More than that, I saw the biological equivalent of what I see in my technology work. When a computer reboots, it goes momentarily silent as all power is lost and the fans stop. After that, the fans are on at 100% for a few seconds, and then things resume their normal median fan speeds. My wife’s breathing eerily took on the same pattern. She stopped breathing for a moment, breathed at a high rate of speed for a few more moments, and then settled into a normal breathing pattern. It was my first experience that technology sometimes follows biology.

When meeting with Mary, I was struck by a similar correlation. When a computer has a power supply problem – when the power supply isn’t able to produce all the power the computer needs – the computer is running along fine until you do something taxing to it. Once you ask it to do something which requires just a bit more power, it will reboot. It momentarily goes blank and starts the process of booting up again. Mary’s responses to me looked like this pattern. She’d get triggered into recalling a memory or making sense of the input she was receiving, and would fall out of that train of thought. Moments later when rediscovering the same novel stimulus, she would return to the train of thought and fall out of it at nearly the same place. Even in technology, there are a lot of variables that change the exact place where things fail, though the failure seems to happen at nearly the same time every time it cycles.

While this is a single observation by a non-clinical observer making a relationship to something man-made that has very little to do with the functioning of the human brain, it’s led me to wonder: what if what we experience as dementia is really just the inability of the brain to make the connections it once used to because of insufficient energy?

I don’t believe we’ll know whether the glucose hypothesis is right in time to help Mary. However, it’s something that I’ll continue to be interested in. I don’t want to accept The End of Memory. I’ll keep Mary’s memories and her memory alive in me as long as I’m able.

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