Scrum Makes You Feel Better

"The types of activities which people all over the world consistently report as most rewarding - that is, which make them feel best - involve a clear objective, a need for concentration so intense that no attention is left over, a lack of interruptions and distractions, clear and immediate feedback on progress toward the objective, and a sense of challenge - the perception that one's skills are adequate, but just adequate, to cope with the task at hand."
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An interesting psychological finding
Posted by: "Nancy Van Schooenderwoert" vanschoo@acm.org nancyvanschooenderwoert
Date: Thu Dec 11, 2008 8:54 pm ((PST))

I was searching in my copy of "Lean Thinking" by Womack and Jones, and noticed this interesting passage in the chapter on 'Flow'. The authors mention a psychological researcher named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Someone's got a tougher last name than me!)

Here is the passage I thought might interest you:

"He has spent the last twenty-five years reversing the usual focus of psychology. Instead of asking what makes people feel bad (and how to change it) he has explored what makes people feel good, so that positive attributes of experience can be built into daily life."

"His method has been to attach beepers, which sound at random intervals, to his research subjects. When the beeper sounds the subject is asked to record in a notebook what she or he was doing and how they were feeling. After sifting decades of notebook data from thousands of subjects around the world, he has reached some very simple conclusions."

"The types of activities which people all over the world consistently report as most rewarding - that is, which make them feel best - involve a clear objective, a need for concentration so intense that no attention is left over, a lack of interruptions and distractions, clear and immediate feedback on progress toward the objective, and a sense of challenge - the perception that one's skills are adequate, but just adequate, to cope with the task at hand."

"When people find themselves in these conditions they lose their self-consciousness and sense of time. They report that the task itself becomes the end rather than a means to something more satisfying, like money or prestige. Indeed, and very conveniently for us, Csikszentmihalyi reports that people experiencing these conditions are in a highly satisfying psychological state of flow."

This gives an indication of why test driven development is so compelling for people once they know the basic technique. It also applies to sports and the arts. There the whole point is to do something that's just at the limit of your ability and keep pushing the edge.

It reminds me of a recent interesting post over on Jeff Sutherland's website. It's called "Scrum Makes You Smarter." It reports on a study that suggests voluntary pressure in the form of audacious goals taken on by high performance teams makes them produce more neuron stem cells.
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Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, Lean-Agile Partners Inc.
www.leanagilepartners.com