Instead of planning out your software design months in advance and guessing at what will work, like traditional software development, scrum encourages experimentation via transparency, observation and adaptation. The saying “fail early and often” comes to mind. With scrum one is constantly learning; improving skills, efficiency and quality. Scrum is conducive to creating flow states which leads to mastery. A scrum is a self-organizing team or rather a team without a manager, a team that picks what work it will do and how it will do the work. Whether its creators know it or not scrum has a lot of self-determination theory going on.  Scrum is in many ways intrinsic motivation in sheep’s clothing.

I am floored that I just figured this out. I had heard of agile development and scrum but I had never read anything about it nor have I come across it in any of my research. Scrum is rife with positive psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience.

None of this is mentioned in any of the literature I have read and by this point I’ve read quite a bit. What is the benefit of using scrums to develop software? Scrum teams develop software up to 15 times faster than traditional project management processes. Holy performance increase batman! Granted a very small number of teams ever get to that level. Gains of 400% are achievable by any team willing to do the work. Not only is the work done quicker but that the end of a development iteration or sprint, the code developed is ready to ship and it generally has less bugs than traditional methods.

I watched a Google Tech Talk: Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team by one of scrum’s creators: Jeff Sutherland. He talked about how having people co-located creates a social bond. The idea is that if people work closely together they will care about each other and will be a better team and do better work. This comes out of behavioral economics, which tells us that we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships and transactional relationships. Social relationships build trust and result in win-win situations. Transactional relationships build rewards and result in win-lose situations.

30% of all development is being done by agile development teams. Though my research for this post indicates that only 50% of teams that call themselves agile are fully agile and only 10% of scrums are actually scrums. Most teams implement some kind of less successful variant. This kills me! My guess is to truly implement agile or scrum means that management has to change too much, or give up too much power to fully adopt these practices, that or teams are resistant to change. At the end of the day, what matters is speed and quality, not how compliant you are to a framework.

The sacred protector of the team and scrum theory is the scrum master. Part leader, part servant, his job is to ensure the team is fully enabled to succeed and remove any impediment to their success. She does this by being an expert on the framework, genuinely caring about the team and focusing on doing whatever it takes to make the team successful and keep them focused. It certainly would not hurt if the scrum master had a basic understanding of SDT, positive psychology and behavior economics. Though I think all leaders should.

I’m ecstatic to find evidence based practices worming their way into the workplace! As a side benefit it gives me something new to research and write about. Hug your local agile programmer; she is making the world a better place.

Optimists live longer, up to 20 years longer and they have less health problems. They have more meaningful and deeper personal relationships. They make better workers. According to many studies done on optimism and heart disease, there is a strong correlation between optimism and cardiovascular health. 

Being an optimist is very important for health and longevity. It’s just as important as diet or exercise. I’d work on optimism before diet and exercise. Optimists are more likely to follow through on things that are good for them. They are more likely to generate virtuous circles.

We know from research done in neuroscience that the feeling we describe as happiness comes from dopamine being released in the brain. There are many circumstances that result in a dopamine release. When we feel like things are constantly getting just a little better, when we maintain a glass-half-full attitude, even when the evidence says different, we get a steady release of dopamine. We also release dopamine when we manage our expectations. If we set out expectations too high and we fail, it crashes our dopamine, if we set them too low, it’s ok and doesn’t interfere. If we exceed our expectations we’ll get a strong release of dopamine.  

That is the virtuous cycle. Do something that we feel good about and our brain rewards us with a warm fuzzy. If we build optimism before we start forming other beneficial habits, we will reinforce and take advantage of your optimism pathways. When we feel good about ourselves and our achievements, we are more likely to go on to further achievements. We are more likely to take on new challenges. We are more likely to succeed.  

It turns out that another bit of folk wisdom has been proven by neuroscience research: Like attracts like. When we focus on what is going right, we see more of what’s going right. If we focus on the problems we will see more of what is wrong. We will also get more of what we focus on. If you have ever driven a motorcycle at night, then you know you can’t look to the edge of the road when going around a corner. If you do, your bike will start moving that way, if you don’t adjust your view, you might drive right off the road. 

I’ve been an optimist for most of my life. I’ve always believed that it was the best option for me. I’m very happy to have studies from different disciplines to back me up. All of these ideas work at home, at work, at school or in personal development. If you are a pessimist, I hope you’ll try to make the transition to being an optimist. It’s not something we’re born with. It’s a choice. You can and should choose to be an optimist! If you’d like to know more about how to do this I suggest reading Flourishing by Martin Seligman or Your Brain at Work, by David Rock.

Street Art from NOLA Gorilla Art

Certainly it’s easier to build trust into a companies DNA from the start than to add it in later. Companies like Zappos, Joi De Vivre and Atlassian are values based and built around trust. We can look to them as models of how to start new companies. The first company I know of that transformed itself from the old model to one based on trust and values is Semco in Brazil. It started as a traditional top down manufacturing company with a single division and a handful of products. The transformation started about 30 years ago and took 3 years initially but it’s an ongoing process. The book Good to Great has some good examples of companies that have made this transformation.

Who do you trust? Do you trust your boss, your coworkers, your team, the executives, your customers? From the field of neuroscience and neurobiology we know that trust is essental to social interaction and that we are primarily social beings. For example, our brains can’t tell the difference between physical and social pain. Most organizations can’t do much work without social interaction. In order to use higher brain functions that result in things like creativity you need trust. Without it, your brain sinks down into fight of flight mode and the lizard brain takes over. When your spending time worried about what is fair or what your status is, your lizard brain is at work.

Moving from a top down, carrots and sticks model to one based on trust and values is difficult. It’s also necessary if your organization wants to stay competitive and viable for the long term. Ask yourself whether you’d rather follow the orders from on top or help be the change you’d like to see in the world? If your answer is the later, then you need to find ways to bring more trust into your life.