Psychology for IT pros

The Psychology for IT Pros blog has moved to a new home at www.meaningbit.com/blog  - head there for more on happiness, technology, and everything in between. There's a whole load of exciting stuff planned, including new podcasts, so please check it out. Thanks for your support so far!

I've noticed an interesting paradox. Many of us get into IT because we're excited by new, cutting-edge technology, and yet as a profession we can be extremely resistant to change. The extent differs from person to person, and between organisations, but it's a theme pretty much everywhere. Even in the most cutting-edge startup, there's an engineer who'll tell anyone who'll listen that things all started to go wrong with that release a few months ago. This can become a real problem both for individuals and for whole organisations, as change is inevitable and is the only way to take advantage of new opportunities. Resistance to change is rooted in fear. By overcoming that fear, particularly when related to automation, and by embracing change, you and your organisation can be happier and more productive. Change resistance There are many ways people can hinder change. It can take the form of direct challenges; for those in authority it could be the refusal of chan...

Conway's Law states that "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." It was first posited by Melvin Conway in the 1960s, and it's a hard constraint on software, networks, and other formal technical systems. What it says is that code is generated by human systems, and these limit how it will work. All software contains the same patterns and relationships that exist within the social systems of the organisation that created it. There's now good empirical support for the hypothesis, too with a paper published the Harvard Business Review finding that closed-source software produced in a single location tends towards a single, monolithic codebase, whereas distributed open-source projects tend towards modularity. Large organisations typically have support structures around those actually producing code or designing systems. There's management, proce...

I recently had a very interesting discussion with Andy Davis of Venturi  about the role of technology in Higher Education and its effects on students, staff, and on the challenges the sector faces. Do check it out, particularly if you work in education or the third sector.

We're going to be launching a podcast over the next few weeks. The plan is to include interviews and some listener questions. If you've got any work-related dilemmas, comments about previous posts or psychology queries in general, drop me a line at matthew@psychfor.it and I'll do my best to answer them. If you want to send me a recording the please do, but there's no need to appear on the show, and you can be anonymous if you like. I'm also looking for interviewees who might be interested in appearing on the show. If you have a particular interest in IT and psychology, or have done some research in the area, then get in touch and we can arrange a phone interview.

In the past few posts I've covered quite a few potential sources of dissatisfaction at work. You might have found yourself in a job which sits poorly with your personal identity , or you may have found yourself in a workplace which lacks sufficient trust . This post is focused on some methods with a good psychological backing to help you change yourself so you can get closer to the things you want. I'm focusing on self-change here as it's perhaps the most fundamental thing you can do to address an unhappy situation, and has the most profound effects. There's a lot of resonance in this topic for me personally, and this blog is a part of my own change process. First, I'm going to discuss approaches that make change more likely, then I'll move on to techniques for determining what kind of positive change you really want to make. Making change more likely Much like actively designing a computer system is far better than letting circumstance design it for you, pla...

Trust is one of those things, like air, that people only tend to notice by its absence, It's vital for personal relationships and for business to function. This post explores the role of trust in IT and at work, and what can be done if it is lost. Trust and computers One of the things that makes IT interesting is the requirement to formalise things that are only loosely defined in everyday life. The most obvious example of this is programming; the act of telling a computer, in a human-readable language, exactly what it is you'd like it to do. IT also requires that trust be formalised, particularly in the sense of being able to trust a person is who they say they are. The human capacity for recognising other people is huge, and surprisingly flexible. We can recognise people from the appearance of their face, their voice, and even from their gait, in very different circumstances to that which we've seen them before. We take for granted that we can successfully identify ...

"There's no 'I' in team" is one of my most despised business cliches. In this post, I'm going to look at two words also beginning with "i" to explain why it's such an awful saying; incentives and identity. If, like me, you've heard that phrase and felt oddly queasy, then this post might go so way to explaining why. Typically, organisations tend to use "incentives" to mean job-related perks, like financial rewards for hitting targets or free access to gyms. These incentive schemes are all about giving the individual employee a reason to behave in a certain, narrow way. All are doomed to fail . Whilst these schemes might give a quick boost to some metrics, the way they distort business process makes them more expensive than the value they create. Worse, incentive schemes like this are inherently anti-lean. I'm going to write more on lean process, and its benefits from a psychological perspective, in a future post, but for now ...

This is the first of a series of post on happiness at work. Happiness is one of the most valuable practical outcomes of applying psychology, and doing so at work can be transformative. We typically spend 40 hours a week working, which is a very long time to be doing something which makes us miserable. Few people I've met had really made a point of pursuing happiness at work. It's not a widely held expectation that we should enjoy our jobs, and perhaps even the opposite is true, that there is some moral value in spending time doing something you find unpleasant. This internalisation of the Protestant Work Ethic has been, perhaps surprisingly, escaped the Danes. They have word for happiness at work,  Arbejdsglæde,  and both expect the workplace to allow them to be happy, and make decisions in support of that. This has considerable benefits, including a higher per-capita GDP than the UK. Before I get stuck in, it's important to define what I mean by happiness here. What I...

Turns out, not much. The statistics for people who died falling out of their bed  correlate almost perfectly (0.96) with the number of laywers in Peurto Rico. This stat comes from the rather wonderful tylervigen.com  which collects many (many, many) such examples. Some time spent browsing that site gets the point across that correlation does not imply causation. This means that even if two things vary together, you can't assume they are linked. You definitely can't assume that one is causing the other. It's a logical fallacy known as  cum hoc ergo propter hoc , or "With this, therefore because of this". This fallacy is immensely important to psychology research. The traditional scientific method involves testing causality by changing a single, "independent" variable, then measuring what happens to another variable. If the second, "dependent" variable changes too, then there is a causal relationship between them. Changes in the independent ...

This is one of the first few posts on the blog, and despite being really keen to get going I've really struggled to put words on the page. This has been a bit of a surprise to me. I don't usually have a problem with writing. It's one of the aspects of the day job that I most enjoy. However, writing for the blog and for an unknown, potentially unlimited audience, turns out to be pretty intimidating. The scope for making a fool of myself seems pretty big when put in those terms.  As a species, we're extremely averse to making a fool of ourselves. Evolutionary psychology suggests that much of the fundamental wiring in our brains, and hence our underlying functioning, is designed to deal with the kind of small social groups you get in hunter-gather societies, not in the kind of large, complex groups that we encounter as modern humans. The effect of this is that we systematically over-estimate the negative effect of other peoples' opinion of us will have on our lives. ...

The first few posts I'm making are to set the scene for the future of the blog and explain what I'm trying to do. In my previous post  I mentioned that I will be using evidence to make suggestions,  examining IT and business practice. This post discusses why that's important to me, and why I think it should be important to you too. We are bombarded with advice about how things should be done, from colleagues, bosses and friends. We can go out and find even more information online, from training, or in books. All of these can extremely useful, but having a reliable way of sorting out the real from the rubbish is vital. Evidence, well deployed, can cut through uncertainty, making your actions more effective and your decisions more reliable. Poorly deployed or misinterpreted, though, it can give you false confidence and lead you astray. Being intelligent is not a protection against this risk, either, and some research suggests it even increases the capacity for  self-dec...

Why start a blog on Pychology for IT Pros (and other technical people)? Whilst there's a huge amount of information tailored to traditional business, and an increasing body of work around startups and their associated culture, there is very little that directly relates to the day-to-day working life of technical people and what they do. This is a major omission; whilst technical people may be different in that part of the job involves dealing with machines, a huge part of the work is with, for, and mediated by, other people. There's a good argument that the role of  IT people is to form the bridge between computer systems and the rest of the organisation. The aim of this blog is to use evidence from psychology, neuroscience and other related fields to give you insight into how you can do your job more effectively, and be happier whilst doing so. You may well be wondering if reading this blog will be worth your time, aside from the absence of anyone else writing on the the t...