ia play

A while back I read The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t

Back then I was in daily contact with someone who could have been the inspiration for Sutton’s book. Some of you will have had your ears bent about that delightful situation.

I’m far luckier in my working environment these days. My current boss and colleagues are all pretty much universally supportive, considerate and rational.

Occasionally I still encounter less pleasant folks but they are mostly at arms length which makes them far easier to deal with.  My most recent encounter sent me back to my book shelves to read Sutton’s book.

The book makes a distinction between people who demean others and people who are constructively argumentative and challenging.  Sutton describes two tests for spotting the former:

• Test One: Does the ‘target’ feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energised, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
• Test Two: Is the venom aimed at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

Sutton argues that the bullies cause obvious damage to their immediate targets but they also damage bystanders, themselves and the organisation.

There’s a good section in the book called “Teach People How to Fight”.

I’ve been struck that through bullying these individuals can control what people do but they can’t control what people keep from them. No-one is going to voluntarily help them out.  People will let them shoot themselves in the foot.

Get a group of UX folks together for long enough and the conversation seems to turn to the challenge/mystery of “how to get at seat at the table”.

I’m not entirely sure that everyone agrees about which table we’re aiming for but I get the impression it is the table where the occupants tell everyone else what to do (I’m imagining an Apprentice style boardroom here).

Most of us have worked closely enough with people who already have those seats so it is surprising that we still seem baffled about how to get there.

I suspect that simply having an excess of self-confidence (inspite of evidence to the contrary) will get you a long way there. Sometimes that comes with talent and sometimes it doesn’t. So I was interested to read this New Scientist piece about how we influenced by the confidence of others. The focus is advice rather than positions of power but it feels connnected.

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge

via Humans prefer cockiness to expertise – life – 10 June 2009 – New Scientist.

I watched Horizon: How Mad Are You? the other week. It was a slightly odd programme in which the basic premise is the professionals try to guess which of the participants have been diagnosed with a mental illness. The participants had various activities inflicted on them to help the professionals identify the ‘mad ones’.

Generally the group agreed that cleaning up a revolting cow shed (to spot OCD) was far preferable to performing stand-up comedy (to spot social anxiety). PW and I nodded vigourously in agreement.

Which reminded me of the “Strip, Speak or Sing” debate:
A group of London IA ladies were discussing public speaking and whether those in the group who speak at conferences are “incredibly brave” or not. Somehow this evolved into a discussion of whether each individual would prefer to “Strip, Speak or Sing” in public  (in the appropriate context that is e.g. strip in a life drawing class, not just randoming stripping off in the office! ).

This was one of those conversations were each participant stared at the others in disbelief when they heard their order. Interestingly, no-one put Speak first.

Which in turn reminded me of an early BBC activity of working out the Myers Brigg types of all the members of a team. The team was then divided along MB lines and had to interogate each other about working behaviour. The conversation that struck with me, for obvious IA reasons, was:
“what? you never file any emails? none at all?”
“of course not. You mean some people really use all those little folders?”

All of these occasions were simple but necessary reminders that other people *really* don’t think like you.

(and if you’re wondering – I’m Strip, Speak, Sing)

I wrote in October about the announcement of Tanya Byron’s review into the impact of violent video games on children.

Mind Hacks were recently a good deal more generous than me about Tanya Byron heading up the review:

“Tanya Byron is great. She came to prominence as the resident psychologist on several UK TV parenting programmes but used evidence-based interventions, essentially demonstrating what a clinical psychologist would do if your child got referred for behaviour problems.

Most notably, she obviously knew her shit and is widely respected among clinical psychologists. Despite often being described as a ‘TV psychologist’ she remained working in the NHS at the coal face of clinical work.”

The report is out now and is mostly sensible and balanced which makes me feel like I was unnecessarily skeptical, for example the report says:

Just like in the offline world, no amount of effort to reduce potential risks to children will
eliminate those risks completely. We cannot make the internet completely safe. Because of
this, we must also build children’s resilience to the material to which they may be exposed
so that they have the confidence and skills to navigate these new media waters more
safely.

and

There are new risks presented in online gaming, many of which are similar to the potential
risks to children of other internet use. These games offer new opportunities for social
interaction between children and there are a number of potential benefits for children and
young people from playing video games, including cognitive and educational gains and
simply having fun. Interestingly the evidence to prove these benefits can be as contested
as the evidence of negative effects.

Full report: Safer Children in a Digital World

In his Comment is Free piece, Happy Talk, Mark Vernon takes Positive Psychology to task. Whilst it’s not clear if he is directly criticising the work of Martin Seligman he opens the article with

“This year marks the 10th anniversary of Martin Seligman coining the term “positive psychology”.

He goes on:

“Its recommendations do not rise above the commonplaces of “work less”, “stay fit”, “think positively”, and so on”

“The fundamental error of the science – and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused – is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion.”

“happiness is not about feeling good, it is about being good. ….Happiness is fundamentally a moral matter not a hedonistic one.”

Which makes it seem that Mark Vernon has never read Martin Seligman’s work. Seligman describes three routes to happiness:

• the Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible
• the Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life
• the Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

Seligman is always pretty clear about what he values

“The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning. ” from Edge: A Talk with Martin Seligman

Vernon says he has read Authentic Happiness and in detail. This is much easier to believe if you read his more considered postings on his own blog. What he seems to object to most is the idea that anything in this space is measurable and therefore worthy of scientific study. That’s a much more interesting and less tabloid debate. Shame he didn’t stick to that point on Comment is Free.

I realised the other day I’ve never actually read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and that was undermining my ability to spot when senior management were systematically misusing the concept. So I got a copy from Swapshop – these are really not the sort of books you should ever have to spend money on.

I’ve been slightly resistent to reading it. At university David Gauntlett introduced us to Charles Mackay’s the Madness of Crowds during lectures about moral hysteria about media (and Victorian moral outrage at the bicycle, if I remember rightly). ‘Madness’ is not the easiest of reads but the stuff on tulip mania makes your jaw drop at times. It may have been my rosy memories of those lectures that made me irritated at Surowiecki’s concept.

Now Surowiecki isn’t rejecting that groups of people sometimes (frequently?) do intensely stupid things. He is more interested in describing the conditions under which a crowd can be surprisingly smart. The book should really be called ‘When Crowds are Wise’.

I haven’t finished it yet and don’t really feel like it would matter if I don’t. ‘Wisdom’ and other pop theory books are more tightly written than ‘Madness’ but the structure is repetitive and they outstay their welcome pretty quickly. Tellingly, most are expansions of magazine articles, expanded (or padded) with a series of anecdotes and a smattering of scientific studies that are briefly skimmed over. They make me crave depth. But maybe not as much depth as Mackay gives you!

Pop theory books are such easy targets, I shouldn’t really expend energy on them. Just read ValleyWag instead.

In Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert mentions more than once that his friends are frustrated by his continual identifying of problems without providing solutions. It is certainly true that this is not a self-help book but it may make you look askance at some of your most engrained truths about what you want from life.

Gilbert believes we are rubbish at predicting what will make us happy in the future. He blames:

• realism – the belief that things are in reality as there are in the mind. But our brains are fallible and rarely scientific; they take all sorts of short-cuts.
• presentism – the tendancy for current experience to influence one’s views of the past and the future. Our current feelings affect our view of the future (when we are full we can’t imagine being hungry) and the range of possibilities we can imagine is a narrow set ranging around the present.
• rationalization – the act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable. We view our actions more favourably than our inactions, we rationalize extreme pain more than annoyance (there must be a good reason for going through this!) and we are happier about situations we are committed to and can’t get out of.
• corrigibility – the capacity for being corrected, reformed or improved (or rather our lack of it). We don’t accept other people’s evidence about things they are doing right now because we are different.

The book contains a brutal and rather depressing graph that shows how parents’ happiness varies with the age of their children. That the lowest point comes with teenagers will surprise no-one but the fact that parents’ happiness only reaches pre-children heights once the kids have again flown the nest is really quite startling. For the most part we mis-judge how happy children make us but it is an error that evolution rewards .

The studies are only comparing happiness of parents over time and don’t compare with non-parents. I’d be interested to see if there was any research to back up the folk opinion that kids might mean sacrifices when they are at home but you’ll appreciate them when you are old (for both care and love they can provide and the sense of continuity/immortality).

More lovely stuff from the Edge Question…

Daniel Gilbert, of Stumbling on Happiness fame changed his mind about changing your mind

“people are generally happier with decisions when they can’t undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn’t undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds”

Jim Ramsey writes at A List Apart about designing for flow (challenge carefully balanced with your abilities) rather than ease of use. I was very excited to find someone applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theories to web design. And even more so to find Jim tackling the keep-it-simple/making-the-complex-clear debate:

“The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.”

Blackbeltjones was also bemoaning the tendency to stick with ‘don’t make me think’ in design and set himself the goal to create services that ‘scamper between beautiful extremes‘ of designs to be glanced at and those to be pored over.

Ramsey’s four flow-based rules reminded me of one BBC team’s (unsuccessful) iPlayer pitch which began with the analogy of a remote control with the more advanced buttons hidden, concealed from everyday use. We have a tendancy never to build those advanced buttons because most of the users (and/or our target users) never use them but we have to remember that simplicity is only one reason that evangelists evangelise.

I’m studying psychology with the Open University at the moment. This is helping tie together random thoughts about designing websites for people to use, understanding creativity at work and organisational psychology.

The course I have started with is Y163 – Starting with psychology. It is a short course and very structured since it is an Openings course, intended for students unsure if undergraduate study is for them. So far I’ve avoided any full length OU courses as I’m a bit nervous about the time commitment (and sporadic outbursts of laziness). I might consider Exploring psychology next Autumn. Or perhaps Ethnography or Challenge of the Social Sciences in May.

You can get a taster of the OU’s psychology materials through OpenLearn:

I’ve put together this list of free course materials from Open University that might be useful to IAs. I’ve got a much bigger list of courses from MIT’s OpenCourseWare to sift through (more on that later).