Sometimes I work in agile environments where work goes in cycles (sprints or timeboxes) and at the end of each cycle we ask “what can we do better next time?”. This is hard to get going in highly political environments or teams that are a mixture of client and supplier staff (people don’t like to rock the boat or accept liability) but where it has worked well, I was struck by how less stressful work became. We weren’t counting on things being right, only better than before.
It brought to mind the work of Edward Thorndike. From what I understand he spent much of his time shutting cats in boxes. You might be thinking he should get out more and funnily enough, that is exactly what he wanted the cats to do. Thorndike’s cats tried any number of motions, at random before triggering a lever that operated the door to open. Having stumbled upon how to operate the door, the cats would be put back in the box (doesn’t seem right somehow) and then take progressively less time to operate the lever to open the door. The mental mechanism he identified is called operant conditioning. He contributed greatly to the behavioural branch of psychology with his systematic studies on learning. I really like the graph that shows what must have been one of the first “learning curves”. Reminds me of a burndown chart. Likewise, Thorndike’s operant conditioning makes me think of an agile environment with it’s “try things out to see if you hit on the answer” style of continuous improvement.
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