The Mindset

A couple of weeks ago I heard a developmental psychologist say that children learn by emotional experience. When you’re trying to explain to a child that something is forbidden, for example, he may understand your words, but unless you can somehow reach him at an emotional level, chances are he will repeat the same behavior again. Only if the child goes through some emotional experience associated with what he has done, will he understand he must change his behavior.

Are grownups that different? Of course, we can understand abstract ideas and concepts. We are able to comprehend things we have never experienced. But can we really change the way we behave without some emotional experience to trigger the change?

Did I ever tell you what caused me to become interested in software quality and optimization? I just couldn’t stand working in vain. Things were decided and then changed. Things were agreed and then forgotten. There was a general sense of chaos. At least that’s how I felt. And, of course, I, as a developer, was the one affected by this chaos. The experience was truly an emotional one. I became frustrated because I felt I wasn’t doing the best work I could, and apparently, I had nothing to do about it. Except that I could have done something about it, and eventually I did. My emotional experience drove me to change things.

In the last couple of years, I tried driving a change in the organization I worked for. It was a long journey with ups and downs, with successes and failures. What’s interesting, though, is that, in retrospect, the people who were open to these changes, the people who were eager to try new things, were the people who went through some emotional experience which triggered the need to change things. They were people like me, troubled by the redundant work, confused by the apparent chaos, and eager to work professionally and do good.

People who don’t experience the immediate need for a change are reluctant to try doing things differently. Arguments such as “the good of the company”, “long-term benefits”, and others, generally don’t appeal to them because they are not directly affected by the current problems (or at least they don’t feel they are affected by them).

Convincing a team leader that better project management will increase the productivity of his team and the quality of his products is almost impossible if he thinks it’s OK for his team to work nights to meet the deadline. If he is not affected by his project management practices in any way, he will have no motivation whatsoever to improve his practices. If you talk to his team, however, they will immediately tell you something must change. It’s not that they are smarter than their manager — rather they are the ones directly affected by the malpractice.

The key to driving the change is to sharpen the emotional experience — to make people realize how they are affected by the reality they work in. Believe me, it is not easy. I’ve personally failed more times than I’ve succeeded. But frankly, this is the only way. Objective reports, books, and case studies, will rarely do the trick. Whomever it is you are trying to convince must personally experience the implications and understand the personal benefit of the change.

Isadora Duncan phrased it so accurately when she said “What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print”.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:13 am and is filed under Change, Mentoring, Improvement, Vision, Motivation, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.