I feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.
However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.
You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.
So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.
I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.
People learn and relearn the core concepts from different paths. A recent trend due to coding agent is that people are learning software engineering is not about syntax and frameworks. It is just the way it is. People build up concepts with things they already understand. The same happens when someone doesn't use a book. It just went implicit and way harder for you to find the magic combo.
I'd say it's a reflection of an earlier stage of interpersonal maturity to try and put people into categories. More socially attuned people realize the complexity of other people and situations and synthesize all the available information to make a decision that is truly reflective of reality.
Doesn't that happen with any first-year psychology or med-student, too? You have some basic knowledge of what could happen, which therefore means that it does happen, right now, here. It normally goes away with more experience and exposure, and yeah, some personal growth.
This seems to be common in large corporations. Your example (requirements changing haphazardly) is a very common occurrence, it's a class of problem where the inevitable failure can't be isolated to one or two things with certainly.
Failure could be team burnout and attrition, it could be a major bug due to fast tracking validation (or not checking AI output), or a fundamental architectural issue with future repercussions that with a clearer mindset would have been considered .. or myriad other things in combination.
The person calling out the risk knows that it will 100% cause a failure somewhere. Exactly where and how the failure will occur cannot be predicted beforehand and it actually doesn't matter as the end result will be a missed delivery or incident.
Unfortunately the executive decision maker needs a concrete failure in order to implement a concrete solution.
That's a good question. Some of the perspectives in the book can be helpful. The limitation is that the scenarios and themes in the books are always a little too perfect to reflect real life.
Like you're watching a movie and everything is going disastrously wrong, then the hero shows up and the tone completely changes for the better. Everything starts going right.
The most valuable parts are probably reframing the situations and looking for different perspectives as a way to broaden your thinking. I try to take them as as additional perspectives to have available.
I think the thing I disliked the most about having the books applied to me was when they were treated as an instruction manual for all situations. People would read those books and then start to fit every situation into something from the book.
The Team Topologies book that another comment brought up is a common offender. For years you could tell when someone had read the book because they'd try to force every organization to fit into the prescribed team and interaction formats. If it wasn't working out they'd switch to one of the other formats instead of thinking critically about what we needed for our unique situation.
Re: Topologies I found it resulted in a lot of reorgs founded on the seeming belief that Conway's law is both immediate and retroactive - if we change the teams and what they own, their features and code will similarly now become cleanly organized.
It's a shame because the underlying message of not overloading teams with extremely broad feature areas is good, and was exactly what we needed.
I suspect people who act this way would do so with or without the books. Cargo cult mentality says more about the person than the source material.
It’s good to read others’ perspectives and expand your own. It’s even good when you disagree with the author. But you need to read multiple perspectives and adopt a habit of learning.
I really do not recommend to buy the ebook in this web shop.
Its the worst UX I have ever seen in an online shop.
Normally you would pay and then receive a link to download.
Here it goes like this:
- you receive an email: Please create an account on our website, you will benefit a lot from it
- then another email: If you want to get the book you just payed for, you must register first and then enter this code: #20 digit cryptic string#
- you create an account, eventually successfully bypass the dark pattern to seduce you to accept spam mails from them ("click here if you do not want to receive spam mails from us").
- You log in an see: "No books in your account", where can I enter the 20 digit cryptic code?
- Another look at the mails, oh, they said, "If you want to receive your book, you have to create an account on ANOTHER website
- You create another acccount
- Log in, you see a message: "Please click on the link in your confirmation mail"
- no confirmation mail received
- Go back, click on "send confirmation mail again"
- Some time later, confirmation mail arrives. But just a mail with header and footer but no content, no link to click
- Try again, same result
- Obviously something went wrong, can i report the bug somewhere? Of course not!
Thanks! I read a sample of the book in the original post, and I couldn’t help myself from feeling increasingly weird about the way the author just kept laying the “you’re the smartest person at the company” and “your work is what makes the world go round” stuff on, really thick. It felt like I was being psychology’d into enjoying the book and unfortunately turned me away, even though I was interested. Will check this one out instead.
In https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116743715688970777 she gives a concise explanation of the minimal groups paradigm where "People assigned to arbitrary groups immediately form strong allegiances, even though they haven’t been given any other psychologically meaningful cues about their group"
Giant cookie banner says "Do not sell my personal information" + "switch the toggle to opt out".
Which is it? Am I switching the toggle to opt out of selling my personal information or am I switching it to opt out of NOT selling my personal information?
I shouldn't have to read a paragraph of fine print to tell if they are intentionally using a dark pattern or merely incapable of composing a simple declarative sentence.
It's a shame, because it looks like an interesting book.
As a mid-manager, the last two chapters in the ToC appeal:
6. Becoming an Organization That Wants to Understand Itself
7. Fighting Dirty for Good Culture
I wish I was on a software team so I could justify buying it. But but my $DAY_JOB is answering phones and fixing printer-jams in a medical practice, so not a lot of application there.
I feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.
However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.
You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.
So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.
I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.
People learn and relearn the core concepts from different paths. A recent trend due to coding agent is that people are learning software engineering is not about syntax and frameworks. It is just the way it is. People build up concepts with things they already understand. The same happens when someone doesn't use a book. It just went implicit and way harder for you to find the magic combo.
I'd say it's a reflection of an earlier stage of interpersonal maturity to try and put people into categories. More socially attuned people realize the complexity of other people and situations and synthesize all the available information to make a decision that is truly reflective of reality.
You must have read Changing on the job :p
Doesn't that happen with any first-year psychology or med-student, too? You have some basic knowledge of what could happen, which therefore means that it does happen, right now, here. It normally goes away with more experience and exposure, and yeah, some personal growth.
This seems to be common in large corporations. Your example (requirements changing haphazardly) is a very common occurrence, it's a class of problem where the inevitable failure can't be isolated to one or two things with certainly.
Failure could be team burnout and attrition, it could be a major bug due to fast tracking validation (or not checking AI output), or a fundamental architectural issue with future repercussions that with a clearer mindset would have been considered .. or myriad other things in combination.
The person calling out the risk knows that it will 100% cause a failure somewhere. Exactly where and how the failure will occur cannot be predicted beforehand and it actually doesn't matter as the end result will be a missed delivery or incident.
Unfortunately the executive decision maker needs a concrete failure in order to implement a concrete solution.
Working with someone who thinks Team Topologies is an instruction manual is not fun.
I am very curious: did you figure some of the books they were using?
That's a good question. Some of the perspectives in the book can be helpful. The limitation is that the scenarios and themes in the books are always a little too perfect to reflect real life.
Like you're watching a movie and everything is going disastrously wrong, then the hero shows up and the tone completely changes for the better. Everything starts going right.
The most valuable parts are probably reframing the situations and looking for different perspectives as a way to broaden your thinking. I try to take them as as additional perspectives to have available.
I think the thing I disliked the most about having the books applied to me was when they were treated as an instruction manual for all situations. People would read those books and then start to fit every situation into something from the book.
The Team Topologies book that another comment brought up is a common offender. For years you could tell when someone had read the book because they'd try to force every organization to fit into the prescribed team and interaction formats. If it wasn't working out they'd switch to one of the other formats instead of thinking critically about what we needed for our unique situation.
Re: Topologies I found it resulted in a lot of reorgs founded on the seeming belief that Conway's law is both immediate and retroactive - if we change the teams and what they own, their features and code will similarly now become cleanly organized.
It's a shame because the underlying message of not overloading teams with extremely broad feature areas is good, and was exactly what we needed.
"You are a stream-aligned team"
My most recent manager was exactly like this.
I suspect people who act this way would do so with or without the books. Cargo cult mentality says more about the person than the source material.
It’s good to read others’ perspectives and expand your own. It’s even good when you disagree with the author. But you need to read multiple perspectives and adopt a habit of learning.
I really do not recommend to buy the ebook in this web shop. Its the worst UX I have ever seen in an online shop. Normally you would pay and then receive a link to download.
Here it goes like this:
- you receive an email: Please create an account on our website, you will benefit a lot from it
- then another email: If you want to get the book you just payed for, you must register first and then enter this code: #20 digit cryptic string#
- you create an account, eventually successfully bypass the dark pattern to seduce you to accept spam mails from them ("click here if you do not want to receive spam mails from us").
- You log in an see: "No books in your account", where can I enter the 20 digit cryptic code?
- Another look at the mails, oh, they said, "If you want to receive your book, you have to create an account on ANOTHER website
- You create another acccount
- Log in, you see a message: "Please click on the link in your confirmation mail"
- no confirmation mail received
- Go back, click on "send confirmation mail again"
- Some time later, confirmation mail arrives. But just a mail with header and footer but no content, no link to click
- Try again, same result
- Obviously something went wrong, can i report the bug somewhere? Of course not!
I am still waiting for my book.
ouf :( maybe original link should be changed to https://www.drcathicks.com/ ?
libgen
The author's site is https://www.drcathicks.com/ and this is the publisher.
One of the best pieces of work in this genre is Gerald Weinberg's the psychology of computer programming.
https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Programming_Psychology.html
Thanks! I read a sample of the book in the original post, and I couldn’t help myself from feeling increasingly weird about the way the author just kept laying the “you’re the smartest person at the company” and “your work is what makes the world go round” stuff on, really thick. It felt like I was being psychology’d into enjoying the book and unfortunately turned me away, even though I was interested. Will check this one out instead.
The author Cat Hicks also co-hosts https://www.changetechnically.fyi/ which has some interesting episodes, e.g. https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17541876-...
In https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116743715688970777 she gives a concise explanation of the minimal groups paradigm where "People assigned to arbitrary groups immediately form strong allegiances, even though they haven’t been given any other psychologically meaningful cues about their group"
Giant cookie banner says "Do not sell my personal information" + "switch the toggle to opt out".
Which is it? Am I switching the toggle to opt out of selling my personal information or am I switching it to opt out of NOT selling my personal information?
I shouldn't have to read a paragraph of fine print to tell if they are intentionally using a dark pattern or merely incapable of composing a simple declarative sentence.
It's a shame, because it looks like an interesting book.
How I miss checkboxes instead of these god-damned Schrodinger's sliders that replaced them
Except they've now started ruining them too with the new asinine trend of making them look like radio buttons
All those designer weenies need to justify their existence.
As a mid-manager, the last two chapters in the ToC appeal: 6. Becoming an Organization That Wants to Understand Itself 7. Fighting Dirty for Good Culture
But isn't AI replacing all of us this time next week?
For ebooks it offers some "VitalSource ebooks". Does anyone know whether it offers a regular pdf or they shitty custom closed format only?
You can request an epub it seems
https://bsky.app/profile/nezteb.net/post/3mr3tbpp3ds2w
Not "open" as such, but Kobo sells this title.
This book looks super interesting.
I wish I was on a software team so I could justify buying it. But but my $DAY_JOB is answering phones and fixing printer-jams in a medical practice, so not a lot of application there.