Conformity in the Global Village
Written by Jamie Sunday, 08 January 2012 15:58
I saw a film once, I don’t know where, about the effects of violent television on the behaviour of children. Some kids were shown a video of a teddy bear being nurtured by one of the experimenters. Later, when the children were left with the teddy bear, they nurtured it, too. A different kid, who had seen violence perpetrated against the bear, as soon as he could, beat the shit out of it.
Today I read about an experiment where participants play the prisoner’s dilemma. Somewhere in the participant’s peripheral vision was a computer whose screensaver was activated. The screensaver showed an animation of two balls. In one version, one ball helped nudge the other ball over a barrier. In another, the ball stopped the other one passing. This cue was enough to, subconsciously, of course, influence the participants. Those in the room with the cooperative screensaver cooperated. Those in the room with the non-cooperative screensaver didn’t.
We are primed to take cues from our environment. Primed to conform. This is what you could call social stupidity. You could also call it social intelligence. With this in mind, then, the software community is collectively as thick as pig shit. We take cues from our environment, that are either parochial, if they come from our leaders, or mediocre, if they come from our clients. We cannot seem to achieve a critical mass of people who either care, are capable, or are interested in anything other than self-promotion.
In his essay, ‘The Evolved Self-Management System’, Humphrey says,
Go back 10 or 20,000 years ago. Eccentricity would not have been tolerated. Unusual intelligence would not have been tolerated. Even behaving "out of character" would not have been tolerated. People were expected to conform, and they did conform, because they picked up the cues from their environment about the right and proper—the adaptive—way to behave. In response to cultural signals people were in effect policing their own personality.
The trait to conform was developed in our little villages (they say woman gossip about other women to stop them cheating on their brothers and uncles). But, via Twitter, email, blogs and cheap flights that allow us to meet regularly, we’ve created McLuhan’s global village. And, like villagers, we conform strongly to our environmental cues. This is disastrous for software projects and for the industry. The antidote, to me, is obvious: turn the internet off, disable the village, wave goodbye to conformity, say hello to anxiety and therefore progress.
Further Reading
Humprey, N. (2011) ‘The Evolved Self-Management System’. Available from: http://edge.org/conversation/the-evolved-self-management-system.
McLuhan, M (1964) Understanding Media The Extensions of Man, Routelage.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Conformity in the Global Village
Comments
The forces of conformity make it hard for new ideas to break through. People espousing new ideas are often thought of as lone nuts. This is why the first follower is so important. The first follower turns the lone nut into a leader. ( http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html )
Bottom line: Mankind has evolved to crave sugar and avoid tigers. The fact that we can manipulate symbolic logic and program computers is nothing short of miraculous! We are definitely 'outside the box' on this one.
For me the constraining factor is not so much IT's unwillingness to change, because I see much change in IT over the past 20 years, but rather business and last-century management's inability to accept that software does not work according to a factory paradigm, and cannot be managed effectively the same way.
@Chris - I agree that the 'first follower' factor is under-appreciated!
Also, can you explain the Nemesis Affair a bit more or maybe how it relates to this post?
I know diversity is good, but it seems like the ability to see other viewpoints and other ideas is good, not bad.
I don't think that anything is good or bad, but I do think that cues from around us push us into a certain mode of operation and that stifles thinking. What would have happened if your team didn't have the internet this week? They might have come up with their own tool but now we'll never know.
There is a real paradox at play, I think. We can move really quickly through our projects because the internet lets us stand on the shoulders of a thousand giants. But via each generation of technology we homogenise. For example, Australians and New Zealanders have no accent they say because those countries were colonised in the time of radio. I.e. technology wiped out variation.
This lack of variation I think is terrible for our progress. On my travels I meet many people who, shall we say, talk the talk, who are utterly driven by the cues in their environment, but who cannot think for themselves - they are bound by the zeitgeist. Their projects are subsequently miserable.
Your team, BTW, is exceptional. And this is not an attempt to flatter, ;-). You are literally exceptional in the way you go about your business. Most teams are not and, I think, could do with a few less hours surfing the web and few more hours thinking about their problems and technique.
J
The interviewee said,"It is not just about being good enough, you have to be better than the competition."
Many clients ask me about other clients, ask me where they stand in the 'league table'. I always say, it's not how good you are but how good you can be. But conforming to other people's standards moves people more than any internal notion of great or goodness. The only way to be really better than the competition is to forget the competition, to never get comfortable.
We are always pushing ourselves to do better. And honestly, we don't really even know who our competition is. There are other providers of 401(k) plans, and the ones we've seen pretty much suck compared to ours already. We are driven to write the best code we can, the best way. We were encouraged to do that early on by Mike Cohn when he was our manager, and the upper mgt supported that quality is our #1 goal.
I'm sure our sales and biz dev folks think about the competition, but they don't seem to be conforming. We've automated things that other companies can't believe that we automated. They all tried and couldn't.
I and others on my team are always out looking to see what is new, what frameworks or tools might help us do even better. I don't see how that makes us conform.
People say my team is exceptional. Well, it might be NOW, but it didn't start out that way. It was a matter of getting good people, and giving them time to learn how to do their best work. Anyone can do that.
Hi Jamie, I was merely noting the similarity of themes. The Nemesis Affair is the (very well told) story behind the scientific theory of the K-T boundary and the mass extinction events in Palaeontology, and how despite overwhelming evidence it took all the old professors to basically retire or die off before the establishment recognised the obvious facts and they were accepted as truth.
RSS feed for comments to this post