The Eyes have it, the Eyes have it

 Beauty is in the eye… [partial quotation]

You sit down to enjoy a bowl of soup. You take a spoonful. Slurp. Delicious! This is a bowl of soup you can get behind. You have another spoon. And another. And another. When is it time to stop? How do you know when you’ve had enough? 

In the mid 2000s, Brian Wansink’s research group wanted to know if people listen to their stomachs when deciding when to finish eating, or if something else helps them make the decision. They designed a dastardly experiment. They invited participants to come and have a discussion about how colour affects taste, and sat them at a table with a bowl of tomato soup in each place and a cauldron of soup in the middle. The participants were invited to scoff as much soup as they wanted whilst they had this decoy discussion about colour and taste.

Unbeknownst to half of the participants, their bowls were connected from the bottom to the big soup cauldron by rubber tubing, perfectly designed so that as they were eating, the bowl would automatically and imperceptibly refill itself. They surveyed the participants afterwards and asked them all sorts of questions. After doing some statistical jiggery-pokery it turns out that the people with refilling bowls ate a whopping 73% more soup than those with regular bowls. They didn’t realise that anything was off, and they didn’t feel more full than their counterparts. Sou-per. 

In this case the participants were using ‘visual cues’ (seeing how full their bowls were) to decide when to eat as opposed to ‘satiety clues’ (feeling how full their bowels were). The experiment tricked the eyes into thinking that they had eaten less than they had, so they kept eating beyond what even they realised. This is one of the many ways in which our visual system influences us in unexpected (and funny) ways.  

This is not a blog about soup (though this is). It is, however, a blog about how we can use scientific concepts and science-based tools to inform and improve our agile practices, and in this post I’m going to focus (get it?) on the visual system and the eyes. I’m going to set out some of the neuroscientific context of the visual system, introduce some recent research into using the visual system to achieve fitness-related goals, and finally introduce some concepts in agility that have a basis in the biology of vision. 

The visual system as you have never seen it before

If we’re talking about the eyes, we have to talk about the nervous system. The nervous system is the the way your brain communicates with many parts of the body. It works through specialised cells called neurons which send electrical signals to and from the brain. 

In a reductionist way, the ultimate goal of any human is to move itself through the environment, eat, stay alive, reproduce. So our body is designed to help us sense what is going on in the world, and calculate how to achieve those aims. The nervous system is a key part of this. 

The nervous system has two elements - the Central Nervous System (the brain and the spinal cord), and the Peripheral Nervous System (everything else). Neurons in the CNS are structurally different from those in the PNS. 

When you prick your finger on a thorn; you feel the warm sun on your face; or your stomach tells you that you’ve eaten too many pies, the neurons where those sensations originate are part of the Peripheral Nervous System. Information about sensations and all other types of information are sent via peripheral neurons back to the Central Nervous System, and up to the brain for interpretation.

In contrast, the Central Nervous System looks after processing of information. It’s less about sensing the outside world and more about processing data about what’s happening outside the body and deciding what to do in response. The idea that thoughts and calculations happen in your brain hopefully shouldn’t be groundbreaking, but I’m emphasising this to show the distinction between the sensing (PNS) and the thinking (CNS) bits of the nervous system.  

The curious thing for us here is that the light-sensing part of the eyes - the retina - is anatomically part of the CNS. Your eyes are a direct extension of your brain in a way that your skin, nose, tongue and ears are not. Diseases which appear in the CNS appear in the retina, and seeing as they are sticking out of the head and not encased in the skull (and therefore easier to study), scientists use the retina when they want to study some elements of other CNS anatomy.

 

Processing visual information also takes up more than 50% of the cortex - the part of the brain which deals with many higher order functions.

So the eyes are wired into the brain in a closer way than other senses, and a huge amount of brain real-estate is taken up by processing input from the eyes. This is all to say that our eyes might play a greater role than you realised in how our brain understands the outside world. Because the visual system plays this outsized role, the opportunity for us to use the visual system to control or manage our emotional and cognitive world is also greater than you might realise. By extension then there are also many ways in which we can use the visual system to help build high performing agile teams.

I’m going to share one example of thought provoking research here, and go into other examples in future blog posts. 

Narrowing Visual Attention 

The Balcetis lab published a set of studies in 2020 describing a fascinating use of the visual system in improving our ability to achieve exercise goals. They gathered a group of participants in a New York lab and divided them into 2 groups. Both groups were asked to go for a walk for 15 minutes, 5 times over a week. One group was trained to focus on an item in the distance by imaging there was a kind of spotlight on it, and then when they had reached it, choose another one to focus on until they reach that one and so on. They were asked to use this strategy on their 5 walks. This was the narrowed attention group. The other group of people were asked to pay attention to whatever they would naturally, they were the natural attention group. 

Both groups tracked their walks and step counts on an app on their phones. Just by using these different visual attention strategies the narrowed attention group walked 60% further and took 84% more steps than the natural attention group. What accounts for such a significant difference? 

The researchers suggested that participants walked more because they saw each smaller exercise goal as easier to attain. This chimes with research that confirms - intuitively - that people achieve goals that are felt to be easier. They offered 2 potential explanations for this mechanism:  

1. Faster reward - If the goal is closer, you’ll get the reward (even if it’s a psychological reward) for achieving it sooner. Getting a reward sooner is more motivating than getting one later, and therefore people make more effort to achieve the goal. These goals are called proximate goals.

2. Easier Visualisation - Visualising what it would be like to achieve a goal makes it seem easier, and narrowing attention in this study made it easier for participants to visualise goal completion.

To summarise this section: 

• Narrowing visual attention on a goal makes it easier and more likely to be achieved (at least in this exercise domain) 

• Short term goals are more likely to be achieved than longer term goals because they are easier to visualise and lead to a perception of a faster reward

 

The Agile Takeaways

User Stories are proximate goals 

User stories are a transformative agile practice, in which teams structure their work in terms of the value to the user, rather than lists of supposedly valuable tasks. The purpose of this is to help the team focus on the actual user experience and the value you are bringing to them. There are a couple of benefits to this 

• It helps the team focus on only doing what’s necessary to deliver value to the user and avoid unneccessary work 

• Prevents the team focussing solely on what their organisation wants them to do at the expense of the user

• Encourages the team to deliver that valuable thing to the user once the story is done, rather than batching it all up and waiting until everything is done to deliver

• Fosters collaboration between team members - with everyone sharing a valuable goal it's easier to reorganise and adapt the work to finish the user story

A collection of user stories all related to each other is called an epic. So the epic might be ‘the user can log in to their account’, consisting of user stories like ‘user can enter username and password’, ‘user gets error messages if their details are incorrect’, and ‘user can do a password reset’.

Agile is all about delivering value early to help the team inspect their approach and adapt as necessary, and user stories and epics are a key practice to achieving this. 

According to what we’ve seen, we could think about the user stories in an epic as proximate goals which are easier to see, and therefore easier to visualise being completed sooner. This in turn encourages more effort and commitment, thus making the overall epic easier to achieve than if all the activities were jumbled together. 

Limiting ‘work in progress’ increases focus on proximal goals

A key pillar of the Kanban agile framework is to limit the work in progress (WIP), i.e. the number of things a team is working on at any one time. Put simply, focussing on one thing at a time and severely limiting multitasking gets all the work done sooner. Stop starting and start finishing, and all that jazz. 

This has been shown mathematically with Little’s Law, which links WIP (number of items in progress), Cycle Time (how long an item needs to be worked on) and Throughput (rate of items leaving the system). Reducing WIP also reduces switching costs (if it takes a few minutes to switch tasks, and ten minutes to get back into the task and you do that ten times a day, you won’t be as effective as if you just focus on one thing. 

However, with this research now we have another argument in support of limiting WIP - the visualisation research indicates that focussing visually and cognitively on one thing at a time actually makes people try harder and commit more, thus speeding up the whole operation. 

Visualising work on a board can be a narrowed-attention strategy

Another Kanban pillar is to visualise the workflow of whatever you’re doing, and show all the work that's in progress and coming up next. One of the most noticeable differences between (office-based) agile teams and non agile teams is the use of kanban boards which the teams gather around frequently to discuss the work on it. 

The origin of these boards was the Toyota factories of the post-war period. Each car-part in the production process was visualised as a card on a physical board in different parts of the factory to help managers and workers see the bottlenecks and measure how long each step was taking. This made the invisible visible, and showed the team there which parts of the organisation needed help.

The same is true of the boards we use in agile teams today, but often these boards can get clogged, busy and visually difficult to understand. The Balcetis research helps us remember that our agile visualisations are there to increase understanding of the work, to increase focus, and therefore to make the work feel easier to achieve, making it actually easier to achieve team goals. 

Visually focussing on lots of things will make it harder to achieve goals 

The contrary is also true. If we expect our teams to always keep their eyes on email, messaging tools, to have notifications on and be ready for anything all the time, we are doing the opposite of creating focus. We are pulling their attention in different directions making goals seem fuzzier and harder to achieve. This makes deep work harder, and ultimately leads to achieving our goals more slowly and with more difficulty. As agilists and people in positions of influence over who gets to distract the team and under which conditions, we should bear in mind that each distraction comes at a significant cost to achieving the team goals. 

This is the first blog in a series exploring a behavioural science-based approach to agile working. Give me feedback! Be as brutal as needed. What do you want to see more of or less of? Any ideas for future topics? Do let me know.

(if you want more of this kind of thing, sign up to my Substack where I'll be publishing in the future)