Forgive the intrusion

I’m interested in two questions today that might seem unrelated: why do we lie awake at night worrying about the future, and how can we help our teams have more focus? 

The answer to both questions lies partially in what happened to a young psychologist in a cafe in Berlin in the 1920s.

Bluma Zeigarnik as a young psychology student found herself amazed at her waiter’s ability to recall his tables’ bills and orders from memory. She was even more astounded that when she left a bag behind the waiter didn’t recognise her. He gave the explanation that he promptly forgets about order once they have paid. 

And then they got married! Ok they didn’t get married. This story might have happened or it might be apocryphal, in any case it doesn’t need to be true to be true. 

This encounter led to Zeigarnik studying the psychology of unfinished tasks, and though they didn’t wed, this encounter did give birth to the Zeigarnik effect. Bluma hypothesised that unfinished tasks occupy an active space in our memory and intrude until they are completed. These so-called ‘Zeigarnik Intrusions’ can be useful - as in the case of the waiter, or unhelpful. Thoughts of unfinished tasks have been shown to intrude on people trying to do something else and detract from the task at hand.

Perhaps Zeigarnik intrusions are what are happening to you when you can’t sleep because of some menial task you need to attend to. My hypothesis is that Zeigarnik intrusions are probably also at play in our software teams. Not only that, but I reckon we are probably making them worse by mistake. 

Cut to your modern software team standing around their board, or meeting on zoom. We’ve done standup, we’ve got five minutes to kill. ‘Why don’t we run the board and have a look at what’s in the backlog?’. Boop, we’ve just highlighted some unfinished work and an unfulfilled goal. Good luck getting on with today's tasks software team, we’ve just made it more likely that you have intrusive thoughts about what’s coming next at the expense of today’s work. Sorry about that.  

Perversely, many of our Scrum implementations might also be set up to make this worse. We ask our teams to pursue the Sprint Goals, but we also ask them to have a bunch of work ‘on the go’ for refinement. Read: unfulfilled goals that now will intrude on their day to day work, even if the next refinement meeting is a few days away. 

So when do these Zeigarnik Intrusions stop? One would imagine that they keep going until the Goal is fulfilled. US-based researchers Masicampo and Baumeister discovered a different answer. Through a series of experiments published in 2018 they demonstrated that coming up with a specific, realistic, process based plan (ie what are you going to do to achieve this goal and when) these unwanted Zeigarnik intrusions can stop. 

This is interesting because it gives it us as agilists an awareness of a hidden dynamic that might be hampering our teams. Next time we find ourselves activating goals with our teams (ie bringing them into people’s conscious memory such that they might intrude) we can catch it. 

If we absolutely need to activate an incomplete goal (because we are planning for the future or any other myriad reason), we can make sure we ‘close the loop’ with our teams by coming up with a quick plan for how we are going to carry out that work. This will help our teams’ brains not need to worry about all these goals that they need to complete in the future.  

At our Scrum ceremonies we can take the initiative to make sure we visualise, follow and close out conversations relating to the goals that come up in conversation. Perhaps as an experiment we could include ‘a Zeigarnik Intrusion-busting plan’ in the Definition of Ready for our tickets. If that takes more time or discipline in our ceremonies… great! Isn't our role in teams to help them design the architecture around their work to be optimised for performance? 

What should go into a plan in this context? That’s probably to be experimented with. The scientists studying plans found that only the people who actually used their plans to achieve the goal experienced the reduction in the Zeigarnik effect. This means that you can’t just whack down any old thing and consider it a plan. It needs to be detailed enough that your brain is satisfied that it doesn’t need to keep the goal in mind for it to get done. 

On the other hand you don’t want to have a detailed moment by moment planning conversation every time an unfinished ticket rears its head. Play with it, let me know how you get on .

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

I’m interested to hear what you think. Let me know what this sparks for you, and join the conversation on LinkedIn