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Another topic in a conversation I had today was about getting commitment to actions – particularly getting them from people who aren’t necessarily that inclined to commit to something, either because they’re reluctant , or because they’re not particularly engaged in the situation. There was a piece of psychological theory that I’d come across which described exactly the technique to help in this situation, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called.

Quite by chance, I came across this article from Arizona State University, which described almost exactly what I was thinking about:

Consistency, according to Robert Cialdini, can be extremely effective in setting up good rules for people to follow. “The key,” he says, “is to prompt them to make an initial public commitment that is consistent with the rule.”

This leads to the restaurant owner and his dilemma.

The restaurant was having problems with large numbers of patrons who neither honored their reservations nor called to cancel them. Rather than take a dogmatic approach to solving the problem, the owner came up with a simple yet profoundly effective solution.

He had the receptionist change her usual request when taking a reservation over the telephone. Instead of saying, “Please call if you have to change your plans,” she rephrased the statement as a question. She began asking, “Will you call if you change your plans?”

The question caused the patron to commit to calling if he or she could not keep or needed to change their reservation. The no-show rate at the restaurant fell from 30 percent to 10 percent.

The context of the conversation I was having was about getting a project handed over into a support environment once it had been delivered, and the reluctance that a support function often has toward taking over new responsibilities. The specific problem was ensuring that the support function understood how to run the new system – and not being caught out by someone nodding and agreeing, but not actually understanding what it was they’d agreed to.

The implication of Cialdini’s theory is that rather than asking “do you understand that”, you need to frame the question so that their understanding is played back to you – perhaps something along the lines of “so how would you go about doing X?” The same principle gets used in aviation – when an instructor hands over control to a pupil, they’ll say “you have control” – to which the pupil has to reply “I have control” before the instructor releases the controls. There’s an explicit feedback loop in place.

[The book referred to in the article is here.]

This is firmly in thinking-out-loud territory, but earlier today I was talking about project timescales, and how we’re generally pretty poor at accurately estimating schedules (that’s a collective rather than royal we).

Then I ran across a post on Metafilter, and picked up one of my old MBA textbooks – and the two things together got me wondering. There’s a concept in psychology and economics called prospect theory, which describes how individuals evaluate gains and losses – basically the idea is that you tend to ‘weight’ losses more than gains, so that tends to make you risk-averse. But the point from which you measure that gain or loss is affected by the ‘frame’ of the decision, or how you subjectively view it. Is the glass half-empty or half-full, that kind of thing.

If this is true for evaluating potential gains and losses, is it also true for evaluating potential durations? Perhaps if the estimation is framed in a sub-optimal way, it will impact on the outcome? And that’s before you start throwing groupthink and confirmation biases into the mix.

Probably not one to be trying to work out in my head at this time of the morning, but worth thinking about further.

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with John C. Dvorak – he’s been responsible for some eye-wateringly poor arguments in some of the stuff he’s written. But I think he’s onto something here: Software patents – Microsoft’s Fatal Error

On the surface it looks like the software patent decision in favor of large corporations is ruining any hopes that small fry will succeed in the business. In fact, the opposite may be true, and Microsoft will eventually learn that software patents are going to ruin the company.

Full article here.

I’ve posted several rants on the subject of the ever-so-slightly controversial European Software Patents Directive in the past, and actually got as far as sitting down to write to the last group of people who can do anything about it, my representatives in the European Parliament.

There are six Euro MPs covering this region – two Labour (left-of-centre social democratic), two Conservative (right-of-centre), one Liberal Democrat (left-of-centre and left-of-Labour) and one UK Independence Party (a generally right-of-centre party whose main raison d’etre is for the UK to leave the EU. There’s an irony present in them having Euro MPs in the first place, but we’ll pass on that for the time being.) The two Labour MEPs act in tandem and respond based on geographic divisions, which reduces the number of responses to five. (I’ve mislaid the response from Diana Wallis, the Liberal Democrat, but she was anti-patent.)
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