Post B7tvhvbuaSbd40DZbc by jacques@mastodon.chester.id.au
 (DIR) More posts by jacques@mastodon.chester.id.au
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv5gqK5Mk8REkts by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       If you're a high performing person doing technical work, I bet you've seen a pattern in how software organizations diagnose and explain the drivers of underperformance. I am making this bet because as a psychologist for technical teams my inbox is just BURSTING with stories of this pattern!
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv5v1TMhyqPs50C by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       @grimalkina oh you damn near killed yourself to save the release last week?  cool, now your KPIs are being 3x'd because clearly you can do it, right?
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv63WxjVvGnqsGO by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       When a developer struggles, the organization frames its question as something like this: is this person missing skills? Or a team misses its targets, so it asks...who do we need to move out? A project fails....well who owns that and didn't work hard enough?
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv6Njkbg2HTJ0l6 by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       Despite a lot of conversation about context and large effects that drive our outcomes (changing technology, changing markets...), when it comes to telling a story about WHY we got an outcome, many organizational narratives swirl almost inevitably down to telling stories about fixed traits of individuals. The conditions themselves are everywhere, but are more difficult for us to keep in mind in that moment of decision than a story about an individual ability.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv6jiQtG3NdaZ16 by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       Correspondence bias is one name for a bias pushing us to do this. This is the robustly documented tendency people have to think someone's actions reflect fixed individual traits, even when the situation is equally or much more explanatory (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). When we see behavior we infer *character.*
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv74z9oGuRbXYAa by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       Organizations doing this will see a moment of underperformance and infer fixed ability. This can be baffling when you're a practitioner and you can point to a whole history of competent performance and see the environmental driver more clearly. To you, close to the actual work, it seems *obvious* that many moments of underperformance aren't dispositional.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv7OTzJrrQ4f7Ym by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       Bigger social trends pushes us toward this too. Behavioral scientists Chater and Loewenstein (2023) described a bias that's shaped how we think about behavior across policy, the economy, education and businesses: the i-frame or the s-frame. The i-frame focuses on individual choices and traits, while the s-frame treats behavior as a result of structural conditions. Many organizations default to the i-frame and they can't even see themselves doing it.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv7pQN9Q0ldGdYO by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       But what the s-frame reveals, in software especially, is that the conditions are vital. In my own research with 15,000+ developers, environmental factors can radically predict capacity: technical people's judgments that an org provides learning culture, agency, belonging, self-efficacy, cumulatively helpful review culture, organizational justice. These are conditions organizations build, or don't, not personality traits they can hire once for and be done with.
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tuv8GMkyyA7Bs9Y0 by grimalkina@mastodon.social
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       In my experience, the technical teams that move forward rapidly right now aren't asking "do we have the right people?" but rather "have we built conditions where people can show us what they can do? Where people can be their best selves?" In The Psychology of Software Teams, I unpack empirical evidence behind why and how all of this works; you can get your copy now! 🚀https://www.drcathicks.com/#book
       
 (DIR) Post #B7tvhvbuaSbd40DZbc by jacques@mastodon.chester.id.au
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       @ariadne @grimalkina followed by “why are the engineers always sandbagging???”