How The RAS Can Help Testers Spot Problems In Their Team’s Thinking.

The easiest person to fool is yourself!

I’ve been reading about the Reticular Activating System (RAS), how it helps and hinders and how coaching can help individuals avoid making thinking errors. It’s made me wonder if it’s a valuable concept to use with teams.

Let me explain what I’m thinking!

What is the RAS?

The RAS selects what we pay attention to.

It resides in our brains and consists of nuclei/neural connections. It’s responsible for filtering millions of items of information we receive each day and is the reason we aren’t overwhelmed with the sheer amount of data that comes our way every 24 hours.

It’s not all good news, though!

Thinking errors.

Are those filters always helpful?

Our RAS creates filters from our assumptions and predictions. It doesn’t care if our beliefs are flawed or if we have faulty predictions. It uses them anyway! It will happily ferry information between our conscious and unconscious minds.

And that’s when the trouble begins!

It doesn’t assess the quality of the filters. It just uses whatever it’s presented with! This can make us prone to thinking errors. Here are some examples:

• All or nothing: Everything is black or white, absolute, without any grey.
• Mind reading: Assuming that you know what someone is thinking without evidence.
• Overgeneralising: Using one negative to make broad generalisations.
• Emotional reasoning: Interpreting feelings as facts.
• Deleting: Ignoring the many good things to focus on the one bad thing.
• Should statements: Believing things have to be a certain way.

I don’t know about you, but it looks familiar when I read that list!

How might we use this in our teams?

The familiarity isn’t just from a personal perspective either!

Have you ever been in a team or org that:

• Insists we always run that test because that bigScaryThing happened three years ago (and hasn’t happened since)?
• Decides we must build that killer feature for our customers without knowing if they really need it?
• Imposed draconian measures because one joker on the team took liberties?
• Stopped hiring from specific demographics because of a bad experience with one person?
• Over-engineered a design because the performance should be the best in class?

I know I have!

What about you?

Now what?

Is there such a thing as a “Team RAS”? I don’t know (yet), but I’ll try to find out.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog