stelling 7: de beste keuze...
Een hele mooie vooronderstelling uit deze reeks zegt ons:
"Mensen maken altijd de beste keuze die ze op dat moment hebben."
"Mensen maken altijd de beste keuze die ze op dat moment hebben."
We maken allemaal op elk moment de beste keuze met de informatie die we op dat moment hebben. Het kan zijn dat het twee seconden later al een ‘slechte’ keuze blijkt te zijn, maar op het moment dat we ze maakten, was het de beste keuze die we konden maken. We maken op elk moment de beste keuze om te overleven, ons veilig te stellen, pijn te vermijden of om plezier te maken.
Deze stelling mag je niet als een flauw excuus zien om voortaan niet meer na te denken over belangrijke keuzes, integendeel! Maar ze kan je wel helpen om achteraf jezelf te vergeven voor een minder goeie keuze en er iets uit te leren.
Denk eens terug aan keuzes die je achteraf bekeken als ‘slechte’ keuzes beschouwt. Maakte je op het moment van je beslissing bewust een slechte keuze die jou niets opbracht? Of bleek pas bij nader inzien (of zelfs pas veel later) dat er betere keuzes waren geweest?
Deze stelling mag je niet als een flauw excuus zien om voortaan niet meer na te denken over belangrijke keuzes, integendeel! Maar ze kan je wel helpen om achteraf jezelf te vergeven voor een minder goeie keuze en er iets uit te leren.
Denk eens terug aan keuzes die je achteraf bekeken als ‘slechte’ keuzes beschouwt. Maakte je op het moment van je beslissing bewust een slechte keuze die jou niets opbracht? Of bleek pas bij nader inzien (of zelfs pas veel later) dat er betere keuzes waren geweest?
5 opmerkingen:
Hallo
Dit is een geruststellende gedachte, omdat je jezelf dan niet altijd schuldig hoeft te voelen.
Dit heeft ook te maken met het feit dat achter elk gedrag een positieve intentie schuilt. Soms is het confronterend om te realiseren dat je bewust een keuze maakt die in de lange termijn niet gezond is, maar een behoefte vervult die in de korte termijn belangrijk lijkt.
Jef, je geeft een mens toch altijd wat stof tot nadenken ! Bedankt.
Over deze heb ik een nachtje geslapen.
Bij mij deed dit dit de vraag rijzen : in hoeverre zou je op dat het moment van die beslissing open gestaan hebben voor ideeën, gevoelens ... van anderen om je beslissing alsnog aan te passen en/of zonder bewust te beslissen iets anders te doen.
Als je hier op doorgaat, kom je bij de vraag uit in hoeverre iemand of de mensheid als geheel opvoedbaar is en kan leren uit fouten ervaringen van anderen.
Ik zie bijvoorbeeld dat ik mijn zoon zelf moet laten ervaren dat hij er niet zal komen als hij niet regelmatiger studeert en meer problemen probeert op te lossen.
Ook als ik iets uitleg, zie ik vaak dat hij de kapsgtok nog niet heeft om iets aan op te hangen, met als gevolg : het ene oor in, het andere oor uit. Ik denk hier terug aan de mentale map waar je het vroeger over had.
Bovendien heb ik ooit gelezen dat de hersenen in de puberteit nog volop in ontwikkeling zijn, waardoor pubers vaak ongestructureerde warhoofden zijn. Zij kunnen bijvoorbeeld ook moelijk emoties bij anderen herkennen (wat het ook moelijker maakt om hun gedrag aan te passen).
Voor de mensheid als geheel zie ik hetzelfde probleem : de geschiedenis herhaalt zich. Eén voorbeeld dat me steeds boeit :-) : de katholieke kerk heeft vroeger genoeg geflaterd met de aarde als centrum van het universum, daarna de mens als beeld van God ... Ook nu blijven ze flateren door geen condooms toe te laten. En dit terwijl anale sex in Afrika eigenlijk de anticonceptie is bij gebrek aan beter, maar zoveel meer kans op aids geeft.
Enfin probeer je maar eens in te leven in de katholieke mindmap ...
Groetjes
Luc
De weg om iemand zijn ideeën 'bij' te werken :
Review of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion for Free Inquiry
Daniel Dennett
October 10, 2006
The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy inRobert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism...
When it succeeds, the results are gratifying: your opponent is in a mood to be enlightened and eagerly attentive. But this is well nigh impossible when the arguments you wish to rebut are too flimsy.
Toch nog een late comment die illustreert dat je soms iets moet ervaren om juist te kunnen beslissen. Spijtig genoeg uit de it sector, maar wel te veralgemenen.
Lesire Software Engineering had been using "developer-only Extreme Programming" for a few months. Refactoring, unit tests, simple design, and pair programming had resulted in measurable improvements in the software process.
When the company wanted to transition to "full" XP and expand the use of XP beyond the development team, it faced a number of problems.
• Poor communication between business and developer teams.
• No understanding of user stories, the planning game, and velocity.
• Distrust of the planning game and velocity. How could such simple methods deliver credible plans and schedules?
Presentations, discussions, training, and coaching did not completely resolve these issues. Developers and businesspeople reluctantly agreed to try the XP experiment, without much hope of success.
Then Vera Peeters, Lesire's XP coach, exclaimed, "Let's play a game!"
Let's Play!
The players are divided into small teams (four to eight players). Each team consists of developers and customers. A coach assists each team, to explain and guide the game and to answer questions. The team can earn "business points" by performing simple tasks. The team with the most business points wins.
The coach gives the team a small set of prewritten story cards. These cards describe simple tasks, such as "Build a two-story house of cards," "Throw a six five times using two dice," and "Find a missing card from a pack of cards."
The team members (acting as developers) estimate how long it will take them to "implement" the tasks. The coach is available to answer questions about the stories. The team may choose a time between ten and 60 seconds. Or they may declare that it's impossible to implement the task in 60 seconds. When all the stories have been estimated, the cards are handed back to the coach.
The team (now acting as a customer) must create a release plan: They choose the stories to implement and the order of implementation. Each story is worth some business points. The team tries to maximize the number of business points they can earn. The total time to implement all selected stories may not exceed 180 seconds, the fixed iteration time.
The team members (acting as developers) must now implement each planned story in turn, in the order defined by the customer. An hourglass is used to measure the implementation time. When the implementation is "accepted" by the coach, the team earns the business points of the story. When the hourglass runs out, the iteration ends. If the team has finished all the stories before the end of the iteration, they may ask the customer for another story.
At the end of each iteration, there is a debriefing, discussing the problems, solutions, and strategies. The "team velocity" is explained and calculated. For the next iteration, the team must use velocity instead of time as a measure of how much work they can do.
The simulation typically runs over three iterations. It takes from one and a half to two hours, including debriefing and discussion sessions.
Open the Magic Bag
At the start of the game, a bag with game props is emptied on each team's table. The bag contains dice, playing cards, colorful paper, balloons, pieces of string, folded hats and boats, story cards, planning/scoring sheets, a pen, and an hourglass.
This jumble of colorful, childish props reassures the players that this is not a serious event. They will not be judged; they can relax and enjoy the game. They are open to bonding with their teammates and to absorbing something new. It's just a game, after all.
Tell Us a Story
The story cards contain simple and small tasks such as "Find a missing card from a deck" or "Inflate five balloons to a size of 40 cm." No special knowledge is required to understand how to carry out these tasks.
And yet, the cards alone do not contain enough information to estimate the complexity of the tasks. The players ask the coach (acting as their customer) more questions about the tasks—for example: "Are we allowed to perform the task as a team?" "What do you mean by throw a six five times? Do we need five consecutive sixes?" The coach clarifies the meaning of the stories and explains what conditions must be fulfilled to accept the story.
This reinforces the idea that user stories aren't specifications but "a promise to talk." It's all right to ask the customer questions. Get as much information as you need to make good decisions. Ask the customer—they know! Or at least they can find out the answer.
Estimating: How Hard Can This Be?
One of the most difficult aspects of working with velocity is convincing developers to estimate consistently. The velocity factor includes all the variable parts of team performance: experience, knowledge of the problem domain, team size, adding and removing team members, interruptions, and so on. If the planning game is to result in realistic schedules, stories should be estimated consistently in terms of their relative required effort. Developers should not try to adjust their estimates.
The coach asks the players to estimate by comparing with other stories. If a story looks twice as difficult as another story, estimate it at twice the difficulty. The mix of stories proposed in the documentation contains stories that are suited to demonstrating this. For example, folding eight boats will probably take twice as long as folding four boats. There are also several stories that have the same complexity. For example, throwing a six five times is obviously exactly as difficult as throwing a four five times.
But it's not always that easy. Building a two-story house of cards is more than twice as difficult as building a one-story house. And finding two missing cards from a full deck is about as difficult as finding one, if you sort the cards.
Estimating how long it takes to perform these little tasks is difficult. Developers already know estimating is difficult. For some customers, it might come as a surprise to learn how hard it is.
One way to improve the estimates is to do short experiments, called "spikes." You could implement these simple stories completely as a spike. With real stories, this is not possible, so we give the players only a limited time (for example, 15 minutes) to come up with their estimates.
Insanely Short Iterations
XP recommends short iterations, so the XP Game uses really short iterations: 180 seconds. These 180 seconds include only the "pure" implementation time, without counting any preparations or the time to perform acceptance tests.
These 180 seconds are the "budget" the players can allocate when making their release plan: The total estimated time of all the chosen stories must not exceed 180 seconds.
If all the chosen stories have been implemented and there's time left, the customer may choose some more stories. The iteration ends after exactly 180 seconds, not a second more, not a second less. If the team is still working on a story, this story is abandoned. This emphasizes the fixed iteration time, during which the customer can change only scope and priority.
When the iteration is about halfway through, the team compares their actual implementation to their plan: Are we ahead, behind, or right on schedule? Should we warn the customer that they might have to reduce scope?
We used to measure time with a stopwatch, but an hourglass is more fun, more tactile, and more visible. We don't care about one-second precision; we need to know if we're halfway or almost done. It turns out that even with such simple tracking tools as a list of story cards and an hourglass, we can give the customer pretty accurate and useful feedback on our progress. The sight of the last grains of sand sliding down the hourglass reminds the players that time is finite and increases the pressure to finish the implementation of their story.
Planning with Risk
Most of the stories depend only on skill and teamwork. We can expect the team to perform consistently on these tasks.
But some stories depend on luck. How can you estimate how long the dice stories (for example, "Throw three ones with two dice") will take? You can compute the odds; multiply by the time it takes, on average, to throw the dice. The answer might be "On average, it will take about 30 seconds to throw three ones with two dice."
When you're planning, you need to take this uncertainty and risk into account. If the estimate is 30 seconds, it might as well take ten or 60 seconds, depending on your luck. When you have two stories that will earn you about the same business value, but one is riskier than the other, which one do you choose? Some people choose riskier stories with a higher payoff; some people prefer the stories with a lower risk. The important thing is to explicitly take the risk into account when planning.
Customers learn that it's not always possible to come up with definite estimates. Developers learn that it's hard to plan when story estimates include uncertainty.
Silly Little Games
The stories are silly little games: throwing dice, sorting cards, finding missing cards, building a house of cards, folding a paper hat, inflating balloons. You can invent your own additions, but all these stories have some features in common.
• They add to the relaxed, playful atmosphere.
• They are not a bit technical, so everyone on the team can join in and contribute.
• They are difficult enough to require some concentration and team effort to complete quickly.
• They are not too difficult, so the players can concentrate on the XP concepts we want them to experience and learn.
The team decides before each game how they will perform the task (in team or solo) and who will perform the task. Players sign up for tasks; tasks are not assigned to them.
All the planned games are played one at a time, in the order chosen by the customer. This reinforces the idea that the whole team is responsible for all the stories.
It's fun to see grown men and women working so hard to fold paper hats or build houses of cards—or design and execute a six-way parallel sort of a deck of cards!
Playing to Win
The element of competition is important to the game. Everybody in the team cooperates to implement as many stories as possible, as fast as possible. They want their team to earn more points than the other teams. Putting developers and businesspeople in one team makes them work together, maybe for the first time.
Don't create teams with only developers or only businesspeople. We don't want to see who's "smartest"—we want to foster cooperation.
Van een ouderling een arrogante uitspraak voor de jeugd van Anatole France :
Ils se croient neuf pour le monde, tandis qu'ils ne sont que jeunes dans le monde'.
Maar nieuw verkoopt altijd goed ...
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