When Intentions Go Public – Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap? by Peter M. Gollwitzer et al.

A lot of people are thinking about how we can reduce household energy use these days. Changing household energy use can be a challenge because to most people there is no working feedback loop available. Energy use is invisible. My own feedback loop consists of getting a monthly invoice displaying the cost I had for the previous month (e.g. “278 SEK”). That is a lousy feedback loop if you want to change behavior. I can not even see how much energy I used. Not that it matters because that information is useless without knowing what would be a reasonable level to compare with. And getting the information once a month does not provide a feedback loop for me to see the effect of my immediate behavior.

A basic model of a feedback loop for a system looks like this:

Based on a desired state (a reference value) a controller operates on a system and adjust control behavior based on the output from a sensor to make the system align the output to the desired state. For this to work there are a couple of things required:

1. We must know what the desired state is. Without it we don’t know if the output from the system is good or bad.
2. We must know the system output. Without the output we can’t calculate the measured error between output and the desired state.
3. The controller must be able to provide system input to control the system and its parts in a predictable way.
4. The delay between the actions of the controller and the sensor feedback needs to be short so that the result of different actions are visible.

Applying this basic model to the typical feedback loop for household energy use we get:

The “system” in this model would be your household. It consists of several things that use energy (refrigerator, TV, other appliances…). You control it by operating various appliances, setting the refrigerator temperature and making purchasing decisions for new hardware that affects energy use. You get the energy bill once a month with the amount of energy used.

As you can see there are several problems. I don’t know the desired energy level. Is my household below or above the average for similar households? If I switch off the TV instead of keeping it on standby, would it matter? Will setting a higher temperature in the refrigerator impact my energy use? Since I can’t see the immediate effects of my behavior there are no drivers to change it.

Real-time feedback and knowledge about the desired state

A first step to  influence behavior would be to provide real-time feedback and information about a desired state. That would make it possible for you to try various control actions and see what implications they have on the system. There are a lot of third party solutions to get real-time feedback e.g. Wattson, TED-5000 and so on, but from what I have seen there are very few options to get information about a desired state. Getting more data about desired state can in part be accomplished by sharing information about your household and its energy use with others.

But, to be able to really affect behavior we need to increase the resolution of the parts of the system (at least sections or types of energy use in the household) by using multiple sensors and comparing the output with multiple desired states. This may quickly become complicated for an individual and a reasonable next step is to automate the controller function (you) by allowing automated control actions on parts of the system (e.g. adjusting your refrigerator temperature based on data about its contents, model, and similar household data).

I guess we have some work to do before we can get a better feedback loop in place. What’s in it for the energy companies? Will we have to install our own real-time meters?

(Thank you to Daniel Brolund who provided interesting insights into control theory last week).

The myth of multitasking:

… [a] research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

Stanford study: Cognitive control in media multitaskers:

Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.

Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times Magazine (10/16/05) (based on research by Gloria Mark, University of California)

Research shows that 40 percent of the time, workers ramble along a different tangent when an interruption ends because their short-term memory has been disrupted.

…research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer every day. I discovered that over time, I have added so much attention-stealing stuff to my main work environment that I feel constantly interrupted. You get growl notifications, tweets, new email sounds, new email icons, RSS feed notifications and IM alerts. When you are reading stuff on the web you are constantly bugged by the latest in advertising technology.

So, starting a couple of weeks ago I decided to remove attention-stealing stuff from my work environment. A short list so far:

1. Disabling Growl notifications for everything but really important stuff. Done!
2. Turning off new email notfications for Outlook (on my Windows computer at work). Done!
3. Reduced ads in internet content by installing Adblock plus in FF3. Done!
4. Removed MailPlane icon from taskbar. Set “Do not disturb” mode in MailPlane. Done!
5. Turning off IM for long periods of time during the day. Done!
6. Scheduling RSS reading to specific time slots during the day. Hard!
7. Turning off notification sounds in Windows. Done!
8. Hiding the windows taskbar to get rid of spinning mini-icons in the right-hand corner. Done!
9. Turning off yellow alert popups from stuff in the Windows taskbar (like “A network cable was disconnected” – who the hell decided that that was a brilliant idea!?). Not sure how yet.
10. Creatign a consistent editing environment for blogs and wikis with the Universal Edit Button. Done when they’ve fixed the Delicious extension incompatibility.

I am feeling a lot more focussed already. The biggest improvement was from turning of new email notifications in Outlook at work.  I guess the experience is similar to what people are getting from the pomodoro technique.

The next step is to reduce clutter in my blogs to stop annoying other people. Mark Pilgrim gave some interesting tips in a blog post a while ago and I have implemented some of them already. Who the hell needs a visible RSS link (or RSS for that matter, now that we have Atom)? I am thinking about removing the whole category list as well. Do people ever click items in the category list?

It would be great if all apps could share a standard API to set a “do not disturb mode” toggable via a keyboard shortcut or a small timer app that allowed you to schedule this mode throughout the workday.

It presents some information that is different from how the Standish Group defines success in their often refered to CHAOS report. The Standish Group assumes that success is the traditional “on time, on budget and on scope”. In many ways this does not make sense as an estimate of time and budget are made when the least information is available (early in or before a project starts).

In Scott’s survey the following success factor priorities emerged:

• “Schedule: 61.3 percent of respondents said that it is more important to deliver a system when it is ready to be shipped than to deliver it on time.
• Scope: 87.3 percent said that meeting the actual needs of stakeholders is more important than building the system to specification.
• Money: 79.6 percent said that providing the best return on investment (ROI) is more important than delivering a system under budget.
• Quality: 87.3 percent said that delivering high quality is more important than delivering on time and on budget.
• Staff: 75.8 percent said that having a healthy, both mentally and physically, workplace is more important than delivering on time and on budget.”

Comparing Agile with other development methods

Based on these success criteria the survey investigated the success rate of different development methods:

A small step, but apparently Agile methods have the upper hand if the study is correct.

The missing pieces

What I still think is missing is a study that actually measures the outcome of a project after it was put into production and compares this with the desired effects that were envisioned. Neither the Standish Group nor Scott’s study on success factors seem to cover this.

• How quick was the return on the investment (if the goal was to increase revenue and/or reduce cost)?
• Were all of the desired effects realised?
• Were all the developed features used in a way so that they contributed to realising the desired effects? (think “reduce waste” if you are into Lean or “usability” if you are a human factors kind of person).

Measuring the above items would give more insight into the true success rate of a project rather than measuring the highly subjective “do you think is was successful with regard to factor X”? The only problem, I guess, is that few projects detail the desired effects in a way that is measurable in isolation from other factors in the environment (e.g. “the economy”).

The above items would also make it clear that the usability perspecive should be included from the start of a project.

Coupled with the extremely short feedback cycle realized by using dynamically typed languages such as Ruby, Rails may have a deeper impact on software development practices than I previously thought.

At a recent Scrum training session Ken Schwaber said “it’s all bout telling the truth”. Philip’s post contains some interesting quotes related to this topic:

“When a vice president in the Windows [Vista project] asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit.

“[...]the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. -’Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss.’ Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.”

Didn’t Microsoft adopt Scrum a year go? Maybe they skipped the part about transparency. Granted, the Windows Vista project may be one of the more complex software projects to date, but how many VP:s do you really need? And even if you do the waterfall dance, there must be some insight into real progress, even for pointy haired bosses?

Update: Apparently too many readers turned his blog post into the standard Windows/Linux shootout which made him remove the interesting parts. Google cache currently has the original.