I attended a knowledge sharing session on behavioral science last week (ok, so technically, it’s not “TIL”… but as of that time, I thought “TIL!”). It was particularly in the context of designing products and services. It touched on concepts—some I’ve come across before, some new. And among the new, what piqued my interest the most was the…
Zeigarnik effect:
not finishing a task creates mental tension, which keeps it at the forefront of our memory
I guess it struck a chord because I was dealing with something that I felt I shouldn’t still be dealing with had someone done their work more promptly (which I later found out, should be corrected to “had someone done their work more correctly”). Anyways, I feel that mental tension — that extra cognitive load — brought about by that that unfinished thing that you have to have to remember.
It also made me think about some agile stuff particularly limiting WIP. In limiting WIP, the team ideally works within their capacity and will prioritize completing work over starting new work so that they aren’t juggling so many open items at a time. There’s also the lead time which is like the difference between when the work is started and when the work is completed. The longer the lead time — say when you start discussing a possible feature to the time that feature actually gets implemented, the longer you have to remember the details around that feature. The longer you have to remember stuff and the more stuff you need to remember—both are mentally taxing especially when the work piles up.
Then there’s also the definition of done. This is something that’s part of the team’s working agreements wherein you align on what has to be completed to consider the story as “Done.” And it gives some sort of comfort in knowing that once a story is done in a Sprint, you sort of have closure, and you can move on to other stories without having to worry about that story coming back to life an haunting you.
Anyways, I haven’t really read up much on the subject. It was just one of the concepts mentioned in the session, and I just find it interesting how some of those agile practices or concepts support combatting that mental tension that is the Zeigarnik effect.
testkeis 