Designing a team that would produce software of good quality: emotions and interest

As I’ve said in the first article, quality strongly depends on the efficiency of the information flow in the system — the more effective the information flow is, the less loss occurs, and the higher the quality.

Efficient information flow implies that parties perform a cognitive function well:

Cognitive function is a broad term that refers to mental processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information, and reasoning. Cognitive functions include the domains of perception, memory, learning, attention, decision making, and language abilities.

People need to be able to communicate, learn, make decisions, etc.

The current scientific body of knowledge states that emotions affect cognitive functions, and I’m devoting this article to the topic of emotions.

As one study says:

Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. This attentional and executive control is intimately linked to learning processes, as intrinsically limited attentional capacities are better focused on relevant information. Emotion also facilitates encoding and helps retrieval of information efficiently.

As another study shows a strong correlation of the level of emotion positivity and memory performance:

In two experiments, context memory performance was disrupted when words were presented during negatively valenced film clips, whereas it was enhanced when words were presented during arousing film clips. Free recall of
words presented during the negatively valenced films was also disrupted. These findings suggest multiple influences of emotion on memory performance.

And another one:

Positive affect systematically influences performance on many cognitive tasks.

And another one:

positive emotional states could reduce switch costs and enhance both types of creative performances

And another one:

This article reviews evidence indicating that, in most circumstances, positive affect enhances problem solving and decision making, leading to cognitive processing that is not only flexible, innovative, and creative, but also thorough and efficient

And another one:

Creativity is enhanced most by positive mood states that are activating and associated with an approach motivation and promotion focus (e.g., happiness)

As you see, a growing body of scientific knowledge proves that positive emotions improve cognition, creativity, memory efficiency, etc. (while negative emotions and stress have a detrimental effect on cognitive function and memory).

Most companies and HR have long since started investing in employee well-being:

the state of feeling healthy and happy

The 2021 HR Sentiment Survey found that 68% of senior HR leaders rated employee well-being and mental health as top priorities. Companies now seem to have started understanding the importance of investing in positive emotions.

While I fully support the management initiatives focused at providing decent work condition, health support and perks of all sorts, I do believe that the cornerstone is missing — there’s no proper attention to a certain feeling which is very positive, crucial to the software development and inherently important to homo sapiens striving — interest:

a feeling or emotion that causes attention to focus on an object, event, or process

Designing the team culture and processes so that the interest is provoked seems quite a good idea for the company.

You often see the promise of ‘interesting tasks’ and ‘hard problems’ in the job description companies post, but rarely do they fulfill the promise.

At this moment, I usually hear, ‘yeah, but it’s impossible to make work interesting for everyone’.

And yet we get paid to solve users’ problems. There is no need to invent complicated ‘interesting’ tasks; we need to allow people a certain amount of exploratory freedom.

Engineering interest is solving problems, not doing tasks: if I assign you a task ‘code me this form’ or ‘paint the button red’, chances are you will consider these assignments boring as soon as you have finished a few hundred.

If instead, you gave me the user’s original problem or, even better, facilitated our dialogue, the user would tell me the problem, and suddenly solving the problem would be much more interesting.

I think you all must remember the pure joy of discovery amusement — where you suddenly realise how a certain problem can be solved.

Imagine your working day mainly consisted of problem-solving and discoveries, but not of tedious tasks.

And what’s even more peculiar:

The motivational function of interest extends to activities that are not inherently interesting or appealing. Interest can bolster motivation to complete tasks that are boring and tedious

If the team is interested in solving a problem, ‘boring’ tasks are not demotivating anymore.

In addition, there’s a great benefit in having a diverse team — a team of people of different levels of expertise and different specialisation.

Chances are some team members never tried solving a particular type of problem: what can be boring to a senior developer might as well be of great novelty to the junior one. If properly done, learning as well as teaching is a thrill.

There’s also a great benefit in organisational agility regarding roles: if a backend developer wants to learn some frontend to help the team solve the user’s problem, welcome it, and don’t force specialisation, knowledge overlap helps the team build things better.

There’s a great book — Exploring the psychology of interest, and here’s a few quotes:

Izard and Ackerman (2000) suggest a motivational function—“interest motivates exploration and learning, and guarantees the person's engagement in the environment

Diverse areas of research demonstrate beneficial motivational effects of interest. Studies of successful adolescents indicate that “undivided interest” promotes the growth of expertise (Rathunde, 1996, 1998, 2001)

research, reviewed in chapter 3, shows that people process texts more deeply and remember the material more accurately when the texts are interesting (Hidi, 2000; Schiefele, 1999)

interest is adaptive because it motivates people to develop diverse experiences that can be helpful when unforeseen events occur (Fredrickson, 1998).

The broaden-and-build model of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998, 2001) proposes that interest, like other positive emotions, lacks short-term functions associated with survival. Instead, interest serves long-term developmental goals: curiosity about the new and the possible broadens experiences and attracts people to new possibilities. The broaden-and-build model suggests that interest cultivates diverse experience by orienting people to new and unusual events and facilitates the growth of competence by motivating sustained activity in a specific area.

To sum it up:

interest is of essential value to the team morale, motivation, and performance
interest bolsters cognitive functions, creativity, learning, and growth
interest is provoked by novelty and problem solving, so don’t give tasks; help the team solve problems

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