Pressure Kills Cognition

The Inner Game series sums up this idea with the phrase, “Trying fails, awareness cures.” That is, consciously trying generally doesn’t work as well as simple awareness. In fact, trying too hard is a guarantee for failure.

The mere presence of a looming deadline can panic the mind into failure. For example, there’s a well-known psychology study that was done with seminary students.^[126]

The experiment took a group of seminary students on the day of the Good Samaritan lecture. Against this backdrop of being good stewards of the earth and helping and serving your fellow man, the researchers set up an encounter. They took one set of students and explained to them that they had a critical meeting with the dean of their school right after the lecture. It was across campus, and they could not be late—their future careers depended on it. They then arranged to position an accomplice, dressed and acting as a homeless beggar, right in their path to the dean’s office.

Deadlines panic the mind.

Sad but true, these devout students, under the pressure of an important meeting, practically walked on the beggar’s head in their mad rush to get to the appointment. But a second group was told they had that same crucial meeting, only they were given some spare time between events—they weren’t in a rush. The students in this second group stopped to help the beggar; they took him to the infirmary, cleaned him up, and so on.

But when the mind is pressured, it actively begins shutting things down. Your vision narrows—literally as well as figuratively. You no longer consider options. What’s worse, you’re shutting out most of the R-mode entirely: it’s the L-mode that handles time. When you perceive time as being critical, the R-mode can’t get a chance to work at all.

There goes your search engine, your creativity, and your ingenuity. The ski instructor or the bass instructor that we read about earlier can freeze up your mind in a similar fashion by unleashing a torrent of verbal instruction. Again, R-mode is shut out.

I had an interesting experience along these lines a few years back. A couple of us attended a problem-solving workshop by Jerry Weinberg.^[128] One of the exercises involved a simulation of a manufacturing operation. The group of ten to twelve people was split into workers, managers, customers, and so on; buffet tables in the conference room became the factory, and index cards tracked production, orders, and the like. Of course, in the tradition of all good simulations, it was a bit of a trap. You couldn’t meet the needs of production by ordinary means. So, the pressure begins to build, and the folks in the managerial roles start making bad decisions, followed by worse decisions, followed by disastrous decisions. The participants in the worker roles begin to scratch their heads as to why their comrades are starting to act like they’ve had lobotomies.

Mercifully, that’s about when the simulation ended. Alistair Cockburn was in the course with me, and he aptly described what we all felt: a sort of tingling sensation as your brain came back on line, almost as if your mind had literally gone to sleep, as an arm or leg will do when cramped in an uncomfortable position.

We need to ease up on the pressure.

Grant Permission to Fail

I said earlier that errors are important to success. The other important lesson from the Inner Game series is the idea that permission to fail leads to success. You don’t actually need to make errors, as long as it’s OK if you did. It sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but once you play with the idea, it makes a lot of sense.

The bass instructor related a common problem. Many of his very talented students would simply freeze up in the spotlight and not perform at their best. So, he took to a little bit of subterfuge. He’d lead the students out onto the stage, under the unforgiving glare of the spotlights, but explain that the judges weren’t ready yet. They were still working on paperwork from the last candidate. The microphones weren’t even on. So go ahead, he’d say, and just run through the piece once as a warm-up.

Of course, he was lying through his teeth.

The judges were, in fact, listening intently. And they were handsomely rewarded; the students performed excellently. They were free to. They were explicitly given permission to fail. For whatever reasons of cognitive or neuroscience, once you make it OK to fail, you won’t. Perhaps, this too, helps shut down our overactive L-modes.

With the pressure off, you can be attentive. You can be comfortable and just observe—remember the first tenet, that awareness trumps trying. It’s hard to just be aware and comfortable with a flawed performance under the harsh light of scrutiny or to let an idea blossom to fruition in its own time when there’s a deadline looming. A “brainstorming” session where ideas get shot down as soon as they’re uttered has the same debilitating effect.

Instead, it is very possible to create “failure permitted” zones on a normal software project. The key is to create an environment where the cost of failure is near zero. In a brainstorming meeting, all ideas get written on the whiteboard (or whatever). There’s no cost or stigma if the idea doesn’t progress much further. Think about the agile practice of unit testing. Here, you’re free to have a unit test fail—even encouraged. You learn from it, fix the code, and move on.

Create “failure permitted” zones.

Prototyping gives you a similar freedom. Maybe it will work out, maybe not. If it doesn’t work out, you can use the lessons—apply the experience—and use that in the next iteration.

On the other hand, if failure is costly, there will be no experimentation. No risk taking. No learning. Just a frozen mind, like deer in the headlights, bracing for the inevitable bloody impact.

But what if the actual environment really is risky? It’s all fine and well to say you need an environment where failure is OK, but what if you’re sky diving? Or running Olympic bobsled or luge? What can you do to increase your chances of success in challenging environments such as these?