In the last blog post, Build Habits, we learned the importance of environment in the making and breaking of habits. In today’s post, we’ll learn a technique for preloading decisions to pass control of your behavior on to the environment. It’s a technique called “action triggers”.
What is an Action Trigger?
Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at NYU, pioneered the work on action triggers. He and Veronika Brand-stätter performed a study in which they tracked college students who learned that they could earn extra credit by writing a paper on how they spent Christmas Eve. The catch? They had to submit it the day after Christmas. They split the students up into two groups: they told one group to use an action trigger but gave the control group no such advice.
Only 33% of students in the control group submitted the paper, but 75% of those in the action trigger group did. What was the action trigger? It was to note in advance exactly when and where they intended to write the paper.
Action Triggers in Software Development
Let’s look at some potential action triggers for a software development team. Say you’re looking to practice pair programming, but you’re just not getting around to it. The daily standup on a Scrum team provides an opportunity to decide on pairs. You can proceed directly from the standup to your pairing session.
Say you want to practice Test-Driven Development but your habit is to write the code first. If you’re pairing, your action trigger could be, “When I pick up a story from the backlog and I’m at the keyboard, write a test first.” If I pick up a story from the backlog and I’m not at the keyboard, my action is to prompt my partner to write a test. Maybe even write this into the story card. That’s kind of what acceptance criteria are.
Try this at your next retrospective: when your team decides what practice you’re all going to start doing for the next iteration, have the team decide when and where they’re going to put the new practice to work. Get them to set an action trigger. And then, set one for yourself.
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