Thursday, November 15, 2012

Using Stories to Bridge the Attention Chasm

Using Stories to Cross the "Attention Chasm"
Many people believe that the attention of audiences follow a U-shaped curve, where audiences remember mainly what said first and last during presentations, leaving a significant chunk of presented material in what I call the "attention chasm".

Stories can help to bridge this chasm.  I recently watched the movie "The Lives of Others" (an excellent film by the way), and even though it was more than 2 hours long and was in a foreign language, I was amazed at all the details I remembered from the film!  And some of these details were not critical to the movie's main story, like what presents were given at a birthday party and what was eaten for dinner.

Why are stories able to accomplish this, and what does this mean for me?  It is not easy to answer the first question, but I feel that in short, stories are able to bridge the attention chasm mainly because they weave loose pieces of information together into a coherent trajectory.  Details are carefully chosen to reinforce the characters of people in the plot; similarly, events are carefully selected to "tell the story".  In comparison, presentations usually are looser amalgamation of information.  Moreover, stories appeal to human's inert curiosity to find out what happened in other people's lives!  (As such I thought the title "The Lives of Others" is an excellent choice from a film marketing standpoint)

For the second part of the earlier question, one answer that popped out at me is education.  Use stories to teach fact-heavy subjects such as history.  Instead of making students remember all the dates and events, have them watch related movies!  I can also consider using stories to bring together all the key points of a presentation.  It is a lot of work though, as I will need to think about the plot, the characters, etc.  Maybe airlines should consider using stories for the flight safety video!  It can be made interesting and humorous, and that would make life better for both the flight attendants and the passengers.

Stories' ability to help their audiences retain large amount of information is fascinating.  I hope I will gain more insight on how to leverage this capability.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Deliver late or less: best options for a behind-schedule project?

Delivering late: a viable option for behind-schedule projects?
(photo credit: marcp_dmoz)
Projects that are behind schedule are usually faced with the following options:
1. Add more staff to the project
2. Work longer hours, including doing overtime and burning weekends (Ouch...)
3. Work people harder, expect more out of the same number of hours.  Employees might do this by reducing interaction time with other employees, or some might cut corners, like do less documentation, testing.
4. Cut scope, i.e. deliver less
5. Do nothing and deliver late

A poll of 50+ mid-career professionals showed that in their workplaces, the preference is for option #1, #2 and #3.

However, research into this area showed that option #1-3 generate negative "side effects" that can develop into vicious cycles having major impacts on the project.  For example, by adding more staff, the average experience of the team is diluted, lowering the productivity of the team and also causing more errors in work done.

The key though is the vicious cycle, or in technical speak, feedback loops.  Continuing on the earlier example, the generated errors can create more errors downstream, for example think of the situation when software is implemented based on erroneous requirements.  Consequently, though there are more people in the team, the team gets less work done than before.  Similar arguments apply for the other two options.

Model showing "side effects" of various approaches to catch up on late schedules
Credit: Professor James M. Lyneis
Does this mean option #4 and #5 are the best options? i.e.  deliver the project late or deliver it with less scope?  Not always so, but my key thought is we need to give those options more considerations.  And to educate our project stakeholders that those are not cop-out options, especially when we bear in mind all the vicious cycle side effects presented earlier.