Have you wondered why so many people, organizations - and even humanity as a whole, constantly find themselves in a mess that's hard to scramble out of?
The reason is quite simple: because we are quite short-term oriented, and we either don't see - or discount - the bigger context we're acting in!
Virtuous Cycles
When we want something that we don't have (or: not enough from), we change something in a way that we predict that we'll get what we're looking for. We then see if that did work, and we'll continue doing more of that until we have enough. And we do the opposite when we don't want something that we do have.
Feedback loops help us to pause, stop or course correct while we're at it.
A trivial example of a virtuous cycle might be lunch: When we're hungry, we want food. We get our portion, like it, and eat some more. (If we don't like the food, we might get something else instead.) We continue eating until either our portion is gone, or our stomach signals "Full."
Vicious Cycles
A vicious cycle isn't the direct opposite of a virtuous cycle - it's when we do something, and get something we don't want. For example, if we'd really like that wild honey, and put our hand into the beehive: the longer we leave our hand in there, the more we'll get stung.
Short term and long term
In the short term, we complete one action and observe the immediate results. For example, we grab a candy bar, and it satisfies our craving. We can repeat this cycle again and again, and we get predictable and repeatable results (well, until our stomach tells us we had too much candy.)
In the long term, however, we get other results than in the short term: while one candy satisfies our craving, one hundred days of repeated snacking will lead to some weight gain, and two years' worth of snacking will result in a wobbly tummy.
Thus, the virtuous cylce of "craving satisfied" is embedded in a vicious cycle of "gain weight."
Inseparability of cycles
In our simple example, it's impossible to separate the short-term virtuous cycle from the long-term vicious cycle: as the proverb goes, "you can't have your cake and eat it, too." The action that starts the virtuous cycle will also set the vicious cycle in motion.
The desirable short-term outcomes of the virtuous cycle are immediately visible, so we're tempted to set it in motion. On the flip side, the long-term outcomes of the vicious cycle are invisible at the moment, so we're tempted to discount them in favor of the proven and tangible short-term benefits.
Shocking consequences
We find ourselves continuously repeating the virtuous cycle, with the firm belief that what we're doing is beneficial, until - one day, in our example, we get a Diabetes diagnosis: It's impossible to attribute the diabetes to any single piece of candy we consumed. Even worse: simply stopping the virtuous cycle of meeting our craving isn't going to change the situation we're in, and the process of reverting the vicious cycle will be difficult to impossible. There's no easy "undo" action related to anything we did in the past.
We were caught by the embedded larger context of our visible virtuous cycle: the invisible vicious cycle.
What does our little example imply for a software organization, then?
What you see isn't what you get!
We always get positive feedback from our immediate action, so we learn that our action is good.
For example, let's say the developer who's always fastest (by skipping tests) learns that they get praise by customers and management, whereas the developers who are always slowest (by building quality in) learn that they'd get more appreciation by cutting short on quality.
The short-term virtuous cycle is that developers learn how to deliver faster and meet tight deadlines.
Unfortunately, by the time we realize the effects of the vicious cycle, our product is probably almost dead: it might take months, possibly years, to trace out and fix all the bugs in the code, and that's not even calculating the effort (and frustration) of adding tests to an unmaintainable codebase.
And worse than that, we only have developers left who have - over the years - learned that building quality in is bad for their careers.
By the time we've come to realize that the vicious circle has taken over, there's no quick fix any more, and the cost of change, at this point in time, is overwhelming.
Scrambling out of the mess
When we realize that we got something that we don't want, we have a myriad of problems to address:
- We must discover a way to re-wire the outer vicious cycle by disrupting it, and replacing it with a vicious cycle.
- We must become conscious that the presumed virtuous cycle did spin off a vicious cycle, and must stop triggering more of the vicious cycle.
- We must un-learn and stop the old virtuous cycle, despite the visible short-term benefits.
This step is very hard, because we must actively reject the benefits we attributed to it. - We must actively pursue the new virtuous cycle, despite it being slow, and the benefits being less visible than the benefits of the old virtuous cycle. This requires strong discipline, because it's easy to lapse into old habits, potentially eliminating months of progress with a single act of carelessness.
Unfortuntately, since we saw short-term benefits in the past, we tend to look for a new way that undoes all of the damage caused by the vicious cycle in the blink of an eye: instead of actively doing the hard work of behavioural and belief change, we often hunt for a miracle pill. And thus start another vicious cycle.
Let me put it like it is:
If a physical building has collapsed because it was built using poor materials, you can't just swallow a pill to rebuild the entire thing. The only way forward is to clean up the rubble, get better materials, and construct a more stable building.
And that's how you get sustainable change:
- Become clear what got you into the bigger mess.
- Stop doing that, even if it gave you results you were looking for.
- Clean up the shambles.
- Create something new that avoids the vicious cycle.
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