Aliens and Your Retrospective: The Will Smith Effect

In 1977 and 1978 there were 1,185 UFO sightings by Brits. Nearly two UFOs a day were apparently buzzing England – one can only imagine it was to get tickets to see Queen at Wembley. What was going on that had the UK’ers looking up from their mushy peas long enough to see UFOs?

They were coming down from a Spielbergian high – in 1977 Close Encounters was released and everyone saw it.

When we put our minds to it, we can create just about anything – including UFOs. In 2009, the Guardian ran an article about what they called “The Will Smith Effect” where sightings of UFOs were remarkably higher in years where movies involving aliens (funny or not) were in the theatres. (Or Dr. Who did something notable.)

Now, most of those who phoned-in a UFO sighting truly did believe there was, if not an actual UFO, a good chance that they did actually see a UFO.

So, the question is … how do we keep UFOs out of our retrospectives? Continuous Improvement demands that we spot ill-suited patterns and deal with them. When we are looking for patterns in our work, how can we see the real patterns and not items that represent our biases, current popular memes, or other false positives?

The UFO-happy Brits had been seeded with an expectation that they would find a UFO if they looked up in the sky. And, the thing is, it was not a very strong seeding. It wasn’t like Prime Minister Callaghan came out and said, “We have been contacted by Aliens, they seem pretty cool, watch the skies for the little buggers.”

So, with a relatively weak seeding, UFO sightings skyrocketed. All of them false positives.

When we tell people in continuous improvement that things can always be improved. Or when we get together in a retrospective and place a not-so-subtle demand that we might be able to do things better. Being good professionals, they go looking for them.

Ideas for continuous improvement still need to be examined and vetted. Teams in the process of continuous improvement should watch that the Will Smith effect isn’t turning out UFOs, as opposed to real, demonstrable opportunities for change.

Image by Buzz Hoffman and his son.

Comments

[DeanG]

But...but...I feel better that we agree to care about change so we must be changing for the better, right? ;-)

[Jim Benson]

@deang - Of course. Continuous improvement means we need to care about change. But there is a line where we go looking for changes that may not really be there. It is like how we always want to grow, but unhealthy growth is a cancer.

We want healthy continuous improvement.

[Aaron Day]

Is looking for aliens such a bad thing? We have folks at SETI looking for aliens and applying non-trivial amounts of effort. So far they have come up empty handed, but any odd squeak, beep, or ping gets extra checking and fiddling. Sure, they haven't found any aliens yet, but does that mean it is a complete waste? I'm sure plenty of science has occurred in signal processing and perhaps other benefits.

Along side continuous improvement is the idea of fail fast. Outside the realm of utopia there are always going to be ways to improve. As long as we do not go too far down the road of error (fail fast), tweaking processes can be beneficial. We can learn better what doesn't work when a change fails. But some otherwise good enough process may not change if we do not investigate. It might be a short term loss or it might be a gain, but we won't know unless you try.

I suggest keeping your eyes pealed looking for aliens in your retrospectives. Sure most will be swamp gas from a weather balloon [that] was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus and you can quickly dismiss it. Quickly recognize it was a failure and revert to the prior process. You can't continuously improve if you don't continuously tweak.

[Jim Benson]

@aaron - Certainly if you continuously improve you continuously tweak by creating small changes that are easy to both implement and back off of if they don't work. What I'm saying here is that sometimes people become fixated on finding certain things and improvement frenzy is very possible.

This leads to things like six sigma waste witch hunts where people fixate so much on finding and destroying waste, that they also ignore the humanity of the workplace.

Continuous improvement is not necessarily about finding inefficiencies as much as it is about finding ways to make the best workplace for the people in it.