The Scarcity Mentality and Technology management

The Scarcity Mentality is a well know paradigm in Psychology. Basically, when you are immersed in a scarcity context, your attention is focus on the immediate needs neglecting the importance of long term decisions. For instance, if you are really worried about paying the rent you may not be thinking of joining a gym to lose those extra pounds that could very seriously impact your health (just an example).

Another well-known effect of the Scarcity Mentality is that the decisions made under this pressure are usually wrong or at least not optimal. There is a case study on the Indian sugarcane farmers where an increase of the IQ was detected after the crop, meaning that they perform better at numeracy and other tasks when they didn’t have to worry about their basic needs (you can read an excerpt  here).

So, I guess all of us (Technology Managers) have suffered impossible project deadlines, Request for Proposals due in an hour, reports for this morning, incidents that can cause the end of the world as we know it, more impossible deadlines, more incidents …, and that is part of our job and we have to learn how to cope with the pressure and, yes, Agile methodologies can help but Agile won’t prevent you from making decisions under pressure.

Is there any solution?. Well, as in the case of the Indian Farmers, when we have our basic needs covered we perform better. In my point of view, you can at least try the following:

·      Have the right people in your team and empower the team to take most of the decisions (you, as a manager, are the one responsible for minimizing the pressure on the team)

·      Stakeholders management: Try to understand as early as possible what the key stakeholders will need in terms of reporting and insert those needs as tasks inside the team (hopefully, they can be automated). Because you have a great team (see the point above) you can spend some of your time doing politics with the relevant people

·      Architectural approach/solution: As explained above, most of the decisions should be made by the team (agile team or project team) that will definitely benefit from having the Technology Strategy defined (we can see that as the rules of the game) and all the “heavy lifting“ resolved and ready. Don’t reinvent the wheel (see my previous post )

Summarizing, the Scarcity Mentality affects the human beings making them short sighted (“here and now” approach). As a result of this myopic view, the affected individuals don’t usually make the best judgment calls (at least not for long term results). We, Technology managers, should be aware of this fact an put some measures in place to minimize this effect.

Disclaimer: Every time I use my personal Linked In account, I’m expressing my own opinions, not necessarily my employer opinions.