The Blog

Reducing prejudice

published April 13, 2010

In his book, Rupert Brown talks about prejudice, its modern forms and how to reduce it. Unfortunately, we encounter different forms of prejudice everywhere, also at work.  Prejudice at the workplace can mean e.g. intergroup conflicts between management and developers. In the book, Mr Brown gives multiple definitions for prejudice: “the holding of derogatory social attitudes or cognitive beliefs, the expression of negative affect, or the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group on account of their membership of that group”. Contact hypothesis is a way of improving relationships between groups. It is based on four pillars that should be fulfilled in order to reduce prejudice between groups.

Social and institutional support
Those who have authority should set up a framework promoting greater contact.

Acquaintance potential
Contact between groups should have sufficient frequency, duration, and closeness in order to permit the development of meaningful relationships.

Equal status
Contact situation should be arranged so that it forms an equal status between participants.

Co-operation
Both groups should be brought together to work with common, solvable problem. It is important that each group is dependent of the skills available in other group.

Situations where prejudice exists at workplace can be really nasty. A leader should be able to notice if prejudice is emerging and react immediately once noticed. This means that the leaders will have to do “Genchi Genbutsu” (go-and-see for us who do not speak Japanese).

Samuli @ 21:17 (No Comments)

tags: Business, Lean, Social psychology

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Social representations in IT project

published April 12, 2010

Social representations theory is a popular European social psychology concept by Serge Moscovici. Social representations can be defined as commonsense knowledge about general topics that are the focus of everyday conversations. It is something that can start as a abstract thing like “social media” and then people are gradually starting to understand it by anchoring it to old information. This is something that we encounter also in IT projects, especially at the start. Customer old timers have loads of social representations about the business in form of acronyms, services and requirements that e.g. consultants entering the project cannot be aware of. You know that you have encountered a new social representation when you get a confused feeling while the customer is talking about an important ‘thingy’, but you have no idea what that ‘thingy’ is. Don’t worry, we all get that feeling.

I feel that the start of a new IT project is like a wobbly sphere. Project team is forming, people are encountering new social representations, requirements are emerging and architecture is evolving. The key here is to implement first version of the software architecture and a working vertical slice. Team leader should focus on forming social representations about the goal, requirements and the architecture by referring to these artifacts only with one business related term, so that team can use common language about abstract, software-related concepts. If there are no architectural social representations forming, I suspect that software architecture is a mess.

You also might have have noticed how agile movement has formed it’s social representations about scrum master, product owner, pigs and chickens. Everyone shares common knowledge about these things but we all also have our own personal beliefs and experiences about the very same things. Other key element in the new project is to ensure that team members  share somewhat compatible social representations about important things with each other and with the customer. If Scrum means different things to different people I would suspect team to encounter more surge during storming stage of group development.

Samuli @ 20:52 (One Comment)

tags: Business, Customer, Group dynamics, Social psychology, Software architecture

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