Meir's Monthly Learning Article

This month I want to highlight an article, Why The Status Quo Is So Hard To Change In Engineering Teams, by Antoine Boulanger. The article discusses learned helplessness, a behavior exhibited by people after enduring repeated aversive stimuli that they perceive is beyond their control. Learned helplessness is a common human behavior, affecting our professional and personal lives. Interrupting learned helplessness leads to massively improved outcomes, such as empowering people to make changes that improve our quality of life and product quality. As well, Amazon’s leadership principles help counteract learned helplessness by advocating for Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right A Lot, Dive Deep, and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. The better we understand the problem, the more easily we can interrupt the behavior in ourselves and in others.

https://www.okayhq.com/blog/status-quo-is-so-hard-to-change-in-engineering-teams

“Encourage engineers to have autonomy: teaching people — directly and through cultural norms — that they are powerful, not powerless, to change and fix broken things is the key. This means welcoming criticism and enabling people to address problems.”