There are two types of failure. There are the failures that are good for us that we can learn from. But there are failures that aren’t good for us. This second type of failure doesn’t produce any learning: it keeps us from learning in the first place, or it shuts down our learning in mid-experience.
To recognize and overcome this second type of failure, you need to be aware of the inner game. Understanding the inner game will help you eliminate interference that gets in the way of learning, and it emphasizes the right kind of feedback to help you learn.
In 1974 the popular book The Inner Game of Music [GG86] and those about skiing, golf, and more.
The Inner Game series helps further the point of learning from your own experience. In this series of books, Timothy Gallwey and other authors differentiate the obvious, “outer” game that you are engaged in and explore the subtleties of the more critical “inner” game. A big part of improving learning comes from Gallwey’s idea of reducing failure-inducing interference and using feedback.
In a famous example, the author takes an older subject, a woman in her late fifties or so, who has never played tennis or indeed engaged in any significant physical activity for the past twenty years. The challenge was to teach her to play tennis in just twenty minutes. There’s no way to succeed at this challenge using a traditional approach. But Tim Gallwey had a better idea—one that didn’t involve any lengthy lectures or extended demonstrations.
First, she was to just watch the ball and say out loud “Bounce” and “Hit” as Gallwey hit the ball. A minute or so of this, and it was her turn: just say “Bounce” and “Hit.” Don’t try to hit the ball; just say “Hit” when it seems about the right time, and swing when you feel like it. The next exercise was to listen to the sound of the ball hitting the racket. If you’ve never played, the ball makes a particularly sweet, clear sound when it hits just the right spot on the racket. This fact wasn’t made explicit; our student was merely told to listen.
Next, it was time to serve. First, she was to just hum a phrase while watching Gallwey serve in order to get the rhythm of the motion. No description of the movements; just watch and hum. Next, she tried the serve—humming the same tune and focusing on the rhythm, not the motions. After twenty minutes of this sort of thing, it was time to play. She made the first point of the game and played a very respectable, lengthy set of volleys.[122]
In another example, you hit balls across the court where a chair is sitting. The idea is not to try to hit the chair but to simply note where the ball lands in relation to the chair. So while hitting balls, you would verbalize observations such as “Left,” “Right,” “Over,” and so on.
The Inner Game series teaches us that it can be very difficult to teach a skill by putting it into words; we learn better by discovery, not instruction. This notion is embodied in the chair example, where the learner is getting real-time feedback in the context of the situation.
We learn best by discovery, not instruction.
Situational feedback is the primary inner game technique that allows you to learn more efficiently by eliminating any interference. In the tennis example, the subject wasn’t inundated with rules of the game; buried with minutiae of proper grip, footwork, and so on; or forced to learn “dance facts” before dancing. Instead of all those distractions, she was able to concentrate on a very simple feedback loop. Hit the ball like this, and it lands here. Hit the ball like that, and it lands over there. Follow this rhythm. It’s nonverbal learning, for a nonverbal skill, with a tight feedback loop and short feedback gap.[123]
Consider an example from skiing. I’ve had a handful of ski lessons over the years, and invariably they turn out the same. I’m hurtling down the face with some instructor named Hans close by, issuing instructions at a frantic pace with an unidentifiable accent:
Now I’m trying to listen to everything this guy is saying, but of course the verbal processing centers (L-mode) are on the slow side of the house. I’m back on tucking in my elbows and starting to think about my knees, and already the tree is looming close. At a certain point (and usually pretty quickly), your brain just fries with the constant barrage of instructions and stops attending. Brain freeze. It’s too much to remember and keep track of all at once.
The inner game theory has the solution: instead of issuing a stream of instructions to the student, the idea is to teach the student awareness and to use that awareness to correct their performance. Awareness is an important tool in becoming more than a novice.
For example, in the The Inner Game of Music [GG86], the author relates the story of teaching a concert string bass player.
The author had been teaching in a manner similar to the ski instructor: hold your elbow this way, your head like this, lean that way, now play comfortably. And of course, the poor student looked like a stiff pretzel.
So the music teacher tried something different. He had the student play just as he was but directed him to really observe every aspect of his playing—how did it feel, where was everything positioned, what passages were difficult, and so on. Then, without explanation, he corrected the student’s posture and finger placement and guided his hands through a few bars of the piece. The instruction was the same: observe all of these aspects; how does it feel now? Now go ahead and play the piece. Consistently, his students now showed great improvement after this kind of awareness exercise.
Just be aware.
This is a key aspect to playing the inner game: don’t focus on correcting individual details, but just be aware. Accept what is as a first step, and just be aware of it. Don’t judge, don’t rush in with a solution, don’t criticize.
You want to try to cultivate nonjudgmental awareness: don’t try to get it right, but notice when it is wrong. Then act to correct it.
| Recipe 36 | See without judging and then act. |
Now you may have noticed that these examples are largely in the kinesthetic domain—they involve muscle memory and physical skills. But there is more to it than that. Performing music, for instance, has been shown by functional MRI scans to activate virtually every center in the brain.[124] From operating the instrument to reading the notes, listening to the other musicians, following the abstract principles of chord progression and such, both L-mode and R-mode are active and cooperating along with lower-level muscle memory. So even though we’re talking about skiing and playing a string bass, the lessons can be applied to software development and other endeavors as well.
For instance, the idea of being fully aware of “what is” before acting to correct it is especially true when debugging. Too often programmers (myself included) seem to jump in to fix an apparent bug without fully evaluating what’s really wrong first. Fight the urge to rush to judgment or to a potential fix prematurely. Be fully aware of how the system is behaving, and only then decide what part of that is “wrong” before moving on to devise a solution. In other words, don’t just do something; stand there. June Kim describes the following technique to help become fully aware.
Don’t just do something; stand there.
Suppose you are doing test-first design. You added a new test and the code that will make the test pass. Thinking the test will surely pass, you click the button. What? There is a failing test that you never expected. Your heart rate goes up, your field of vision narrows, your adrenaline pumps. Breathe in deeply, and first take your hands off the keyboard. Read the error message carefully. Raise your awareness. What’s happening?
Now close your eyes, and imagine where the source of the error resides in the code. Think of it like the epicenter of an earthquake. You may feel the ground shake here and over there, but the epicenter is way over there. What will the code look like? What about code around it? Imagine the code and its neighbors before opening your eyes.
Once you can imagine the code, now open your eyes, and navigate to the code in question. Does it look like what you expected? Is it really the cause of the error?
Now close your eyes again, and imagine a passing test. When you can imagine the test code, open your eyes, and type it in. Check whether it is the same as you imagined. Now just before you hit the test-all button, ask yourself, what will happen when I hit this button? Then click the button and see.
It may sound like a trivial exercise, but it really does make a difference. The next time you find yourself trapped in an ad hoc hack-spin-loop, try it. The idea is to raise your awareness; explicitly contrasting your imagined version of the code with the real code helps accomplish that.
And it’s not just about debugging. The same is true when gathering requirements—especially when an existing system is involved. Jerry Weinberg maintains that most clients will tell you their most serious problem, and its solution, in the first five minutes you talk with them.[125] It’s vital to listen to what the client has to say, instead of letting your attention wander to the cool solution you’re dying to try. You can brainstorm solutions later, but first, be aware of what is.
The inner game ideas focus on feedback to grow expertise. You are training, and then listening to, the inner voice of experience. But that works only if you can listen to the inner voice of experience. Listen, listen, listen. Unfortunately, it isn’t always that easy, as we’ll see next.