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Cognitive Disruption Poker is a simple tool that uses cognitive theory to disrupt biases that hinder great solutions. It turns out that we humans have two distinct decision making paths in our brain. Most of the hard work and processing power is dedicated to the fast, high transaction, automatic system known as system one that allows us to for example, to play a musical instrument without having to recall and think through each note and beat. Once you’ve learnt the tune, you can play that tune while thinking about other things, even day dreaming. The second decision making path is where decisions are learnt, thought out, rationalised and practised. It is somewhat slower and much lazier than system one so once we have learned something new it is committed, or hard wired into the system one[1].
A simple example of both systems is easily demonstrated.
- What is 2 + 2 = ?
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What is 16 x 47 = ?
You see how the answer to 2+2 immediately sprang to mind? It was instinctive, automatic, you are unlikely to have worked out the result by thinking it through. The answer to the harder question is not something you usually find in system one.
Maths is one thing what about something a bit more complicate; taste in food, how about the following:
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A cheese and jam sandwich
Pretty unpleasant in most peoples mind, a cheese and jam sandwich is not often found in many peoples lunch-box, System one found a few patterns to help work out in your mind whether you should like it or not: A cheese sandwich, delicious and savoury often a main course. A jam sandwich, delicious and sweet, often a childhood treat like cake. Mixing cheese and jam together, probably get told of by mother – Fire ‘yuck!’ response. All this happened automatically when you read about someone eating one on Facebook.
When system one learns, it adds a cognitive bias[2] or two to help fit all this information in your skull and generally aid your survival. Studies have revealed as many as 160 cognitive biases from Loss aversion to Availability heuristic. All of these biases help make up who we are and how we behave and without them we would never have survived so long let alone build a civilisation that explores other planets.
Software Development
Developing software solutions is largely a technical exercise, all logical and systematic in its approach to problem solving so is immune from cognitive bias? Of course not, you only have to work in the industry for a few days to see cognitive bias everywhere. Anyone who has tried to improve that accuracy of time estimation, or the security of an application, or develop a new user experience will have plenty of experience of cognitive bias. We evolve processes and tools to manage these biases in order really to bring order and most are pretty effective in some way. Some of the tools I particularly like are cognitive disruption games. You may have used them yourself, probably the most familiar one in the software industry is Scrum Poker[3]. We use this tool to help improve our estimating tasks by disrupting ‘availability cascade’. Another one of my favourites is Elevation of Privilege[4], a card game used to disrupt how we think about software security and threat modelling. While I was using Elevation of Privilege I pondered how a tool like this could help improve our product’s User Experience, or for that matter any part of a software product, using a standard card desk and loosely following the rules of one of my favourite recreation games Texas Hold-em.
Cognitive Disruption Poker Image may be NSFW.
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A game built on some existing patterns and designed to engage your brain to purposefully disrupt your cognitive bias. It is easy to learn and play.
You will need
- A 52 standard card deck of playing cards
- A notepad
- A problem to solve
It is ideas you bet
The rules are pretty straight forward, the game mechanic is almost identical to traditional Texas holdem as far as hands go. It’s not money you are betting but ideas/insight/acumen. You win a hand not simply by being dealt the best hand, but by justifying playing that hand with an explanation of your idea or improvement to solve the problem you are tackling. It has to have merit to be a playable hand, and the stronger the hand the more merit it has to have.
For software development the cards are in four suits, each suit sets the overall topic of the idea.
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User Experience – How well the users and customers engage with the product
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Platform – The logical nuts and bolts that the product is built on
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Trustworthiness – Application security, safety and reliability
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Commercial – Marketability, return on investment and profitability
The cards are ranked from
2 – A simple idea that effects a simple improvement to
Ace – A completely new untried idea that effects significant improvement.
For a great example of this idea of card ranking download the EofP cards and have a read through each suit which this game is based on, the ‘ideas’ are all pre-written in a way to get you thinking about software security and are a good guide on understanding card ranking. Would do little harm to download the whole Secure Development Lifecycle Model and carefully read through to improve your spades – trustworthy hands ( as well as improve your own software security )
The ‘hand’ rules are almost the same as texas holdem, the best two-five cards you can play from the two in your hand and the five on the table. The exceptions to the traditional texas holdem rules are that straight flushes are valid with 2 or more cards. E.g. Image may be NSFW.
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is a valid hand. There is only one deal per hand, all five table cards are dealt with the first hand.
Suited Connectors
Suited connectors are important hands in Cognitive Disruption Poker. A suited connector is two or more ideas of the same topic connected to each other. The strongest, and most difficult, hand to play is a royal flush Image may be NSFW.
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which is five connected and related ideas that are so fantastic they will cause such an improvement or change that it will go down in history, or at least appear on The Register. Be warned, just like traditional hold-em if you get dealt a royal flush and don’t play it you are in danger of giving yourself cognitive dissonance[5], a serious psychological condition[6]. To play well, play suited connectors.
Play order and Blind
Another key principle of the game is that the person left of the dealer has to bet ‘blind’ i.e.. Has to play their hand or at least try and play their hand. As the dealer and blind rotates clockwise after each hand this gives everyone at the table an opportunity to participate and share their ideas. This starts of the flow of the hand and the flow of ideas, people are way happier to go second than they are to go first.
It is best learned by playing it, to help understand here are some hand history (all names fictitious):
Hand Examples
A team get together to improve an application that displays the latest Billboard 100 data with links to online shops that sell the songs on a referral reward system. How do we get it up the app download charts now that ‘No 1 when you were 21′ app is beating our hide.
| Community Cards: Qs 4s 5c Jd 2h Dealer: Anthony Blind: Andrew |
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| Andrew | 4c2s | 4c = we use a profiler to help rewrite the findfriends query to speed it up 5c = while we are in the profiler we rewrite the 3 slowest queries to speed them up |
| Sarah | 6h7h | 6h=We add a progress bar to show off the improved speed 7h=We make the progress bar speed up towards the end, not slow down |
| Richard | Qc10d | Folds |
| Anthony | AdQd | Folds |
| Dealer Notes | Neil and Sarah play hands with merit, Sarah wins the hand. | |
You see how Andrew and Sarah played suited connectors, it is quite natural to think of a few ideas in response to a finding a solution. By playing suited connectors the game disrupts the bias to share one idea, then wait and test the response before sharing anything else.
Although in this game Aces are actually difficult to play, when you get dealt Aces it is difficult to avoid the urge to have a try. Although the examples are fictional the kudos of successfully playing a strong hand is a positive bias that gives instant reward. Imagine being able to play the strongest hand in Poker, a royal flush.
Disruptive Technology If you play a great hand let me know, and if you are up for a game get in touch and I’ll bring my poker face.
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References
[1] BBC Horizon on iPlayer
[2] Cognitive Bias on Wikipedia
[3] Scrum Poker
[4] Elevation of Privilege
[5] Cognitive Dissonance the book
[6] Cognitive Dissonance the podcast [ Mature Audiences only, may cause offence ]
© Neil Dixley April 2014