Reframing information overload
Laurent Bossavit writes about Problem-picking patterns:
In complex situations, such as software projects and the teams that work on them, there’s never such a thing as “the problem”. The sense that something is wrong may be the start of a break with routine – the start of a problem-solving process.
From the list, I prefer to reinforce what works, to compensate for natural tendencies to think in negative ways about problems.
Another favourite of mine (although I’m not quite sure if it fits in Laurent’s list), is Reframing – taking a different perspective so the problems at hand disappear and the situation looks entirely different. Marc Evers pointed me to a blog entry by Ton Zijlstra about information overload, Every Signal starts out as Noise which contains this example:
there is no such thing as information overload. It does not exist.
When trains were first introduced passengers suffered from jet-lag like symptoms, even at speeds as low as 20 km/h. Most likely because for the first time sensory input became asynchronous. What you heard and smelled (the train, people in the car with you) did not coincide with what you saw (the landscape passing by). We adapted, we have to do so now.
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