Welcome to day one in your new job. You have a huge opportunity. When we start out in a job or really in any new environment where other people may have been for some time, jobs are the most obvious version of this, but it could be if you move to a new city or you join any kind of group that has kind of been forming for a while together. And you have the same opportunities that we're going to talk about in today's episode. We're going to talk about four different mental models that make your opportunity important. We're going to start with yours. Your side of it, the new kind of fresh eyes side. And then we're going to talk about the environment that you're entering into. Okay, the fresh eyes side and the environment that you're entering into. The first pair of mental models or kind of heuristics effects that we're going to talk about are going to act as a weather vane. They're going to act as a weather vane. If you don't know how a weather vane works, you don't really need to understand that part other than it points into the wind. The point of a weather vane is to show what direction the wind is coming from. Where is that pressure coming from? You're going to identify the areas of pressure because this is going to help explain problems that may exist in the new group that you've joined, in the new organization, in the new team, etc. These two models that we're going to talk about that interact with each other. The first is the anchoring effect. The anchoring effect. This is a... Pressure that you will feel because of your introduction to the organization. The anchoring effect essentially says that whatever you encounter first has a greater effect on your perception than what you encounter later. For example, this is why when you see a price tag and then it gets slashed through in a lower price tag, whether you want it to or not, that original price is going to have an anchoring effect on your brain. This is a psychological tool that is used in sales all the time. But it's also something that we encounter in unintentional ways. An anchoring effect is kind of the basis for why first impressions matter, for example. If you think about the first experience that you have in your job, if you think about the first experience that you have in your job, if you think about the impact that the first couple of meetings that you have, especially the impact that the first couple of meetings with people who you're working closely with, that has a lasting impact based on the anchoring effect. And the second effect that's going to have that continuous pressure on you is the bandwagon effect. This one's a little more intuitive for most people to capture. The basic idea is that the prevailing trends or the prevailing opinions tend to be adopted by other people. And so if you have, for example, an anchor with one opinion and then a bandwagon effect with that same opinion, if you otherwise may have had a different opinion, you're going to feel pressure. You're going to feel pressure to start aligning yourself with a new opinion. That is the one that is prevailing in the organization that you're joining. The important thing to note is that this pressure is felt because of the differential, the differential between your already held belief and the pressure to adopt a new belief. Others who are already on the bandwagon, so to speak, are not feeling that same pressure. They do not have the weather vane that you have. This is the opportunity that you have. This is the opportunity that you have as a new hire. We're going to come back in just a moment and talk a little bit more about the environment that you are joining and why it is the way that it is. Right now, while I'm talking, I want you to go ahead and open up a tab if you're on your computer or take a note. Write down Miro.com slash podcast. That's M-I-R-O dot com slash podcast. Because here's the reality. Miro has absolutely changed the way that I do work. Just this week, I used Miro to drive an alignment meeting between multiple teams. The best part of that meeting, according to almost every piece of feedback that I got, was when we went to the Miro board. Miro boards are highly flexible. They have a ton of options. In fact, recently, I just used an AI grouping option. It takes a bunch of cards that other people have written all on the board. You can summarize and group all of those cards so that common keywords that are perhaps distinct in those cards, they can be grouped together. This is the kind of thing that Miro enables. Now, if you're a little bit worried about learning a new tool, I can tell you right away. The teams that I've worked with using Miro have had zero training. They didn't need anything. Any additional learning, they jump straight in. They basically open the link to a board that I shared and start participating right away. There's virtually no lag due to learning a new tool. If you are a manager, I want to talk to you directly about Miro for just a second. One of the things that I push on this show and hopefully other management material that you've read and understood, hopefully you understand the importance of elevating. All of us. We're all in this together. We're all in this together. All of the voices on your team and also the difficulty of doing just that. Sometimes it's hard for one person to speak up because, as we're talking about in this episode, the status quo is that another person is the one that normally talks. If you had a Miro board, you can start to elevate voices and work asynchronously. This is a huge opportunity. It's one of the main reasons I use Miro is because it allows other people's voices to be heard. It allows other people's voices to be heard in new and interactive ways. Go and check it out. It's Miro.com. That's M-I-R-O dot com slash podcast. You can get three free boards today. Miro.com. M-I-R-O dot com slash podcast. Thanks again to Miro for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Team. So we've talked a bit about how you will have some kind of pressure to change. Now, recognize that the reason we're talking about it from this angle is because all of what you're feeling or all of that pressure is coming from you. The anchoring effect is happening because of the impression in your perception. The bandwagon effect is a pressure that you feel. Not that necessarily others are. Not that you're putting on you. But rather that you perceive. And so those two effects are things that are happening kind of inside of your own perception. Now we're going to talk about things that are happening in the perception of the team that you are joining. The group dynamics, etc. And specifically, we're going to hone in on two types of biases or you may call them effects. The first is called the illusion of uniqueness or the uniqueness bias. And the second is called the status quo bias. They are exactly what they sound like. The uniqueness bias is the irrational belief that for some reason your situation or your group situation, your company situation is unique and is set apart from other companies that are similar. Set apart from other people who are similar. And the status quo bias is the pressure to maintain some kind of homeostasis. Whatever is currently comfortable. And true. So maintaining that predictable kind of current state. That is the status quo. Now the interesting part of both of these becomes even more interesting when they combine. When they combine. That is, we have a tendency to want to keep things the same. And if we believe that we are unique, we have probably come up with some esoteric solutions to our problems. So. If you've ever had this experience where you join a group, you join a team that does believe that their problems are unique. They may have, for example, written their own libraries to solve common problems. And the libraries may have analogs that are available in, let's say, an open source environment. But because of this uniqueness bias, the problems have not been pattern matched. Or. Or really, truly, fully investigated. And so you have a status quo bias of a resistance to the conventional solution. You may also experience the reinforcing that the current state is optimal. So looking at how these effects or these biases combine with the ones that you're experiencing. Right. You get this reinforcement of, hey, we're, you know, we're doing things our way because we're, you know, our problems are not the same. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.! highly unique, that we need to continue building our own solutions to this particular problem, right? This isn't every team, but this is the kind of thing that you're going to encounter. These kinds of biases and the way that they intersect, the status quo and the uniqueness bias, they tend to be very common biases, especially for companies that have been around for any amount of time. They've experienced something that has caused them to go off into some unique area, some bespoke bit of code or something like that, right? You'll also have difficulty learning from others if you continue on with this, the uniqueness bias and the status quo bias being challenged or not being challenged, rather. Your opportunity, right? Coming back around to the beginning of the episode when we said you have a great opportunity, your opportunity is to run a business. You're going to have a great opportunity to run a business. You're going to recognize that you have that weather vane, that you have a pointer, that there's something different about what's going on here than what you think or what you believe, and that your process of alignment with the new team, that you can learn through that process and potentially identify areas that you don't think you really should align with. Let me say this again. If you're a team, you're going to have a great opportunity to run a business. You're going in. You're likely to come into a company and because of the effects that we talked about today, recognize that you have things you're seeing in the company that you don't think are a good idea. You're going to come into a team and recognize code practices that seem backwards, that seem like maybe we could do that a little bit better. Now, the team is likely to respond by saying, well, you'll see once you find out about how special and unique our problems are, once you really understand how different this is than what you think it is, then you'll agree with us that this was the right solution all along. But these are all opportunities to look at these biases directly and say, well, I don't know that necessarily I should align with that. I don't know that what you've chosen to do is going to work. I don't know that what you've chosen to do is going to work. I don't know that what you've chosen to do or even that the problem that you're solving is necessarily as unique as you think it is. These are opportunities because when you can recognize these kinds of biases or effects, you can improve on them. You can improve that code by saying, you know what? It looks like somebody else has had a very similar problem. Maybe we can learn from them. Maybe we can incorporate some of this other code so that we don't have to maintain our own private library. We don't have to maintain our own private library. We don't have to maintain our own libraries. So the takeaway today is not for you to necessarily memorize what these effects are, memorize what the, you know, the definition of these different biases. Instead, it's to recognize that that feeling that you have of incongruency when you join a new company, sometimes it's characterized as a bad thing or that it's something to work on, something for you to work through. That's not necessarily the case. It's not necessarily true that you have to align to the way that your team thinks right away. or even over time. I want you to recategorize these differences, this fresh eyes differences, as a weather vane, an opportunity to recognize what is different and why. Now, I'll add one final caveat before we close out today, and that is that I'm not recommending that you walk into a team and start pointing out all the ways that they're wrong. There is still a human element, a communications element to this where the tone and the exploration that you're doing with this team, you have to approach it rather than an accusatory stance from an observational stance. You can recognize differences and you can call out those differences in belief or in approach without necessarily making the differences personal. You can observe the facts that are staring at you. You can make statements of belief without making the primary message, you're wrong. Focus instead on learning together. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this kind of discussion on how these different biases and effects intersect. It's not just as simple as learning what one bias is. It makes sense to look at how they combine and how they work. And in what scenarios would you encounter that combination? And that's exactly what we did today. Hopefully you enjoyed this discussion. If you did, first, I'd encourage you to go check out our sponsor today. That's Miro, M-I-R-O dot com slash podcast. Miro dot com slash podcast. You get three free boards. If you sign up today, Miro dot com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode also, I would encourage you to join the Developer Tea Discord community. And finally, leave a review in iTunes. This is the best way to help Developer Tea continue doing what we do on a weekly basis. Thanks again. And until next time, enjoy your tea.