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…people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future

There are aspects of my life where I’m optimistic but probably less so than most people. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a self-decribed pragmatist: I see wonder and beauty all around but I also see problems coming a mile away.

In my work as a software architect I consistently encounter a propensity for optimism from folks who dream things—as opposed to those who build things. The dreamers are “The Business” and they are “bully”. To varying degrees, anything short of “can do” is nay-saying.

Strangely, it’s the dreamers who tend to label the do-ers (as pessimistic) but not the other way ’round. In professional life it’s taboo for someone to tell an optimist that they just don’t know enough to understand the real risks involved in X, Y or Z.

Those conversations do happen rarely and don’t often result in much change. Why?

One answer could come from applying evolutionary psychology to the SDLC. It’s a topic I’m interested in considering further.

As a start, I’ve looked at The brains rose-colored glasses : Nature Neuroscience.

The best way to think about the problem from The Business’s expectation is:

optimists’ brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted

The foundation of Agile Methods—XP—took this into consideration. XP focused on measuring “velocity” and included rules that used past velocity to govern / temper the optimism of a future iteration.

More details can be found here: optimism