Understanding interventions in context to benefit developer experience

Creating change in the world is difficult. Scientists face this difficulty daily as we wonder whether a change that we find in a research study will translate to another environment, a different group of people, or in a different topic. Systematically untangling a bit of this complexity is at the heart of this useful review which explores social-behavioral interventions (attempts to change how people interpret, experiment with, and take action in their environments), and the larger contexts which may dampen, cancel, or even reverse the effects we expect from an intervention. For anyone who has found themselves constantly asking “Yes it works, but do we really know if it’ll work here?”  in their workplace, this review may provide heartening validation. 

Using the gentle metaphor of “Seeds” (interventions) and “Soils” (the environment that allows an intervention to take hold and flourish), this review guides us to think about psychological interventions as a collaborative process between individuals and their ecosystems – not mind over matter, but Mindset interacting with Context. Despite providing some technical social science commentary (don’t be put off by terms like treatment-effect heterogeneity; in fact, save it for the next time you want a fancy way to say “sometimes we get a bigger result and sometimes a smaller one even though we’re doing the same thing”!), Walton & Yeager craft a highly readable exploration for anyone through a series of accessible examples. I read this piece slowly; if you’re short on time, even a bite-size exploration of one of the sections might be thought-provoking.

One thing I particularly enjoy about this review is that the questions raised by it neatly echo many of the questions a practitioner might ask themselves as they consume a new scientific study: Does this really work out here? Might it work for someone like me?  Another strength of this paper is the efficient expression of ideas – a psychologist’s way of thinking about the mechanisms of how our beliefs steer behavior is captured in lines like: “A psychological intervention offers people a way of making sense of daily experience. People test out that perspective almost as a hypothesis.” For the sociotechnical systems thinkers, there is inspiration for reframing context as something that we could take advantage of inside of our organizations, even as context makes our lives much more difficult and less predictable. But that contextual change might be the path to understanding: “manipulating a system is a powerful way to learn about its causal structure.” Finally, it’s densely packed with interesting citations to studies that test interventions in a variety of settings and populations for readers who wish to go exploring in the growing world of intervention science. 

This review paper inspired me to write my own review on how developer experience can take advantage of the world of psychological affordances. Taking this paper as a model, I wanted to contribute three scenarios that I’ve seen engineering organizations and developers face, and integrate psychological theories that can help us understand why psychological affordances matter. While many of the social-psychological interventions in Seed and Soil refer to non-workplace experiences such as classrooms, or personal health decisions such as eating choices, I think there is a large opportunity to extend what we already know about interventions to people’s real workplaces. This “context” can be difficult to access, measure, and improve, but doing this work is a core mission at the Developer Success Lab. Plus, developer experience teams are actively working to understand how to create good environments for people, and can provide an important source of insight back to us as scientists about how they are observing, learning, and challenging our theories. In my review, I expand on the Seed and Soil paper to include software research and findings from our research with technology teams which help us understand more psychological affordances, such as the role of learning cultures.

I hope you enjoy Seed and Soil as much as I did!