Dave's Whiteboard

How can people be more productive while working on complex tasks?  One approach involves a driver, a navigator, and a pomodoro.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Jim Remsik describes a way that programmers at Hashrocket (a web development company) write software.  (Full article: For Writing Software, A Buddy System.)

The quick summary: two programmers sit side by side.  One (the driver) writes the code.  The other (the navigator) checks, critiques, and offers suggestions.

As the code’s being written.

Remsik says that when senior and junior programmers work together, the junion person might start as the driver, “which may encourage the senior person to become a better teacher.”

Hashmark finds that the driver/navigator system increases productivity.  The collaborators not only switch roles (you don’t drive all the time) but also partners.  The programmers refer to that as “promiscuous pairing.”

As Remsik says, “People have different talents, and this way the expertise is spread around.”

Working like this can be exhausting, he says.  I think that’d be even more the case if you don’t get along that well with your partner, at least initially.  The fatigue factor is one reason that Hashmark uses the Pomodoro Technique.

Briefly, that involves breaking tasks into small chunks and working steadily for 25 minutes.  After that, you take a break–even if you’re ready to keep going.  At Hashmark, the phrase to encourage  driver and navigator to take that break is, “Respect the tomato.”

(Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato.  Here’s a one-page summary of the technique; you can find out more at Francesco Cirillo’s site, The Pomodoro Technique.)

I spend a lot of time working on my own, and sometimes wish I did have a close collaborator.  I benefit from having someone to consider possibilities with, although I’d hate to debate serial commas or how to phrase feedback, time after time.

The pomodoro notion intrigues me–instead of saying, “I’ve gotta spend a good three hours on this,” which can sound like a sentence, the approach sounds more like “Get Thing A done, take a breath, then move on to Thing B.”

CC-licensed images:
Motorcycle and sidecar by BotheredByBees / Peter Shanks.
Pomodoro juice by Tanzen 80 / Antonio Fucito.

It’s a new week.  For some people, it’s a new year.  The equinox, as Wodehouse said of Christmas, is at our throats again.  What better way to clear your brain than considering the pentatonic scale?

(Note:  I’ve switched the video to the version on YouTube; the original one seemed to perform poorly when embedded here.  You can find that original,  Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale at the World Science Festival on Vimeo.)

I’ll bet a pretest would have indicated that not many of these people could read music and that not many of them are prone to sing in public.  Pay attention to how little McFerrin instructs and how much he proposes.

I wasn’t much surprised to find that one panelist is Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music (mentioned a time or two here on the Whiteboard).  You’ll find the entire Notes and Neurons discussion in five videos (lengths vary; about 75 minutes in all) at the World Science Festival website.

Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

What more invitation do you need?

Once, on a training discussion board, a colleague said, “Of all the sports, soccer / football makes for the best analogies to business.”

To which I replied, “Of all vegetables, the rutabaga makes the best analogy to bingo cards.”

I knew the colleague well enough to borrow some of his stuff to set up a straw man.  I was leaping onto a favorite soapbox.  I feel about sports analogies at work much the way I do about those endless Jeopardy games that people are always cramming down the throats of perfectly innocent learners.

Please understand, I’m big on analogies.  But their success depends on both aptness and originality.  If you go for the first analogy that wanders across your cerebral cortex, you’re practically guaranteed to select one that’s obvious, shopworn, and insight-free.

So, business like a soccer team?  Right off, people outside the U.S. will smile (or sigh) because you’re using “soccer” when any normal person would say “football.”  And you can’t win, because if by “football” you mean “overstuffed, undermatriculated former college students earning $15,000 per play in a taxpayer-subsidized arena,” they’re still going to smile.

If business is like a football team, then are the shareholders the team owners?  And the customers, they’re…the opponents?  (Yes, it can seem that way, but that’s another day’s rant.)  What about your strategic partners: are they the beer vendors, or the cheerleader squad?

I once heard Don Tosti of the Vanguard Group speak on the notion of “internal customer.”  This was another analogy with wide popularity only a few years back.  It’s fallen out of favor, kind of like the phrase “dot-com.”

Before that fall, though, Tosti was calling into question the aptness of the analogy.  In his analysis, your in-company colleagues aren’t necessarily your “customers.”  Especially if you don’t exchange money for goods or services.  (Blessed are they who lack chargeback systems, for their admin yoke is light.)

Many if not most organizations have internal relationships and power inequities that can make a mockery of the simpleminded idea that everyone’s my “customer.”  If an actual customer’s involved, you’ll be astonished how quickly subgroups will clout will say “make it so.”

All of that to say consider your analogy before you unleash it.  Your audience may include people who see a surfeit of sports analogies as a sign you’d rather be somewhere else, discussing something else.

And you want those folks on your side, if not on your team.

CC-licensed images:
Bingo-game’s worth of rutabagaa: image adapted from this photo by Suzanne Long.
“Internal customer” skeptic by imrational.

My parents, one Christmas, gave me an album by Peter, Paul and Mary.  Ignoring the question of how Mom and Dad knew who these people were, I didn’t like Peter, Paul and Mary.

Or so I thought.

By the following year, I wanted a guitar.  And I guess I learned informally, because I didn’t take lessons, and I didn’t know anyone who knew guitar.  I had found Earl Robinson’s Folk Guitar in Ten Sessions, which was more about accompanying singing than fancy fingering.

So: listening to Yarrow, Stookey, and Travers pulled me into a web of songs.  Some were traditional, some were contemporary, but for me they related in a way that other kinds of music hadn’t.  Related in the sense of having a connection, and related in the sense of giving an account of things outside.

I started learning about other kinds of music, about the “folk process” through which tradition song gets transformed, about social relevance.  And I learned that making music was not something only professionals did, or only other people: making music was an invitation.

I don’t know if Mary played an instrument.  Her voice helped carry the heart of a song: the braid of sounds and story.  Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh — it’s no feast if there’s no talk — and there’s not much of a song if there’s no connection.

In an interview, Mary said, “I’m not sure I want to be singing Leaving on a Jet Plane when I’m 75, but I know I’ll still be singing Blowin’ in the Wind.“  She died yesterday, three years short of that, but the connections remain.

At GE Information Services, our Software Development and Consulting people were technical consultants, working with the client’s IT staff before and after a sale.  When we hired new SDC people, some hadn’t spent much time with clients; they’d dwell  on networking, data communications, relational databases, and so on.  And on.

So: Technical Presentations for a Non-Tech Audience. I never liked the title, but the SDC people did, which was part of the point: does the audience like it?   I needed a topic for which I was the technical expert and they were not.  That ruled out electronic data interchange, the OSI model, and systems architecture.

But not Elizabethan drama.  That’s how I started.

How you are: How would you feel about knocking off early today to see a 400-year old play?

• Maybe you like Shakespeare.  I can tell you that on a 10-point scale, where 1 meant “I’d prefer dental work,” the first SDC group came in at 2.5.

Where we’re going: I promised to explain why people in Shakespeare’s time would choose to see a play, when the other entertainments included bear-baiting and bawdy houses.

What you know: I asked what the SDC folks knew about the battle of the Alamo.

• From the “pretest,” I knew there weren’t many Shakespeare fans.  This apparently unrelated question (Shakespeare?  Alamo?) nudged the attention knob higher.
• What did they know?  Not many “factual” facts–date, numbers, causes.  Something about Texans, Mexicans, the 1800s,  overwhelming odds.  And maybe Davy Crockett.  Or John Wayne.

What you may not know: I spent about 5 minutes getting here, and took three more to make the connection:

• Most Americans know few historical facts about the battle of the Alamo (like the date), but we know emotional facts.
• Since 1836, people have made songs, stories, books, plays, and movies, each connecting the events of the Alamo to its audience, playing off those emotional facts.  (This is where John Wayne comes in, along with Fess Parker, Brian Keith, and Billy Bob Thornton.)
• The battle of Agincourt — the heart of Shakespeare’s play Henry V – was roughly as far removed from his audience as the Alamo is from us.
• The main difference?  At Agincourt, the Texans won.

This probably wouldn’t work for a multinational audience–those emotional facts about the Alamo are common in the U.S. but not in, say, Norway or New Zealand.  Which means it’s not the specifics of my story here, but what my audience already knew, and what I could use from that knowledge to to explain something new to them.

I went into details that fit the categories, to reinforce the connection.  Details like:

• Factual facts about Agincourt (just a few, paving the way for what would follow), including  the 5,000 archers with longbows who were five-sixths of Henry’s army.
• Emotional facts: everybody in Shakespeare’s audience “knew” Henry V had been a great king; everybody “knew” his army was vastly outnumbered; everybody “knew” the French were snobs.
• Connections: examples of how Shakespeare started from these facts, like having Henry disguise himself as an ordinary soldier (“Henry LeRoy”) to check morale.
• Features and benefits: everyone “knew” that Henry won not only the battle, but the daughter of the king of France.  Shakespeare plays off that by having Henry try to woo her, even though he can’t speak French and she “cannot speak your England.”

And of course, I gave a demo, with a little help from Kenneth Branagh.  (Right at the opening, there’s great exposition by Shakespeare, as the  earl of Westmoreland wishes for enough men to get the odds down to 2 to 1.)

Salespeople know the difference between features and benefits: a feature is a thing, like satellite radio in a new car.  A benefit is a value for the client, like tailored entertainment.  If the audience sees no value, a technical presentation isn’t much of a present.