23 June 04 - 20:17How many megabytes in a mind ?

On the ride home today I found myself pondering an odd question, somewhat out of the blue - what is the quantity of information present in one (adult) human mind, and how would one go about measuring that ?

- Private Life Of The Brain - four comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

20 June 04 - 21:35Synchronicity

The following thoughts were prompted by David Schmaltz, author of The Blind Men and the Elephant, who was wondering aloud on his mailing list about the relevance of synchronicity to project work. Synchronicity is that thing you get from time to time, where you come across just the right book, just the right person to get you unstuck from a pressing problem - at precisely the moment you were least expecting it, which simultaneously turns out to be just the right moment for it to happen.

I think of synchronicity primarily in terms of "noticing", the event or activity whereby the focus of our attention jumps, unbidden, from one object to the next.

There's always a million things happening around us (and within us), several of which will provide an appropriate articulation for making sense of whatever is puzzling us at the moment. So it's really no surprise that synchronous events seem to appear at "just the right time" - they appear because it is just the right time.

Just how noticing happens is a vexing problem. It's so infuriating when you think about it. A hallmark of rationality is consistent sequencing, ordering our thoughts in a deductive sequence. A hallmark of consciousness is its linearity - we are aware of one thing at a time. Noticing is unconscious and irrational; there are no formalizable rules for what things we notice - yet noticing is precisely how we pull together the various elements of a rational solution to any given problem.

In that connection I like Daniel Dennett's ideas on consciousness, especially what he calls the Multiple Drafts model, and his presenting the linearity of consciousness as a "user illusion" - by analogy with modern OS design which fakes a multi-processing paradigm on top of a single processor, deluding the user. Consciousness is the reverse illusion - it is massively parallel but we experience it as linear because that's what best fits the uses to which we put it. (Or perhaps "best fit" - for all we know the illusion may have arisen in the past and retained for historical reasons.)

At the moment I'm interested in the topic of "self-organizing teams", and one of the things I have experimented with is the deliberate blurring of attentional focus by each individual in a group, so that at some point the group seems to become capable of a collective decision without needing to first acknowledge a designated leader. This is a more systematic use of synchronicity - powerful stuff, too, since this kind of "distributed cognition" gives us the benefits of teams without the attendant coordination costs.

In the laboratory - i.e. the workshop my colleage Emmanuel Gaillot and I have run, twice, to explore this effect - we get good results by using physical exercises, inspired by theatrical practice, to model the things we suppose happen within teams of knowledge workers. Another respondent to David's comment mentioned the use of Aikido to help people explore related insights.

It seems that we have particular expectations about the workings of our minds, which get relaxed somewhat when our bodies are involved instead. Strange that it should be so, since our bodies are bound to grosser laws of physics than our minds...

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10 June 04 - 11:54Presencing

Fifth and final day at XP2004 - today. The morning's talk was inspiring and thought-provoking - touching on something called Presencing, which for the moment I can't comment on other than by linking to it - must look deeper into it.

The "Blogger's BOF" was pleasant, though only one person beside me was in attendance. I'm looking forward to this afternoon's session on Organizational Change, with Diana Larsen.

Next blog, I expect, will be from Paris.

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10 June 04 - 11:49Agile theatre

Day 4 at XP2004 - yesterday: what stood out was the Agile Theatre session put up by John Favaro and Patrizia Falcone - Patrizia actually teaches in the theatre; it was an interesting coincidence to attend that after hosting the workshop which was also inspired by exercises from the theatre.

Wireless - I was wondering about wireless before leaving... Not only is there a WLAN set up in the conference center where the sessions are held; it reaches out to the small plaza just outside the center, where many of the attendees meet to have lunch. The weather has been wonderful for the whole week - sunny and warm. I'm writing this entry from a table in the shade, with a breeze of cool air coming from the lovely fountain in the middle of the plaza, after enjoying a conversation brimming with insights from people with whom I share diverse interests. Life doesn't get much better...

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08 June 04 - 15:40Programming out loud

Day 3 at XP2004 - today. I'm finally caught up ! I've also set up a "Blogger's BOF" to happen, with the intent of encouraging XP bloggers to meet in one place, blog the conference, learn about each other's blogs.

What stood out today was the first presentation in the PhD symposium, which I'm attending as part of my ongoing reconciliation with formal studies. Sallyann Bryant presented her work on "cognitive understanding of Pair Programming", which I found spot-on. It apparently draws on some of Bill Wake's work and extends it in directions that are very incisive.

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08 June 04 - 15:32Value driven development

Day 2 at XP2004 - yesterday: I was attending the "Customer Collaboration" workshop. The topic is a vitally important one and the format was interesting - inspired by LAWST (Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing) - participants tell and refine stories with the aim of extracting practical lessons.

One story stood out for me, that of a project that had been using a hybrid of XP and Scrum, implementing features in prioritized order. About six months from ship date, the people in the customer and PM role left and were replaced. The resulting dip in velocity caused the new customer to eventually call for a reevaluation of the features' ranking by business priority. She sat down with the new PM and went through the backlog to reassess every feature in the light of the project's business case document, which had been revised around that time. Then she used the business case justification to assign a dollar value to each (fairly large-grained) feature description. This turned out to have a strong focusing effect on the technical part of the team, who henceforth had much more confidence in the solidity of the prioritization.

It seems to me that an even better way would have been to have the developers sit in on the prioritization meetings, which is what XP normally calls for; but this scheme - "dollarize business value", as I call the pattern - did wonders to focus the developers and improve the collaboration between the technical and business contingents.

That's the part of the conference that it makes sense to report in a blog entry - there's a lot more going on that you have to be here to appreciate ! For instance, I could tell you about the new Official XP Drink, or the forthcoming ban on giving anything (be it a book or a blog entry) a title conforming to the "X driven Y" pattern. But I won't... for those to be funny you just have to be there.

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08 June 04 - 07:01Diversities

Day 1 at XP2004 - two days ago, Sunday : Emmanuel and I hosted our workshop on self-organizing teams. This was surprisingly well attended and well received by participants, who liked the structure and experiential nature of the workshop, according to the feedback from the mini-retrospective at the end. We will be offering this workshop again, so I won't spoil it by saying too much - but one particular exercise was so popular, several participants warned us they intended to steal it. Don't be surprised if you find yourself walking around in circles at an agile conference in the following months...

The workshop was not without its difficulties. We learned a somewhat deeper lesson when our preparation for the exercises, which involve mildly strenuous physical activities, conflicted with one participant's condition. Our preparations had not included a contingency plan for that sort of tension. Teams must also address this issue - how do you accomodate a process not designed for people with physical or sensory disabilities, or other significant differences.

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04 June 04 - 19:15XP2004

I leave for Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, site of the XP2004 conference, tomorrow after lunch. I intend to blog about happenings at the conference. I'm writing this mostly in attempt to force myself to do that, by making a public commitment. (I hope there's free wireless somewhere, or even just wireless.)

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02 June 04 - 14:54On Excellence

It is tempting to suppose that everyone might fully realize his powers and that some at least can become complete exemplars of humanity. But this is impossible. It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether.
-- John Rawls, A theory of justice

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