Alistair Cockburn - Agile Software Development

"Kelly kept those of us working on his airplane jammed together in one corner of our [building]...

My three-man thermodynamics and propulsion group now shared space with the performance and stability control people. Through a connecting door was the eight-man structures group. ... Henry and I could have reached through the doorway and shaken hands.

"...I was separated by a connecting doorway from the office of four structures guys, who configured the strength, loads, and weight of the airplane from preliminary design sketches. ...the aerodynamics group in my office began talking through the open door to the structures bunch about calculations on the center of pressures on the fuselage, when suddenly I got the idea of unhinging the door between us, laying the door between a couple of desks, tacking onto it a long sheet of paper, and having all of us join in designing the optimum final design... It took us a day and a half..."

"All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor: A stone's throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions.

Every project team should be on a drive to reduce the total energy cost of detecting and tranferring needed ideas. That means noticing and improving the convection currents of information flow, watching for sources of drafts, getting the benefits of osmotic communication and information radiators. The end goal is to lower the erg-seconds required for team members to exchange information, whatever constraints their organization places on their seating, and with or without technology.

To get communications as effective as possible, we want to improve the likelihood that the receiver can jump the gaps that are always present in communication. We want the sender to be able to touch into the highest level of shared experience with the other person. We want the two people constantly to have feedback in this proces, so they can detect the extent to which they miss their intention.

Actually, the same sort of characteristics apply when the people are in "invention" mode, except that during invention, the people shift sender-receiver roles much more rapidly.

Modalities in Communication

Let us pry apart a sample communication situation to find the mechanisms at play. I find about a dozen at play in a simple discussion at the whiteboard:

Physical proximity. Standing about one meter from each other, the people detect minute visual cues, tiny movements of eye muscles to overall muscle tension.

The speaker may move closer to indicate aggressiveness or enthusiasm. The listener may move closer to indicate interest, agreement, or the desire to speak; or away, to indicate fear, disagreement or the need to think privately for a period. They manipulate their relative distance to express various emotions and stages of agreement, disagreement, aggressiveness, trust and distrust.

The signals vary across cultures and personalities, but the signals are both present and used.

Three-dimensionality. The people notice visual parallax, or 3D information.

The parallax shift of the visual image is lost when the same people talk over a video link, even if they are similarly close to the camera and screen.

Smell. Smell is one of those senses that is unimportant to some people, very important to others, and important but subconscious to many. One person reported she can often sense sublimated fear and distress, probably through sense of smell. It certainly is the case that those cues are available at the whiteboard, and lost in remote communications.

Kinaesthetics. Many people use kinaestetics (sensation of movement) to help think and remember. The speaker might use it to help construct a new explanation, or to help improve the building of a question.

Touch. The one person touches the other on the shoulder, to mean, "Don't feel threatened by this discussion," or perhaps, "This is really important," or "I have something to say." Touching is part of the overall manipulation of proximity and personal space. In some cases, there are objects to touch, whose feel is important to the conversation.

Sound. In the simple use of language, a speaker person emphasizes points with colorful adjectives, exaggerations, metaphors and the like. Besides that simple use of language, the speaker uses pitch, volume and pacing to differentiate and emphasize ideas in a sentence.

Visuals. People communicate through gestures as well as words, often making a point by gesturing, raising an eyebrow or pointing while speaking.

The people may wave their hands to make shapes in the air or to accentuate the speaking. They may raise an eyebrow to indicate questioning or emphasis. Again, they use pacing to differentiate and emphasize ideas, for example, moving rapidly over obvious parts of a drawing, and slowing down or pausing for effect at less obvious or more important parts.

A person also draws on the whiteboard, to present (particularly spatially oriented) information for the other to consider. The drawings may be standardized notations, such as class or timing diagrams. They may be loose sketches. They may even be wiggles having no particular meaning, whose sole purpose is to anchor in a public, static location, the thought being discussed, for later reference.

Cross-modality timing. One of the most important characteristics of two people at the whiteboard is the timed correlation of all the above. The speaker moves facial muscles and gestures while talking, draws while talking and moving, pauses in speech for effect while drawing, and carefully announces key phrases in time, while drawing lines between shapes.

Cross-modality emphasis helps anchor ideas in the listener's mind, enhancing the memory associations around the idea. Drawing otherwise meaningless wiggles on the board while talking gives meaning to the wiggles that the two can later refer to.

Low latency.Because the two are standing next to each other, watching and listening each other, the round trip time for a signal and a response is very small. This allows real-time question and answer, and interruptions:

Real-time question-and-answer. The receiver asks questions to reveal ambiguity and missed communication in the speaker's explanation. The timing of the questions sets up a pattern of communication between the people.

With the very fast round-trip times available in face-to-face communication, the listener can interrupt the speaker, asking for clarification on the spot. Over some number of minutes, the speaker may be able to tune the presentation to fit the receiver's background, developing more effective types of phrasing or drawing.

The listener can give the speaker feedback in the middle of the expression of an idea, perhaps through a raised eyebrow or other non-verbal modality. The speaker can then adjust the expression on the fly.

Trust and learning. Through modalities and rapid feedback, the two are likely to develop a sense of comfort and trust in communication with each other. This is comfort and trust of the form, "Oh, when he speaks in that tone of voice, he is not actually angry, but just excited." The two find ways to not hurt each other in communication, and to know that they will not be hurt in the communication.

They build small emotional normalizing rituals of movement and expression to indicate things like, "I'm starting to feel in danger here," and "You needn't because this is not an attack on you." Those rituals serve the people well over the course of the project, particularly when they can't see each other during the communication. At that juncture, touching into the shared experience of these rituals becomes crucial.

We see an example of needing these normalizing rituals in the amount of airplane travel going on: