Aliases: None at this time

How can team communication be improved, so everyone is open to new ideas?

Context

A team that shares a performance goal in a creative environment. The rationale focuses on software, but this pattern can be applied in any creative situation.

Forces

• It's gratifying to have someone listen to your ideas and understand. It's even more satisfying when your ideas become generally accepted.
• Good ideas are infectious. A truly good idea will spread like a virus. Everyone who hears it will experience some of the pleasure inherent in the creative act.
• Ideas are multiplicative. Once underlying erroneous assumptions have been challenged by a good idea, other related good ideas will flow.
• People are defensive. The act of creating intellectual property demands a great deal of emotional and creative investment. Criticism or better ideas about the product or the process of creating it can be translated into criticism of the self.
• Communicators are sensitive to rejection and can react strongly if their ideas have been rebuffed out of fear or other ill-motivated reactions.

Solution

Get everybody's head into the game. Anyone can contribute. Anyone on the team can tell you how to shave time to market. Anyone on the team can tell you how to ship. The whole team must think this way.

Look within and make every effort to purify your part of the communication. If the recipient is having trouble accepting your input, find a way to make it easier. At least explain your situation and your frustration. If someone keeps giving you "bad" feedback or "lousy" ideas, look within to make sure that some primitive territorial defense isn't clouding your judgement.

Resulting Context

The clearest sign that people are thinking is that they listen to others' ideas and critical feedback. They quiet their initially competitive responses to a possibly superior line of thought. They demand of themselves the intellectual rigor to fairly and properly evaluate the new, potentially valuable information. They can filter out the ego-driven aspects of the communication they've just received.

Rationale

Software is intellectual property. Intellects must be at work to get software. The more intellects working, the more valuable the software. Most people don't want to think. They think they want to think, but they don't. When one person presents another with ideas or feedback, the recipient is faced with a dilemma: either the information is valuable or the person is a bozo. The recipient then sets the bit-flag on the communicator: BOZO=TRUE. Instead of soliciting more information and developing a greater understanding, the recipient becomes defensive. Head-on conflict or a passive-aggressive dismissal results, and no mature evaluation of the information ever takes place.

No one pays any attention to a bozo. As far as his making a contribution is concerned, he's just dead weight. You can also flip the bozo bit on yourself. You can decide that you don't know what you're doing and that you're powerless anyway, so you become dead weight.

Known Uses

Flipping the bozo bit occurs in every situation, not just in software development.

Related Patterns

Jim McCarthy describes another related guideline, Get Their Heads Into the Game.

Author:

Reference

From Dynamics of Software Development by Jim McCarthy, Microsoft Press, 1995, ISBN: 1-55615-823-8. Reprinted with permission of Microsoft Press. All rights reserved. The book is available by calling 1-800-MSPRESS.