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This is a really good description of a natural tension any engineering team has to deal with. I specially liked the framing of pair programming as a powerful hy

This is a really good description of a natural tension any engineering team has to deal with. I specially liked the framing of pair programming as a powerful hybrid. A challenge the OP doesn't touch on is the need for individual focus _during_ coordination events. For example, someone is presenting their design ideas to an audience who's seeing them for the first time. In order for the coordination to be productive, the audience needs to be good at focusing in realtime to grok the ideas presented to them. It'd be unfortunate to rely on your team's ability to pull off a burst of focus on demand. Some can do this well, some can't, and you only water down your coordination if you rely on it too much. I've read about and quite like writing-heavy workflows, e.g. presenter writes and shares a 4-6 pager, or meeting starts with people silently reading a memo. The async-ness and the reliance on written word pulls a lot of weight when there's too much depth/breadth involved; the kind of thing that happens a handful of times a quarter. But this is hard to pull off consistently every week for small iterations that nonetheless need coordination on cognitively demanding topics. How do folks deal with this?

tooltower 5y ago
I'm one of those folks who can't focus on my own thoughts during a presentation. I can understand the ideas being presented, but cannot critically evaluate them until later. All I can muster is to write down questions. It's just a bulleted list of "Slide number/title. Question." I can ask them in real time if the presenter consents to interruptions. Otherwise, I'll ponder over them later when I can focus, and follow up if necessary. I pretty much never approve any decision in a presentation without later analysis. That is, unless there is somebody else in the room that I can delegate that analysis to post-approval.
1penny42cents 5y ago
There's a strong relationship between writing and focus. The more writing done beforehand, the more productive a meeting can be. But writing is harder to coordinate over. Just think of all those multi-day hundred-message chat arguments that happen from time to time. Going completely async means things fall through the cracks by default, so we need to write more and more to compensate. But meetings are great for synchronizing information and coming to decisions quickly. Meetings have high information bandwidth and we're much more adapted to face to face conversation than back and forth writing. So on top of the Focus-Coordination spectrum, there's the Sync-Async spectrum, where focus and async are on one side, and coordination and synchronous communication are on the other. We can use sync and asynchronous communication to achieve that balance between focus and coordination across time.

tooltower 5y ago

I'm one of those folks who can't focus on my own thoughts during a presentation. I can understand the ideas being presented, but cannot critically evaluate them until later. All I can muster is to write down questions. It's just a bulleted list of "Slide number/title. Question." I can ask them in real time if the presenter consents to interruptions. Otherwise, I'll ponder over them later when I can focus, and follow up if necessary. I pretty much never approve any decision in a presentation without later analysis. That is, unless there is somebody else in the room that I can delegate that analysis to post-approval.

1penny42cents 5y ago

There's a strong relationship between writing and focus. The more writing done beforehand, the more productive a meeting can be. But writing is harder to coordinate over. Just think of all those multi-day hundred-message chat arguments that happen from time to time. Going completely async means things fall through the cracks by default, so we need to write more and more to compensate. But meetings are great for synchronizing information and coming to decisions quickly. Meetings have high information bandwidth and we're much more adapted to face to face conversation than back and forth writing. So on top of the Focus-Coordination spectrum, there's the Sync-Async spectrum, where focus and async are on one side, and coordination and synchronous communication are on the other. We can use sync and asynchronous communication to achieve that balance between focus and coordination across time.