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Is Agile Stifling Introverts?

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For years Agile has been encouraging teams to work together collaboratively in open spaces and encouraging developers to pair program, but lately these types of practices have been coming under fire.

Back in January, The New Yorker published a piece on brain storming called Groupthink.

Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

Citing various studies the article concludes:

Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: "Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas."

Of course, brainstorming is not an integral Agile technique and may not be used at all in many Agile teams, but what about team rooms, group-work, and pair programming?

Susan Cain, recently gave a very popular TED Talk titled, The Power of Introverts". Her talk and the accompanying blog post took aim at our bias for extroverts and group-work:

Solitude, as Cain says, is a key to creativity. Darwin took long walks in the woods and turned down dinner invitations, Dr. Seuss wrote alone, and was afraid of meeting the kids who read his books for fear they would be disappointed at how quiet he was. Steve Wozniak claimed he never would have become such an expert if he left the house. Of course, collaboration is good (witness Woz and Steve Jobs), but there is a transcendent power of solitude.

And the things we’re learning from psychology affirm this. We can’t be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring each other, and groups follow the most charistmatic person, even though there is no correlation between being a good speaker and having great ideas. (Hesitant, then full laughter from the TED crowd.)

She closes her to talk with a call to action:

"End the madness of constant group-work." (The audience applauds.) Offices need chatty conversations, and great spaces to make serendipitous interactions. But we need much more privacy, and more autonomy. The same is true - more true - for schools. Yes, teach kids to work together, but also how to work alone.

In a sign that she’s right that change is coming, almost the entire auditorium, introvert and extrovert alike rises to give a standing ovation.

Jon Evans wrote about office spaces and pair programming recently in his Tech Crunch article: Pair Programming Considered Harmful?

Legendary development shops like San Francisco’s Pivotal Labs and Toronto’s Xtreme Labs(1) have adopted a 100 percent pair programming mindset, with considerable success.

Great! Problem solved, right?

…Not so fast.

"Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption ... What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed," says a New York Times article castigating "the new groupthink." It also quotes Steve Wozniak:

"Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team."

Open-plan offices, in particular, seem an impressively terrible idea. "Open plan layouts create massive distraction, damaging productivity," according to a recent analysis by the U.K.’s Channel 4. See also the related Hacker News commentary, which includes gems like "Most modern office layouts seem to be designed to screw with people's fight or flight instincts all day," and "I'm a quiet type, and I often need time alone to think and write code and documentation. The 'rah rah' social types railroaded us ... I am becoming bitter and resentful."

Jon also sums up evidence that pairing can be good for creativity:

Working alone is good for creativity - but being paired with someone who thinks differently from you can lead to more creativity yet.

And concludes:

The true answer is that there is no one answer; that what works best is a dynamic combination of solitary, pair, and group work, depending on the context, using your best judgement. Paired programming definitely has its place. (Betteridge’s Law strikes again!) In some cases that place may even be “much of most days.” But insisting on 100 percent pairing is mindless dogma, and like all mindless dogma, ultimately counterproductive.

Another article addressing how social media caters to extroverts, blames the tech companies behind social media:

Blame Mark Zuckerberg. When Facebook went public at the beginning of February, its doe-eyed CEO released a letter to investors describing it not as a company, but as some sort of religious sect, which would make Zuckerberg, its leader, a kind of social missionary. Facebook, he wrote, "was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."

Zuckerberg famously champions workplaces with open floor plans and glass walls as a metaphor for the world as he dreams it. This is one example of how the free-for-all nature of social media is seeping into real life-and it’s a problem for those of us who liked the walls where they were.

I guess there aren’t many introverts working at Facebook.

Is Agile to blame for popularizing some of these ideas? Has Agile been stifling introverts and creativity all these years? If so, then what? Is it time to go back to the cubicles?

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