Opinion: Working in isolation breeds mistakes

That seems true to me but at the same time improvisers hear each other to play together, but also practice alone. I find that my stack is only so big and the more the inputs I have (noise, conversations, etc.) the less room I have for the things I am trying to hold onto.

Hi Jeffrey.

I am sensitive to visual distraction but not aural... but I realize that it's the opposite for some people.

There are two kinds of "aural" pollution that go beyond the normal ambient team sounds... outside information (listening to unrelated talk from a nearby desk or over a wall) which Cockburn calls a draft. And unmodulated or off-topic team conversation, which takes time to work itself out, and requires frank discussion of noise issues. Recently, a colleague sensitive to room layout made a great contribution to reducing noise levels by simply suggesting that we lay out the room differently to keep conversations more localized. This was an opportunity for the team to self-organize and learn that their space really is theirs.

I generally recommend several nearby small meeting spaces available to every team for private conversations, spirited brainstorming, and occasional quiet work. But the ideal arrangement for those sensitive to sound is to find (or create) a quieter corner of the team space and move there or ask the team to make it available to you. Oh, and make sure whiteboards (sure to draw discussions) are not in places that will constantly distract team members not involved in those conversations. One solution is many smaller whiteboards - or whiteboards on all walls.

I'd be interested to hear from any who've experience difficulty with sound in an Agile team room and how the team solved the problem.

deb

It's a myth that jazz improvisation is the height of creativity and that jazz musicians can make novel musical masterpieces at the drop of a hat. For a bit of proof, pick up some of the old recordings that have been re-released on CD with alternate takes and note how similar the takes are. There is more than "a few structural rules" and jazz is extrordanarily idiomatic - if you don't know the arbitrary idioms, you're not playing jazz. There was a great recording unearthed recently of John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk playing at Carnegie Hall. I assumed that that these two masters would just show up and play, but according to the liner notes Coltrane had to do a lot of work to pull it off because he couldn't play and improvise on the melodies of Monk's tunes well - those darned idioms strike again! Even free jazz is relatively structured. Ornette Coleman had to rehearse with his band for months before he was ready to record the landmark "free" jazz recording The Shape of Jazz to Come.

Asking a businesses to adopt new software development practices by likening them to jazz isn't going to be convincing anyway - most people don't like jazz. Lots of people hate it for the same reasons they hate agile: it's unfamiliar and counter-intuitive from the conservative perspective.

JP

At the risk of wandering off topic, two observations.

Mike Douglas passed away the other day. I watched his afternoon talk show just for the closing theme. His tenor player ad libbed something completely new and different every day. I was always surprised at how many ways he could treat the same tune.

And I recall Winton Marsalis abandoning the small band with head-solo-solo-solo-head structure becuase it was so much "musical masturbation." He turned to big bands to feature the arranger's art rather than the improviser's.

Jazz can be as agile as you like. Or not. :-)