[The following is adopted from a piece that I wrote on HumansAndComputing.org some years ago. It relates to my ongoing advocacy for the ‘texture’ of work, and the relationship between the presence of such ‘texture’ and the creativity and productive effectiveness of individuals and teams]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in “The Social Life of Paper” that the consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper has risen nearly 15 percent between 1995 and 2000. You might think this is just a matter of our not yet having broken old media habits–of not yet having embraced the digital world. But, according to Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, in their book Myth of the Paperless Office, there is a cognitive reason why people still prefer paper over pixels: paper provides unique affordances that computers cannot provide.

Here’s a story that Gladwell tells about air traffic controllers, who he refers to as the “quintessential knowledge workers.” Each air traffic controller uses three media: a computer radar screen, with little blips representing the planes he is responsible for; audio contact with the pilots and other controllers; little strips of paper they call “flight strips.”

Using these media, the flight controller constructs for himself a 3-D picture of all the planes he is responsible for. The construction and manipulation of artifacts within these media help the controller maintain situation awareness. On the subject of situation awareness, Mica Endsley writes:

“Situation awareness operates on three levels. One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means-analogous to reading comprehension. The highest level, though, is projection-the ability to predict which aircraft are coming in and when. You’ve got to be able to look into the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”

Those paper air strips are critical in helping air traffic controllers achieve situation awareness. Air traffic controllers often work in pairs, where each manipulate the strips. Movement of the strips, writing on them, etc., all play a critical part in the real-time activity of the situation awareness needed to safely land planes. Their movement act as cues which helps the controller keep the situation of his planes clear in his head. Moreover, when discussing the situation with their pairs, controllers move the strips around in order to animate various scenarios. As Gladwell observes, “The controller’s flight strips are like the piles of paper on a desk: they are the physical manifestations of what goes on inside his head.”

This, I believe, is a critical point. As human beings, we rely on aspects of our environment that are as much felt as they are thought, in order to trigger embodied memory and effective action–the quality of ‘flow,’ which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi writes so much about, which is important to forms of work requiring creativity and ingenuity.

In fact, the air-traffic-control center probably looks a lot like my office looks when I’m in a particularly creative flurry of activity: papers and piles everywhere. And yet, it is this apparent chaos that allows controllers to keep thousands of people safe each and every day.

There is movement afoot to force controllers to clean up there act-to get everything onto those nightmares of affordances: desktop computers! Expect to see an uptick in accidents and near-accidents.

I wrote elsewhere in this blog about the ‘texture’ of self-organizing teams. There I referred somewhat obliquely to the notion of a project ‘taskboard.’ Here, I want to describe what a ‘taskboard’ is and why I think it is so important to an agile team, particularly a team that is new to each other, or new to the agile way of working.

Here’s a picture of a taskboard (taken from Mike Cohn’s website):

Here’s a snapshot of an actual taskboard from a team I worked with some years ago:

In short, the taskboard shows progress for a given iteration or ’sprint’. At the beginning of an iteration, the team plans the work for that iteration, writing down tasks on index cards or PostIt notes, and pins or tapes them in the ‘To Do’ column. During the course of the iteration, the team meets each day to plan that day’s work. With a taskboard, team members can move tasks from the ‘To Do’ column into the ‘In Process’ column, or from the ‘In Process’ column into the ‘Verify’ column and so on. As the iteration unfolds, the team can readily see their progress as those cards move (or don’t move) across the board.

See Mike Cohn’s discussion of taskboards for more information on taskboards.

Yes, But … Why Taskboards Rather Than Software Tools?

Some organizations love to use software tools for managing iterations and sprints. I prefer taskboards for the following reasons:

1. They make things more visible in ways that make the most immediate and best sense to the team. Teams almost always find ways to customize their taskboard, through color coding of cards, adding stick-ons, etc. This makes it easy for a team member to, at any moment, look up at the board and see where things stand.

2. Taskboards facilitate more active and interactive iteration and sprint planning meetings. I find that when team members can plan together, informally, around a wall–taping and pinning work items up as they discover them and while they discuss the work they intend to do–with lots of chaos and talking and scheming, there is more aliveness and hence more alertness. Planning meetings go more quickly; they become an occasion for subtle forms of ‘team-building’ and bonding; and team members come to be more invested in the work since they so actively participating in defining it.

3. Taskboards facilitate more active and effective daily stand-up meetings. When teams can have their daily meetings around the taskboard, moving task cards as they discus their progress and what they commit to do for the day, everybody can see everything and, thus, have a clearer sense of what is happening. This builds confidence for team members. Also, it is another one of those ‘texture’ things which come together and support greater team collaboration, cross-functionality, and self-organization.

4. Gives managers a good reason to visit the room. With software tools its very easy to simply send management a report of the team’s progress. However, if there is a taskboard (along with burndown charts), a manager can walk into the team workroom and see in a matter of seconds what the team’s progress is. Meanwhile, they can get a sense of how the team is doing in other ways since, presumably, they will be working right there in the room.

5. Taskboards give teams yet another opportunity to put their personal stamp on their physical environment. When teams and groups can make their physical space their own it helps them in the important process of self-organizing since it allows them to define, together, aspects of their ‘identity’ as a team.

While software tools certainly help a team ‘manage’ their project, the loss of these subtler qualities is extremely expensive.

The design of experiments shapes how mechanists observe. E.g.:

a + b + c = X

where a,b, and c are independent variables and X is a dependent variable. But because it would be impossible to include all of the variables which determine any given behavior, we limit the number of variables to something manageable, and then tack on an Etc term to the equation:

a + b + c + Etc = X

But it may be that in this Etc term is where the good stuff lies. All the small peculiarities, frailties, failures, small insights, passing dreams, idiosyncrasies, and moments alone and with friends that constitute the edges of who we come to be at any given moment – a coming-to-be that shapes the behavior of an organization, whether a person, a company, a composition, or a piece of furniture.

The question “Who selects ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’” is a question of power. Because, the one who defines the dependent variables is the one whose description of the system will prevail.

Given the command-and-control facts on the ground in most places (i.e. who defines ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c’)–whether in our own heads or in the social structures in which we find ourselves–Etc is often the only refuge of democracy and native organization.

[Related article: “Texture”]

Within the context of the inquiry to which BeautifulSystems.org is dedicated, texture is a special term (it has its own category). So, here I want to say a few general things about texture.

Here are some things you’ll find on Wikipedia:

“Texture refers to the properties held and sensations caused by the external surface of objects received through the sense of touch”

In painting, texture is described as the “feel of the canvas based on the paint used and its method of application”

In music, it’s defined as “a way to vaguely describe the overall sound of a piece of music”

In computer graphics, texture is “a bitmap image applied to a surface in computer graphics”

Here are some points that we may glean more generally from these definitions:

Consider, for instance, the texture of a book. The book has a certain weight when you hold it. It has a particular smell to it. The pages have a certain feel as you run your fingers over their surfaces–a feel that comes about both from the texture of the paper itself and from the very minute protusions on the page that are formed by the ink. the cover has a certain texture.

In addition, the book has other kinds of textures. The font, the setting of the letters. The page layout. And, perhaps most generally, there are the things we do in order to facilitate our reading– the direction in which we turn pages, the scanning orientation (in English, for instance, we move our eyes from left-to-right, from top-to-bottom of the page). The location in the book of footnotes and citations.

All of these aspects of the book don’t just ‘frame’ our experience of reading–in fact, reading would not be reading without these things. (Amazon’s new Kindle attempts to recreate many aspects of book reading, acknowledging the loss of texture which current online reading experiences yield).

Organizations (companies, software source code, communication, etc.) have textures as well. Those textures describe the every-day-ness, the mundane qualities, of those organizations. They define what it’s like to dwell within those organizations (as an employee, as a programmer, as speaker or listener).

Subsequent writings on this topic will continue to flesh out this important aspect of organization, bringing attention to those aspects of organization that are often ignored, often relegated to the inessential. What if, as leaders and organizational change facilitators, we were to turn our attention to the transformation of texture? What would that look like? How might it be manifested, in practice?

Stay tuned.

Often ignored in our reductionist quest for quicker access, organizational texture is the stuff of the everyday, the mundane, the material. And yet, it may be in those small, infinitesimal moments, where what’s most real occurs.

I once worked with a team that was struggling to come together as a team. Observing, for the first time, one of their project planning meetings, I saw that their work was stored in an Excel spreadsheet and that planning was conducted using a projection of that spreadsheet. Team members assumed the roles of spectators while the project manager and business analyst described the work items. The room was effectively a movie theatre of corpses.

For the next planning meeting (since this was an agile project, meetings were being held every two weeks), I invited the team to use index cards and for they themselves to assemble themselves during the meeting and write up their own work tasks. They agreed to try it. During that next planning meeting, chaos ensued: people were talking at the same time, scribbling indecipherable items down on notecards. By the end of the meeting, the team had covered the white board with hand-written tasks. They were fully engaged and ready to get started on their next iteration.

The low-tech index cards, with nearly indecipherable handwritten tasks, provided for those small, almost unnoticeable, infinitesimal, moments by which people most naturally come together.

The subsequent presence of those cards on the team’s taskboard–with idiosyncratic (and, again, often illegible) handwriting–reminded the team of who they are for themselves and each other. This was the beginning of that team self-organizing and coming together as a team.

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In denying or otherwise ignoring the qualitative dimension of human activity and interaction, modern management arrests the capacity for teams to emerge within their own coherence, to find their own humanity. Once this capacity is freed, however, it becomes an organization’s most vital strength.

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Commenting philosophically on matters related to this, Theodore Adorno writes:

“To yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments. Scientific objectification, in line with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, tends to eliminate qualities and to transform them into measurable definitions. Increasingly, rationality itself is equated more mathematico with the faculty of quantification. While perfectly corresponding to the primacy of a triumphant natural science, this faculty is by no means inherent in the concept of the ratio itself, which is blinded mainly when it balks at the idea that qualitative moments on their part are susceptible of rational conception. (Adorno, 1995:43, emphasis added).

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Adorno, T. W. (1995). Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.