We've all seen sportsmen playing in a near-superhuman state, one where they are seemingly untouchable: Ricky Ponting in the middle of a big century; Naas Botha slotting every kick and directing the game like a general; Roger Federer withstanding every onslaught from Andy Roddick.
Ayrton Senna wrote about this state during qualifying for the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix: "I was already on pole, and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my teammate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel."
It's called "being in the zone", and it's when you are performing at your peak. It's also known as "flow", a term coined by Hungarian psychology professor Mihly Cskszentmihlyi, and it describes a state in which we are at our most productive.
The state is accompanied by nine factors:
1 Clear goals;
2 Concentrating and focusing;
3 A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness;
4 Distorted sense of time;
5 Direct and immediate feedback;
6 Balance between ability level and challenge;
7 A sense of personal control over a situation or activity;
8 Effortlessness of action as the activity is intrinsically rewarding; and
9 People become absorbed in their activity, to the extent that focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.
We have a large team of developers at MIP, and we have found that they are at their most productive when they are in the zone. They produce work of a high quality, and they produce a lot of it. On average, we have found that it takes them 27 minutes to get into the zone, which means an interruption to a developer when he is in the zone is costly: it will take him around half an hour to get back into the zone.
I raise this issue because there is an intense debate going on in software development circles, primarily from those promoting the new wave of agile development techniques, which developers should be dealing directly with users.
This school of thought says developers are perfectly adequate in terms of their communication skills; that they can quite happily do requirements elicitation and extraction; that they can present plans and models, and update requirements as they evolve; that they should be in ongoing touch with users as and when needed.
Kill productivity
Apart from the obvious shortcomings of such an approach - developers by their nature are not easy communicators, are typically introverted, and because of their work profile, are not usually required to see the big picture - a string of interruptions throughout a working day will kill a developer's productivity.
So let's look at an ideal working day for a developer: get into the office at 8am, get productive by 8.30am, stay in the zone until lunchtime (or don't bother with lunch - once you're in the zone, such trivialities as food can wait!), back at the desk shortly after lunch if you have any, and back in the zone until it's time to go home.
Of course, time and perspective blur when you're in the zone, and many developers choose to stay at their desks after going home time.
It is for this - and other, quality-related reasons - that we have introduced a layer of business analysts at MIP. These folk interface with the users; they are responsible for understanding precisely what the users want; for interpreting that into the kind of language the developers understand; and for ensuring that the users get what they need, within budget, according to requirement and fit for purpose.
This allows our developers to stay in the zone, doing what they do best. To quote a blogger: "Geeks, hackers, programmers - call them what you will, everybody nowadays knows which group of programmers I am referring to. Among us there is a concept known as deep hack mode. Deep hack mode is a state of intense concentration engendered during programming to the exclusion of very nearly all outside stimulus. In fact a hacker in deep hack mode is unlikely to hear you talking to him at all and usually it requires a physical touch to get his attention. Not that I would advise that - he will not thank you for it. Deep hack mode takes about an hour of intense work to get into."
(Source: http://silentcoder.co.za/2006/08/deep-hack-mode-and-flash-mode/)
Share