Pairing

Richard Sheridan (Cofounder and CEO, Menlo Innovations) wrote Joy Inc to share insight into all XP practices that worked for his Org. Here is a summary of his thoughts on pairing.

In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than your competition.

Why do programmers define themselves by a piece of technology? .NET. Java. Why can’t they be just software programmers? Why don’t just use whatever language worked best for the problem we are trying to solve?

Why shouldn’t your technical allegiance lay with whatever technology that worked best for your customer?

That’s why we were able to adjust quickly to the language change brought by iPhones and the App Store. Collaborative, on-the-fly learning is the basis of our competitive advantage. Through pairing, we give our team permission to learn.

Two Heads, Two Hearts, Four Hands, One Computer

Pairing is the foundation of our work style and our learning system.

You may have to fight every one of your managerial instincts to accept pairing. Incredibly inefficient way to organise humans, right? Isn’t it more productive to have each person work separately? Aren’t we paying two people to do one job?

What I have learned is that pairing is one of the most potent managerial tools I have ever discovered because of all the traditional problems it helps solve. Pairing fosters a learning system, builds relationships, eliminates towers of knowledge, simplifies on-boarding of new people, and flushes out performance issues.

In environments where people work alone, serendipity is lost!

Learning to Get Along

Assigning pairs and switching them each week helps avoid a variety of typical team ills that could interfere with learning outcomes. Shyness. Alienation. We avoid clique forming, as everyone gets a chance to work with one another.

Time spent together dispels a lot of misconceptions about one’s fellow teammates. You are going to get to know the person in a deeper way than a general impression could ever accomplish.

Working in pairs also provides an emotional safety net for our employees. Imagine a six year old child on an unfamiliar walk near the edge of a deep, dark forest. The child will stand frozen and frightened, unable to move forward. But place an equally frightened six year old friend beside him and together they may confidently travel this unknown space together, hand in hand. Pairing helps us move into the unknown (a new technology, for ex) with confidence and courage, comforted by the safety such a system provides.

Watch Productivity Raise

There is no loss of productivity with pairing. But tremendous gains as learning goes faster. Such people are quickly unstuck when their partner suggests a different approach. Quality soars with four eagle eyes on the screen, and we achieve superior result in a shorted amount of time.

Working in pairs doesn’t mean that one person gets to slack off while another is glued to the keyboard. People who have just joined us leave at the end of an 8 hour day looking quite exhausted. When our team is working, distractions fade away — they are really working.

Can We Really Afford All This Learning?

Potential clients often hesitate when I tell them that our team will be learning something new while working on their projects. They tell they don’t want it done on their dime. They may also insist we put only experts on their project. They want people who have a deep understanding of their industry or at least three years of experience in the technology they have chosen.

If this traditional thinking persists, we are likely not a good fit for the client. We believe that relying on deep expertise stifles innovation. We have a deep developed curiosity that allows us to see things that experts easily overlook. This is where our most serious learning occurs. Our inquisitiveness and openness to learn from others help us to learn our client domains quickly — usually to a greater depth than most could begin to imagine. Learning how to learn fast, and as a group, is where out organisation shines.

Tear Down Towers of Knowledge

A board member knows a particular programmer? Must be a tower of knowledge! Keep him happy!! Your job depends on it!

Lest you think that the tower of knowledge enjoys being the centre of attention in this way, think again. What may start out feeling like job security eventually becomes a prison from which he cannot escape. He also becomes a bottleneck of the entire organisation. Many organisations take this risk. Companies goes to unbelievable extremes to protect and coddle their towers of knowledge.

In a paired environment that switches the pairs regularly, this knowledge hoarding just isn’t even a possibility. Pairing, by its nature, eliminates knowledge hoarding. We switch pairs weekly because doing so knocks down towers of knowledge each and every week. Benefits to team member? In 12 years, we never had to deny a single request for time off.

Pairing Pushes Personal Growth

At Menlo, hiring, firing, and promotions decisions are peer led. Good pair partners must be teachers as well as students.

Pairing is the atomic element of our learning organisation. It produces a joy in learning that most of us haven’t experienced in years, perhaps since elementary school, when everything was new and all we had to do was absorb it.