Michael Lopp - The Software Developers Career Handbook (Early Release)

Your body has a distinct natural reaction when you see an impending crisis. When considering the crisis, you take a long, deep breath. You often dont notice this, but if I sat next to you, I would hear you sigh.

A sigh is associated with despair. Were screwed. Sigh. My interpretation is different; this long, deep breath is one of preparation. Lets break it down: breathe in. Gather your strength. Oh shit, how am I going to deal with this? Hold it. Hold it. OK, breathe out. OK, not sure what the plan is, but lets roll.

The interesting part of the deep breath is when you hold it. Try it right now: take a deep breath and hold it. What are you doing when youre holding your breath? Well, first off, youre slowly asphyxiating, but in that moment of life-threatening tension, youre doing interesting work. Its a subtle transformation from building tension to calm release. It can also be a deliberate moment of consideration.

You can let that breath out now.

Its a metaphoric stretch, but its around the deep breath that I build my teams communication structure. Ill explain, but first, a story.

The team at the start-up was in a design crisis. The 1.0 version of the product was out and doing well, and everyone wanted to do...well, everything. Every feature was being considered. Unbridled ambition is an excellent problem to have for about a week. After a month, we had three different design directions in play with various levels of support. The creative rush of developing a new release was degrading into useless design meetings where different camps were building strategic fortifications rather than talking. Decisions were being made and not communicated. Confusion was replacing creativity.

In times of crisis, a few human behaviors can make everything worse:

• In the absence of direction, people make stuff up. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of solid information, people generate their own information to fill that vacuum. Theyre not lying; they have no ill will; theyre just trying to build a semblance of structure amongst the confusion. This is only exacerbated by the fact that...

• Human beings provide mutual group therapy by endlessly talking about the crisis at hand. This isnt the creation of new content; its just the regurgitation of the latest news. At the right time, this hallway cross-pollination is a great way to evolve an idea, but if all were doing is talking about the crisis, were scratching at the worry rather than dealing with it.

• Finally, everyone wants to know everything. Combine the communication vacuums and the group therapy creating a fire hose of additional questionable content, and its not surprising that everyone on the team wants to know everything. Before I proceed, I want total disclosure. I have something unique to add, and I better get a chance to do so.

It was an information communication disaster. There were brilliant ideas wandering the hallways, and there were stickies with great ideas hanging from monitors, but in the confusion that was our communication structure, everyone was running around panicking, and no one was taking a deep breath.