Over the last couple of months I’ve watched a couple of TeeVee specials on KCTS(HD) about a couple of our time’s famous very creative (sometimes to an extreme) artists.  The first was about Dale Chihuly (http://www.chihuly.com/) where he and his team were designing, building, and deploying amazing blown glass over Venice (http://www.chihuly.com/cov/).  The second show was about Frank Gehry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gehry) and how he has evolved into playing with spaces, surfaces, and materials from inspirations everywhere. 

Besides the fact that they both are masters of polarization, the idea that you either love or hate their work (note: I’m not a big fan of the EMP under Seattle’s famous Space Needle/Rocket), I noticed that both artists had mastered the art of ‘non-verbal team communications.’  Both artists had teams of people they worked with, some of whom had been working with them for over 10 to 15 years.  One of Gehry’s design partners said, “sometimes we look at each other and both know exactly what needs to get done next.”

Have you ever experienced this in a software project?  I’ve had it happen many times with a number of different people in my career.  Sometimes I find myself looking for non-verbal communications patterns – piecing together words, facial expressions, tone of voice, body movement.  Other times, we go back and forth and after listening and trying to find these patterns and nothing.  This is most common in situations where I am interacting with people of different (other than software design) backgrounds.  One of my favorite counter-examples, I had the pleasure of working for Steve Kaneko (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/people_steve.html) in the Windows Hardware Innovation Group a few years back when I was at Microsoft.  Steve has a way of describing a vision and drawing on a whiteboard, and somehow I felt like I knew exactly what he meant.  It wasn’t only what he was saying or drawing, it was how he said it and how what he was saying was related to what I knew.  The feeling is just like when you swing a baseball bat or golf club and hit the ball on the ‘sweet spot.’  It feels like magic and the results are amazing.

So the ultimate question then is, “how do we recreate this situation?”  Is it even possible to get a group of people together, sprinkle magic powder, add water, and eventually the team communicate with the highest possible bandwidth?  In my opinion, it’s all about the people – but how do the people get to that point?