Oddly Influenced

Welcome to Oddly Influenced, a podcast about how people have applied ideas from *outside* software *to* software. Episode 40: Roles in a collaborative circle, part 2: creative roles

Here, in the final collaborative circle episode, I try to make sense of the creative phase of a collaborative circle’s life. In addition to Christopher Alexander’s forces from last episode, I’m also going to bring forward some ideas from future episodes about what’s called embodied, or ecological, or extended cognition.

Farrell is concerned with the type of creativity that comes when two or more people bring seemingly-unconnected ideas together and find that they fit surprisingly well. An example is how Monet and Renoir “combined the visual perspective and bright colors of Japanese woodcuts, the French and English traditions of landscape painting, and their own methods of juxtaposing dabs of bright color to convey light and shadow observed at a fleeting glance.”

The French Impressionists were creative, fine, and Monet and Renoir were pivotal. But a question is: why were collaborative circles helpful to them? Why creative groups rather than just creative individuals or creative pairs? After all, collaborative circles mean meetings where people talk and talk and talk. Sure, the fact that the meetings involve alcohol helps, but what function do those meetings serve beyond entertainment? A second question is: if circles are helpful, what distinct roles *within the circle* support the needed creativity? Monet and Renoir were very different people: how did their differences play with each other? Which differences mattered?

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To answer the question “why a group?”, I’m going to start with some introspection about a teensy-tiny creative breakthrough of my own, retelling the story with ideas derived from two books published in 2011: Louise Barrett’s /Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds/ and Anthony Chemero’s /Radical Embodied Cognitive Science/. Then I’ll say why it seems to me that a collaborative circle’s characteristic talk-talk-talk and critiques of each others’ works facilitates larger creative breakthroughs.

So, my little breakthrough. A question you may have heard before is: “what’s the difference between a chair and a stool?” You might answer that a stool doesn’t have arms or a stool doesn’t have a back. But you can easily buy something labeled “stool” that does have arms and a back. And bean-bag chairs are called chairs, not bean-bag stools, even though they don’t have arms or backs. Sort of? Until you sit down in them? Anyway, the conclusion you’re supposed to draw is that the boundary between the two concepts is fuzzy. Fine. That’s a useful thing to understand about concepts or categories given that most of us have been trained to believe that they by definition have sharp edges – “necessary and sufficient conditions” is the jargon – and that’s just not true for the majority of categories.

But: while I was writing the script for this episode, I found myself wondering what makes me choose one of those words over the other in boundary cases, and I flashed on the word “comfort”. I realized that I associate chairs with situations where comfort is at least somewhat important, and stools with situations where comfort takes a definite back seat.

Consider the classic bar stool. More important than comfort is that you can squeeze a lot of them in the linear space in front of a bar, and that they’re the right height for both sitting patrons and a bartender who’s standing and moving around. Or: I inherited a carpenter’s stool from my dad: it’s quite short, so comfort is clearly secondary to portability. Or: If you do an image search for “dunce cap”, you’ll find many pictures of people sitting in corners on… stools. Because they’re being punished, so of *course* they’re not sitting in a comfy lounge chair.

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OK. Let’s say that my conception of “stool” has now changed. How did that happen? What things mattered, specifically?

1. I had an idea and I sanity-checked it against three examples: bar stool, carpenter’s stool, dunce sitting in a corner. Examples seem important.

It’s interesting to note that I treated my memories as if they were raw perceptions. That is, I didn’t actually go look at any stools. You could think of that two ways. The first is that memory is just a stored perception. But we know that’s not true. Memories are incomplete and malleable; eye-witness testimony, for example, is notorious fallible (except, alas, to the keepers of the US legal system). Memories just *aren’t* verbatim storage of sense perceptions. They’re more like an awfully lossy form of compression. Like in JPEG compression, they’re compressed so they can be expanded into something good enough for our purposes, such as using them as examples of concepts like “stool”. Features of a memory unlikely to be useful to animals in our ecological niche are discarded, just like MP3 encoding might discard very high or low frequency sounds.

Scientists like Barrett go further: they think perception itself is very lossy and purpose-dependent. We don’t come anywhere near constructing a model of the world from our sense perceptions: we perceive only those features in the world that are likely to be useful.

So, the claim I’m going to go with here is that there’s no fundamental difference between a memory and a perception, not when it comes to evaluating concepts.

2. Repetition strengthens and adjusts concepts. The three examples were better than one. And I’ve now written four versions of this “stool” story for the script you’re listening to me read. If I’d just flashed on the idea of “comfort” and not worried it like a dog worrying a bone, I’d probably have forgotten it by now. Instead, it’s stuck in my head.

3. Definitions include debris. We tend to think of concepts like “stool” or “tree” or even “concept” itself as being labelled by words. Barrett, following Andy Clark, suggests that words come first. It’s not absurd to think that what learning is, is attaching (lossily-compressed) experiences to preexisting words.

Consider this everyday scene: A child is walking with his mother. “Look at the doggie!” she says, pointing. The child reacts with some sort of interest and gets a rewarding smile. After several similar episodes, spread out over time, the child starts pointing and saying “doggie!” himself. Each time he’s rewarded with the pleasure of his mother. Once in a while, he gets it wrong, illustrating that counterexamples are important too. He might point at my daughter’s mostly-Chihuahua rescue dog and say, “rat!” His mother will correct him kindly and say, “No, dear, that’s a *little* doggie”. Over time, the child will be able to reliably identify dogs, and we can say he’s learned the concept of “dog”.

I say “concepts include debris” because concept formation is not exceptionally scrupulous about *what* compressed experience it attaches to words. Like a logjam in a river catching logs, twigs, empty beer cans, and fishing line, a concept will have associations that don’t make a lot of sense.

I apologize to my wife, who listens to these podcasts, but the sight of umbrella clotheslines – or even hearing them mentioned, as she just now has – provokes in her the same feeling as in Emily Dickinson’s poem about encountering a snake, which ends:

But never met this Fellow,
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone –

Dawn’s ability to successfully navigate a world with clotheslines, despite her visceral reaction or association, means that we might as well say that she has the same “concept” of “clothesline” as I do, even though hers clearly differs in a way important to her.

4. It matters how meaningful experiences are. An interesting fact about rabbits is that there’s a strong sense in which a rabbit can’t smell something that doesn’t yet matter to it. That is, if a rabbit has never smelled a carrot before and you waft carrot smell into its hutch, nothing much happens in its brain’s olfactory bulb, where smells are processed, and there are no resulting signals sent to its cortex. If you sent it carrot scent 100 days in a row at 10 a.m. each day, *still* nothing would happen. If, however, you deliver sugar water at the same time as the smell, the rabbit will begin a process called Hebbian learning, in which certain neurons will start firing together as a self-reinforcing cluster – that is, the output of the cluster feeds back into the input. Interestingly, the feedback loop is tuned to the frequency of a rabbit’s sniffs, so each new sniff of carrot gives the cluster a little bit of a push, like pumping your legs in a swing. When the cluster reaches a certain threshold, a circular activation pattern develops across the entire olfactory bulb, and that (or a derivative of that) is what’s delivered to the cortex, where it provokes some sort of action. That circular activation pattern is called an “attractor”, in the same sense it’s used in chaos theory: a not-exactly repetitive pattern that a system tends to settle into.

As a side note, while it might be fair to say that the smell of carrot is represented in the olfactory bulb by a collection of neurons that, when stimulated, fall into an attractor, it’s probably not fair to say that the rabbit has a concept of “carrot” that pulls together the smell and taste and color and meaning of a carrot into a single “place” that we could say “represents” the idea of “carrot”. The reason is that neurons are fantastically expensive, as cells go. Evolution can be haphazard, but there’s strong selection pressure toward thriftiness with the body’s energy supply. It does not appear a rabbit *needs* an internal representation of “carrot” to get on with its rabbit life, so it doesn’t have one.

5. Words are good for learning. Barrett and Clark agree that you and I have a concept for carrot, because we have language that allows concepts to accrete around words. For the types of lives we humans live, concepts are worth the cost.

“Clark literally thinks of language as a tool. That is, it hasn’t changed anything about the basic structure of our brains, or how they work, but rather it complements their functioning. It allows a parallel-processing pattern-recognizer to process things in serial fashion according to a set of precise rules. In other words, it allows the brain to operate “as if” it were a modern digital computer even though, as we’ve seen, brains don’t seem to work in that way at all. Language gives human brains a new way of dealing with the world.”

Barrett doesn’t quite say so, and I haven’t read Clark’s book yet, but it seems to me part of what language is *for* must be to allow us to form more concepts – and form them more quickly – than if we relied on experience alone. Language allows me to juxtapose an abstract feeling like “comfort” to an abstraction of a set of physical objects like “stool”. Rabbits, Barrett believes, can’t do anything like that.

Here’s another example. I’m going to ask you a question and assume you’ve never heard it before. Here goes: is the Pope a bachelor?

Let’s assume that concepts are something like the smell of a carrot. A “latent” concept is a set of nerve cells, wired in a particular way. A concept is *activated* when those cells are stimulated and fall into a self-reproducing attractor pattern. Because you’ve never heard the question before, let’s say the concepts of “Pope” and “bachelor” have never both been activated at the same time, at least not in conjunction with a motivation to link the two. Now they are. A quick victory for the power of words, together with a possible change to your concept of “bachelor” (represented by possibly ad-hoc changes to neurons).

6. Argument is effective when it’s affective. I’m being intolerably cutesy with the words, but I want to extend point 4 – that it matters how meaningful experiences are – into the realm of sequences of words. That is, we saw that rabbits learn smells if they’re meaningful: they are associated with rewards or, for that matter, dangers. I implied that a child learns “doggie” faster because of the emotional rewards his mother gives him. Here, I want to claim the same is true of *arguments*, using the word both in the sense of “a sequence of statements that justify a conclusion” and “an at-least-slightly emotionally charged discussion”.

As an example, I offer myself. I’ve had enough bad experience with arguments that start by appealing to dictionary definitions that an argument with that structure has very little effect on my understanding of a concept. You could say that it would, at best, add a tiny twig or a discarded fishing lure to my logjam. Or, hearing an argument structured that way for the ten thousandth time, I might – in a fit of pique – rip the fishing-lure-sized definition out of my logjam and throw it away.

(I may be getting somewhat carried away with this metaphor.)

But for other people, dictionary definitions carry a weight of authority. Let’s say they can add a big log to the logjam or reinforce one already there.

The point here is that different arguments “hit” different people differently, and the same argument may hit the same person differently at different times. David Byrne sang “Say something once, why say it again?”, but he sings it in a song titled “Psycho Killer”. I’m not a psycho killer, and I’ll assume you aren’t either. For people like us, whatever “it” is *has* to be said again: repetition and variation and some degree of tailoring is required.

OK. That’s my exposition of one strain of cognitive science. Let’s assume it’s true for now and see where it takes us, as is the habit of this podcast. So let’s have a few bars of “Psycho Killer” and move on to collaborative circles.

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Our epigraph for this episode might be from Paul Feyerabend’s autobiography, /Killing Time/: “We also assumed, at least initially, that a complicated issue involving major conceptual revisions could be solved by a single clever argument.” Or we could make that the epitaph for most every programmer most everywhere.

At the beginning of the episode, I quoted Farrell as saying that Impressionism combined ideas of Japanese woodcuts and Anglo-French landscape painting with the goal of “creating the impression produced by a fleeting glimpse of a landscape”. I’m going to count those as two pre-existing concepts plus a new one (an artistic goal perhaps none of them had considered before).

What was required before that synthesis could happen?

First of all, a larger number of concepts had to be laid out for consideration (that is, activated). They didn’t just pick the first three that came to mind. A benefit of a collaborative circle is that the union of everyone’s concepts is bigger than any single person’s private concepts.

What does “laid out for consideration” entail? Remember that a person “understands” the concept of “doggie” or “stool” or “bachelor” or “comfort” or “landscape painting” if they can communicate *well enough* to get along in a world whose most salient feature is other people.

Circle members are involved in large creative change. Surely all the Impressionists understood landscape painting well enough to get along in the Paris art world of their time. But, perhaps for all of them except Monet, that understanding wasn’t good enough for *innovating* in landscape painting, as the Impressionists were destined to do. So the Impressionists, led by Monet, had to each increase the size of their individual logjams that had accreted around the words “landscape painting”.

I don’t mean something crude like what’s called “the conduit metaphor” for language, which would suppose Monet would encode his understanding into words that would then shoot over into the heads of other circle members, who would then decode them into the same understanding.

Instead, they would all have to deploy examples, juxtapositions with other words or concepts, argumentation, and so on until enough people’s personal logjams were *good enough* – synchronized enough – that they could work creatively together. This would take time and repetition, especially for new concepts. Monet might have to rant about the ineffable beauty of a fleeting glimpse multiple times before one of them struck Renoir in a way that previous rants hadn’t. Or Bazille’s description of what he thought Monet meant – or didn’t mean – might have resonated with Renoir as Monet never could.

Better than rants is a back-and-forth. In my own experience juxtaposing “comfort” with “chair” and “stool”, I had a little mental discussion that went something like “Chairs are about comfort and stools aren’t. No, that can’t be right, what about uncomfortable designer chairs or padded stools? So, what about something like ‘comfort is the default goal for a chair, but not the default goal for a stool?’, and so on.” I’m one of those people with a strong inner voice – I think by talking – so taking both sides of an argument isn’t *too* hard, but other people are more creative than I am at finding objections to my ideas.

My personal feeling is that any circle should move to concrete examples quickly – that is, to discussions of paintings, poems, and the like. Discussing examples is the best way to determine whether people’s concepts actually *have* converged enough.

An example from my own experience is when I was in a three-person working group about something to do with the Rational Unified Process. The other two got into a discussion about the definition of the word “plan” that I swear took up the better part of an hour. Given how I feel about definitions, I checked out of the conversation and waited impatiently. When they’d finished, I said “You think you both agree, and *you* think you both agree, but I guarantee you don’t agree.” It took not too long to show I was right, and I’m pretty sure that was revealed by looking at (or trying to create) an example of a test plan.

As concepts go, “plan” is pretty concrete. Lord knows how long the discussion would have taken if the concept at issue had been “the impression of fleeting glimpses” or the Fugitive Poet’s emphasis on words like “theme”, “setting”, or “tone”.

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When bashing concepts together to make a creative breakthrough, it’s not enough that people have similar enough logjams attached to a particular word. The logjams – the contents of the concepts – have to be adjusted so that they can fit together.

For example, Renoir and Monet didn’t *just* put together Japanese-style bright colors with landscape painting. I’m no painter, and my visual imagination is poor, but I think they had to think about what it means to paint with bright colors when looking at a landscape that has relatively muted colors. Something needs to change about the conception of “a landscape painting”. And the connotations of “painting with bright colors” have to change too. I’m out of my depth here, but imagine them noticing that the visual effect of small patches of adjacent bright colors is markedly different than large patches and so thinking that the thing to focus on was the effects of juxtaposing brush strokes as opposed to the painterly tradition of blending brush strokes, then carrying that forward to concentrate on the ever-changing play of light on water, which was the Impressionists’ first big breakthrough.

And Renoir and Monet’s breakthrough in that one summer of pair work had to be communicated back to the larger circle, both in terms of abstract talk and detailed discussion of individual paintings, so that members of the circle could update their logjams to accommodate insights into Impressionism. And – in the process – they surely changed Renoir’s and Monet’s ideas of what they had been doing and why.

This kind of thing is going to take time. I think there are two conspicuous forces pushing against success at this process. The first is that some people will want to converge to a common point of view too quickly, settling for something that can’t be called a breakthrough. The second is that some people won’t be eager to converge at all. They might prefer to keep talking because they like talking, or because they want the group to converge on *their* favorite idea. Different roles help with both problems.

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A couple of roles from the last episode remain important. Because the arguments and discussions are emotionally charged, the Peacekeeper role is needed to mediate. The Charismatic Leader role – though its importance diminishes as time moves on – may be needed to keep people optimistic that they should push forward instead of settling for what they’ve gotten to so far. Note that it’s not unusual for the charismatic leader to change. Whereas before, “charisma” meant being challenging, inspiring, and ambitious, as the circle develops the role becomes more about being *accomplished*. Sometimes the same person can do both, sometimes not.

I think the key role for preventing premature convergence is what Farrell calls the Boundary Markers. They come in two forms, though Farrell occasionally hints at more. The Conservative Boundary Marker is a person willing to be seen as closest to the status quo the circle is rejecting. The Radical Boundary Marker wants to push beyond what the circle currently accepts. While boundary markers may be perfectly sincere, it seems most all of them relish the role of Devil’s Advocate. That is, they enjoy publicly taking a position contrary to what most of the circle believes.

The Boundary Markers are distinct from last episode’s Scapegoats in two ways. First, they are insiders to the circle, rather than being on the periphery. Second, their ideas are more than objects of ridicule; they’re discussed seriously (even if eventually rejected). Some circles, like the Fugitive Poets, have ritualized dialogues between the boundary markers, where engaging with dissimilar views is part of the rules.

In the first-wave feminist Ultras, Antoinette Brown was a Conservative Boundary Marker. For example, she wanted the first-wave feminists to base their arguments for women’s rights on the Bible instead of the Rights of Man ideology of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Brown’s approach would have been more appealing to the status quo. For one thing, it would align feminism with the religiously-affiliated anti-slavery and anti-alcohol movements. And, despite its American pedigree, “Rights of Man” smacked too much of the French Revolution, and Americans of the time were not too thrilled with how that little historical episode had turned out.

So Brown combined concepts from the status quo with the emerging understanding of feminism to argue that the status quo implied feminism. Her argument didn’t carry the day, but it could have. Even though she lost, Brown remained a valued circle member.

However, it’s possible for a Conservative Boundary Marker to be ejected from a circle, essentially being demoted to the role of the mocked external Scapegoat. Indeed, conflict between the Conservative and Radical Boundary Markers can tear a group apart. The Peacemaker will have her work cut out for her preventing that. (I assign the Peacemaker a gender in honor of my wife, who often played that role at work.)

The Radical Boundary Marker has the job of making outlandish ideas more acceptable, perhaps by associating them with ideas already agreed upon. Elizabeth Cady Stanton played this role in the Ultras. At the first Women’s State Temperance Society meeting, Stanton made a speech that “acted as a bombshell not only at this meeting, but in press, pulpit and society.” Rather than allying with the clergy, she attacked them for their leading role in oppressing women. She compared marriage to slavery and divorce to the Underground Railroad that took escaped slaves to safety. Elsewhere, she said women should have the right to vote, which is just crazy talk. (At the time, the feminists were mainly advocating for equal access to education and the elimination of archaic laws about when women could own or inherit property.)

A common attack against collaborative circles is that they are sloppy and undisciplined. (I remember this very much from the early days of lightweight methods; the very name was said to imply carelessness.) I suppose that’s an easy attack: the status quo has had all kinds of time to regularize, refine, and “domesticate” their ideas and techniques, but a circle has not. A response to that attack is to deflect it onto *only* the Radical Boundary Marker. In the Impressionists, that was the role of Cézanne:

“Cézanne seemed to embody what the Salon and the public attempted to pin on [the Impressionist circle] – incompetence and undisciplined rebelliousness. While they sought the approval of the Salon jury and the public, he showed only contempt for their standards by submitting work that was deliberately provocative and sloppy. Though the members had sacrificed success and income to stay committed to the group culture, they still felt ambivalent toward it. Cézanne was thus a boundary marker for the group – embodying traits they denied in themselves. After each jury rejection they could say something like, ‘At least we are serious. We’re not rebellious adolescents like Cézanne.’”

The Boundary Markers may influence the coalesced group vision, but they do not *determine* it. That’s the job of the Center Coalition. The Center Coalition “assumes responsibility for weighing and integrating the innovations into a new vision. Through dialogues with the creative pairs and the devil’s advocate, the Center Coalition eventually negotiates consensus on a coherent and engaging vision. The center coalition comprises members who have won respect through their contributions to the work of the group, and who use their emergent authority to socialize marginal members into the emerging group culture.”

Or:

“The center coalition […] consists of two or more highly respected members who are not identified with either the radical or conservative extremes but who make up the audience and jury for the arguments between the boundary markers. The center coalition sifts through the arguments, and then synthesizes the conflicting views into a common vision. The coalition members are the ones who give voice to the shared beliefs and values of the group – their style, manifesto, or vision.

“Once the coalition members crystallize a vision, they produce work based on the vision and attempt to persuade the others to use it. In the Impressionist circle, Monet and Renoir were the initial members of the center coalition. It was their synthesis of the circle’s experiments that gave definitive form to the Impressionist vision. Monet convinced Pissarro to adopt the new style. Pissarro then socialized Cézanne into it. Monet, along with Berthe Morisot, who also became a member of the center coalition, persuaded Edouard Manet to adopt the circle’s style. The center coalition distills out of larger discussions the essential elements of the group vision and articulates them to the rest of the members.”

I like the emphasis on the Center Coalition being quick to *do the work* rather than just talk. The vision doesn’t lead to the work, any more than a requirements document unproblematically leads to a product. Instead, progress on each leads to progress on the other, in a feedback loop.

Whereas the Boundary Markers act to hold open possibilities and push against premature satisfaction, the Center Coalition keeps the circle from going on and on without ever coming to a conclusion.

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There are two roles left. The first is Cork. Renoir is the exemplar.

“Renoir was ambivalent about many of the issues that animated the group’s discussions. Monet’s aggressive rejection of classicism and studio painting appealed to him, but he also admired the careful drawing and classical themes of Ingres. He was torn between painting outdoors and painting in the studio, between subjectivism and objectivism, between Manet and Cabanal. He often characterized himself as a cork “floating in a stream, ‘tossed about on the current.’

“In heated discussions, Renoir often avoided taking sides, but instead let the dialogues in his head play out in the discussions in the group.”

In terms of concept shaping, someone like Renoir will, as a byproduct of his ambivalence and conflicted thoughts, come up with new ways of explaining or synthesizing ideas. “Through participation in the debates, and through identification with the spokespersons for both sides, the conflicted members eventually resolve their ambivalence, firmly commit themselves to a vision, and become free to work more productively.”

There’s a certain deftness or talent required in this role: I can remember times in my life when I tried to mediate between opposing positions and ended up with both sides agreeing on exactly one thing: Brian Marick is a jerk.

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I could imagine collaborative circles with nothing more than these roles enabling bursts of individual creativity, but Farrell locates most of the *important* creativity in the role of Collaborative Pair. Let me give some snapshots of collaborative pairs before going to generalizations.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were a speechwriting collaborative pair. As Stanton told it later:

“We were at once fast friends, in thought and sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other. In writing we did better work together than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of thirty long years… Our speeches may be considered the united product of our two brains.”

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford also collaborated, for example on rewriting an earlier novel of Ford’s. This coworking was a high-intensity experience. Quoting Ford:

“We would write for whole days, for half nights, for half the day or all the night. We would jot down passages on scraps of paper or on the margins of books, handing them one to the other or exchanging them. We would roar with laughter over passages that would have struck no other soul as humorous; Conrad would howl with rage and I would almost sigh over others that no one else perhaps would have found as bad as we considered them. We would recoil one from the other and go each to our own cottage… In those cottages we would prepare other drafts and so drive backwards and forwards with packages of manuscripts.”

I’ll end the vignettes with a pair Farrell didn’t cover, the programmers Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Here’s a bit from Thompson’s Turing Award lecture:

“That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recall only one case of miscoordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character. The result of our work together has been far greater than the work that we each contributed.”

This tight sympathy is not unique to that 20 lines of code. Conrad’s novel /Nostromo/ was published as a magazine serial. Once, when Conrad was sick, Ford wrote the next installment, and you’d have to be a Conrad scholar to spot which installment that is.

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Generalization time. When members of successful pairs look at each other, what do they see?

1. A friend. In episode 38, I said that I didn’t think collaborative circles depended on anything more than “business friendship,” but I was wrong when it comes to pairs. Take, for example, the close friendship Stanton described between her and Anthony. At the very least, the two have to find each other easy to talk with and to share characteristics that make them potential friends.

2. A person who “mirrors”. That’s psychoanalytic jargon. In its basic form, mirroring is what I described when I talked about a child learning the concept “doggie”. It’s a parent’s attitude of fascination and joy that encourages the child to go further. Call it a delightfully appreciative audience who constantly communicates that the child can – and *will* – keep doing better. Admiring but demanding.

In collaborative pairs, Farrell says,

“Mirroring is a combination of parenting, therapy, and good teaching. It includes a sensitivity to the subjective life of the other person and authentic delight with that person’s acquisition of skills and abilities. It includes an ability to appreciate the struggle to create, to reflect back to the other that his creative work is appreciated and understood, and to have one’s reactions unclouded by jealousy, rivalry, cynicism, or the desire to control.”

3. A useful critic. The other person is used to avoid self-censorship: “Because there is another to act as critic, each participant is freed to suspend critical judgment and let imagination fly, trusting that the other will help clean up the resulting product.” Freud thought Wilhelm Fleiss a supreme scientist and theoretician, so (in the words of a biographer), “It was safe to set the feared daemon of curiosity free, when he [Freud] was guided by someone who believed in physics and operated in mathematical symbols.”

Note that critical skill should be matched to weaknesses. For example, English was Joseph Conrad’s third language, after Polish and French, so his writing was stylistically awkward and somewhat overblown. Ford was a good stylist, so he could provide Conrad a useful service. But despite Ford’s skill with detail, he was lousy with the structural aspects of writing, like a plot that made sense – that wasn’t “just one damned thing after another” – and Conrad helped him with that.

4. An ideal. The Civil Rights activist Jessie Jackson describes himself as having been adrift before he met the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. “When [Jackson] identified with King, when he linked himself with his image of King and his mission, he felt stronger and able to act in a sustained, constructive way. Eventually, this personal identification became the foundation for the more abstract values that guided his actions, stabilized his self-esteem, and provided a sense of internal cohesion.”

The ideal has some traits or skills or perspective or mission or something that the other pair member wants to incorporate. Renoir – the self-described indecisive “cork” – was attracted to Monet in part for the latter’s daring and readiness to plunge in and experiment.

Additionally, mirroring given by someone you idealize makes the appreciative audience even more motivating: “Because Fleiss took him seriously, [Freud] took himself more seriously”.

My hunch, though, is that people in pairs must avoid the all-too-human tendency to emulate *everything* about their ideal. The great jazz saxophonist Charles Parker, nicknamed “Bird”, was also a heroin addict. I’ve read that, after he died – helped along by heroin – there was a saying “If you wanna blow like Bird blew, you gotta do like Bird did.” Heroin gained in popularity among musicians but those who took it up later regretted it.

5. A reciprocator. For Farrell, a crucial moment in the development of a pair is when *I* reveal unfinished work to *you* and brace for the reaction. Part of your reaction has to be admiration for taking the risk, caring criticism, and all that. But if you don’t now reveal unfinished work back to me, our pair will probably never be able to ratchet the risk-taking up to the level of creative breakthrough. Similarly, I might not as good as you at mirroring – at being the audience delighted with your progress – but if I don’t do it at *all*, the pair won’t work.

That’s the end of my list. Farrell summarizes thusly: “trust, intimacy, openness, an egalitarian relationship, acceptance of differences in perspectives, and a kind of empathic attention that enables the creative person to explore his most disturbing thoughts.”

Which leads me to creative work:

“As the members share jokes, fantasies, and hunches as well as polished thoughts, ideas from one person are combined with ideas from the other, and the associations result in new combinations that might never have occurred when either person worked alone. Finally, once the ideas emerge, as each plays the role of critic for the other, the ideas are reworked into useful components for the emerging shared vision. Two are thus able to accomplish what one might never have accomplished alone.”

That, I think, is at least *similar to* the blending of concepts that I was talking about in the beginning of the episode. The next step is bringing it back to the circle, and then – perhaps – to the world.

As far as bringing it to the circle, Farrell comments of the Impressionists: “Although the intimacy of the [pair] was more conducive to taking risks and opening up to one another, the abrasive dialogue with the whole group led to clarification of the idea.”

While I don’t think the abrasiveness of the Impressionist or Fugitive Poets group discussions is necessary, I do think it’s important for the new concepts of a pair to be explained to the group, so as to extract them into language that other people can then learn from and work with as they adjust their own concepts.

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That would have been an OK ending, I think, but I worry that this episode makes collaborative pairs seem *too* high intensity, too demanding, a once-in-a-lifetime meeting of soulmates. That ain’t necessarily so.

First, the work can be intense, but it can be sporadic. Anthony’s visits to Stanton were special occasions of intense work. Something similar was true of Conrad and Ford. Quoting Ford: “We each at intervals carried on work of our own. Then we would drop it, have another month’s try at [revising the novel] “Romance”. Then drop that again.”

Second, a short, not-so-intense pairing can deliver a tidy little bundle of value. Once, when painting outside, Renoir happened to meet Diaz de la Pena, an established landscape painter.

“Diaz examined Renoir’s work and decided he liked it. That summer, they painted together several times. […] It was Diaz who persuaded [Renoir] not to use dark colors […] even when painting shadows. Renoir later remembered: ‘I immediately began painting another landscape, and tried to render the light on the trees, in the shadows, and on the ground as it really appeared to me… “You’re crazy!” exclaimed Sisley when he saw my picture. “The idea of making trees blue and the ground purple!” But after some experimenting of his own, Sisley adopted the innovations, and the pair passed the ideas on to Bazille and Monet.”

So don’t turn down a brief fling because you’re waiting for Monsieur or Mademoiselle Right.

≤ music ≥

This series on collaborative circles has been somewhat brutal to create. I did it because, from what I hear, software development keeps getting worse for the people at the bottom of the organization chart, and it has been for a good many years.

I do believe that the most significant improvements happen at the team level and bubble up, so I’ve favored episodes applicable to that, ones that might give teams hope that a different way *is* possible, and provide some tools or frameworks-to-think-with that might help teams improve their situation. Hence this series, the series on gift economies, on Elinor Ostrom’s /Managing the Commons/.

The results after a year? I can’t say this podcast has been the snowflake that started an avalanche, but I still hope it will be of some use to someone.

Still, going forward, at least for a while, I’m going to focus on neat ideas of use to individuals, and things that are just neat ideas in general without quite so much straining to fix corporate and societal structures that treat people as resources to be extracted until they run dry. As such, I announce here the new tag-line for the podcast:

Welcome to Oddly Influenced, a podcast for people who *want* to apply ideas from *outside* software *to* software.

So coming up: Watts’ centrifugal regulator, diving gannets, and why a pound of lead actually *is* heavier than a pound of feathers.

This is the longest episode yet. Thanks for your patience, and thank you for listening.