The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.15. Superconductivity as Metaphor

Before I became a software designer, I was a theoretical physicist. So it is natural for me to draw comparisons between certain aspects of software development and physics. It occurred to me recently that the phenomenon of superconductivity provides a useful metaphor for helping us understand the challenges of managing software developers.

At normal temperatures, individual electrons within a potentially superconductive material collide with the material's atomic lattice, losing energy with each collision. But if you lower the temperature of the material sufficiently, its electrons pair up and begin mimicking each other's behavior. The paired electrons act as if they are one particle.

Pretty soon, all the electrons are moving in the same direction. Their individual behavior becomes a global effect. The collisions stop and the material's electrical resistance disappears. The result is a quantum leap in conductivity.

In our metaphor, software developers are the electrons and the software development project is the lattice structure surrounding them.

Under normal conditions, the developers bounce back and forth, ricocheting haphazardly from one problem to the next. And like the electrons, they lose energy with each collision. As a group, they are inefficient and relatively unproductive.

In an enterprise dedicated to true IT productivity, however, management organizes software developers into collaborative units and promotes a style of coherent ...