The ethics of Agility
It is a given that agile practices require an open and trustful environment to succeed. It is also given that agile practices help promote such an environment. But in a development project it is hardly enough.
In a development team, I like to characterise the level of trust I need to be comfortable with the simple question “Would I go to war with that guy in my platoon ?”. This is obviously figurative as I have never been in a war and cannot begin to imagine the reality of it. The idea in that in a combat unit if a grenade is thrown in the middle of the unit, the soldier who sees it first will cover it with his body to protect the rest of the unit. On the same idea soldiers rotate at the head of a column where you are more likely to be shot or to trigger a trap. These are only two examples of what lies behind the question. In the more peaceful environment of an agile team it means that when someone discovers technical debt, that person (that pair) needs to address it on the spot before it becomes a problem for others in the team. It means that the riskier tasks are rotated but affect a single member of the team at a time, limiting the risk that others will be affected.
This is why, for me, the question “Would I go to war with that guy in my platoon ?” summarises the kind of ethics I have come to like and expect in my team mates. A team that shows this kind of ethics is probably “jelling”. A team that shows opposite behaviours is probably falling apart and will drag the project in its wake.
I almost forgot. The ethics are important in an agile context because the process will emanate from them, making the team truly self organised, if not self directed.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:22 am
There are numerous other benefits of rotating roles in a team. One of my personal favorites is that each individual can observe different things from that position. By bringing together the different perspectives it is probably possible to produce a more optimal result. There is also cross training. There is improving the bus ratio (how many of your team have to be hit by a bus for all your work to grind to a halt). There is teambuilding. There is building a sense of collective ownership.
Your metaphor can also be extended to process debt. Take two former teams of mine. Both had a complex spreadsheet that managed part of their process and rotated its ownership around the team. In one team, each owner in the rotation counted the days to his or her liberation. In the other, each owner would either make changes to the spreadsheet that would make it easier on the next person, or identify the points of highest pain for someone more adept to improve on during the next round.
It is obvious which of these teams I would feel more motivated to work with. However, I am not convinced that ethics are the main issue. If individuals in a team do not feel any ownership of a problem or empowerment to resolve it, perhaps they are being managed exclusively on individual goals rather than team goals.
In another team I had one individual who did not behave like the others and appeared to be less inclined to “take one for the team”. He was known for his cynicism and sat alone a lot. He said he liked it that way. However, a new manager demonstrated the importance of this cynic and his role of nay-sayer to help the team challenge themselves and achieve better results. He wasn’t opposed to doing the work or doing it for the team. He just saw that the group wisdom was not always the best course of action. It would not have been ethical to fall into line with peer-pressure.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I may not have chosen my metaphor correctly. In my mind it is about duty and responsibility. Not about self sacrifice.
It is also definitely not about peer pressure. Nor is it a judgment of the skills or qualification of an individual. It is about what makes a team. I have my share of example of grumpy individuals that contribute using mostly negative feedback and this does not contradict the ethics I offered here. Some of these grumpy individuals I trusted to not leave skeletons around and some I did not.
I also think managerial methods only reinforce or attenuate the ethics (or MAP if I am so bold as to use Miki Saxon‘s trade mark) that preexist in the individual. It is all about the moral obligations you put on yourself with respects to the other members of your work group.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
It is also possible that you’ve tickled the “nurture-vs-nature debate” part of our brains…