Fatalism in the workplace is the belief that you can’t control or influence the work you do or how you do it. Engagement is a measure of commitment, motivation, and involvement. Engagement impacts a person’s work, their colleagues, and their organization. An engaged person is passionate about their work. With few exceptions, hierarchy is a fact of life. Hierarchy defines the levels of authority, responsibility, and decision-making within a company or organization. A simpler definition that is often used is the “chain of command.”
Jeffrey Miller and I have been trying to coordinate a time for an interview on the topics of tribal knowledge and team playbooks since August 2022. We finally solved that problem. Teams generate knowledge, and understanding how to hold on to that knowledge and push boundaries forward is why teams are powerful.
X-as-a-Service – providing or consuming a service with minimal interaction, and
Facilitating – helping another team clear impediments.
Each team probably uses multiple approaches, however, one is the most common. The team’s topology predicts its most common mode. For example, a stream-aligned team will generally collaborate with other stream-aligned teams. Alternatively, they will use the x-as-a- service mode with other teams they have transactional relationships with. For example, procuring software licenses would require interacting with procurement. Interaction modes change based on context.
I have been considering the relationship between privilege and fatalism. Boiling down the impact of privilege into a few words, we find advantage and the potential for power. Whether it is the ability to make decisions about the work you will do, the power to direct others to do work, or even just to be heard, privilege is power. That power can generate fatalism in those without the power privilege delivers. As an agile coach, the concepts of privilege and fatalism often collide. Early in my career, a mentor passed on a piece of advice. If you have a great idea, have a consultant tell it to my boss (my mentor’s boss). They will accept it from them, not from you or me. The consultants had privilege. The message was clear, we did not and wouldn’t be listened to. This is an example of a collision of fatalism and privilege. This was of course despite our corporate mottos “we only hire the best and brightest” and “our employees are our greatest assets” which were emblazoned on posters in the lunch room. Looking back it is hard to understand how that amount of cognitive dissonance was tolerable. I am now on the other side of that coin. Where power differentials exist and are used as a tool to gather power then privilege and fatalism run wild.
A funny thing happened on the way to SPaMCAST 757. I was considering critical thinking when I ran into data that challenged a common agile belief – enter critical thinking. The idea is that constant collaboration, the goal of team rooms, and always-on communication software, is to create good ideas and decisions; good but not great.
This week we also have a visit from Susan Parente who talks about her approach to personal kanban, something she calls kanban for one. Susan also takes us under the hood for a view into her busy, innovative world and how she keeps it under control.
The boundaries of teams are shaped by a huge number of pressures ranging from corporate politics and specialism to architectural structure. Inspecting the majority of team boundaries it would seem that boundaries are the outcome of a random walk because they reflect all of these pressures over time. The result is that poor team design impacts architecture and flow. It is rare to have the ability to design teams from day one or even to press the hard reboot button.
Some of the most celebrated stories in business literature are where people did not accept the rules or others believed that they were not empowered to act and acted. One of my favorites tells the story of a Federal Express (before it was FedEx) employee. They picked up the whole drop-off box and took it back to the station because their key wouldn’t work. They acted and accepted responsibility for their behavior. Years ago a friend and colleague paid with their career. My friend approved an emergency change to a department’s website when it went down. The change went to production without going through the change control board which would have taken several days to meet. They knew what they had to do, the failure put lives at risk (it is a cool story) and there would be serious consequences. The person in both stories did not accept that something was outside of their control, acted, and pushed forward.
SPaMCAST 756 welcomes back Paul Gibbons. In this visit, we discuss his new book Change Myths: The Professional’s Guide to Separating Sense from Nonsense which he co-authored with Tricia Kennedy. I have described Paul’s new book as a Trojan horse. While it dispels myths it more importantly provides the tools for critical thinking which will allow you to tackle new myths as they appear.
Pau’s bio:
Paul Gibbons is an author, academic, speaker, and business consultant He has authored numerous books, including Change Myths: The Professional’s Guide to Separating Sense from Nonsense and The Science of Successful Organizational Change, He lives in the Denver area with his two sons and enjoys playing poker, chess, and other mind sports.
A few weeks ago a colleague and I were discussing why a team never had anything to show during the demo part of their sprint review. The team works on a large number of small to medium size enhancements. The work is important to the business, so as soon as it is ready they get approval and promote it into production. At the end of the sprint, there is nothing for show and tell. I suggested that the duration of the sprint was too long. A shorter sprint would afford a chance to gather broader feedback before moving the work into production. The discussion went something like this:
SPaMCAST 755 features an essay on the relationship between engagement, hierarchy, and fatalism based on a discussion of the topic between the SPaMCAST Columnists. The ideas of hierarchy, engagement, and fatalism struck a nerve within the SPaMCAST family. To a person, the prevailing attitude is that hierarchy has value, but only to a point.
Jon M Quigley joins the cast in the second slot this week with a discussion about making mistakes. Learning from mistakes is important but making the same mistake over and over is not a sign that you are learning. /
Software Process and Measurement 