The fight against alienation is real

Don't inflict help

Any time a professional person attempts to change an organization they belong they are going to face a backlash.  Socrates would argue that this kind of behavior was the product of ignorance.  The philosopher would say once people knew the difference between objective right and wrong, people would choose right.  It was an optimistic view of human nature and one which is non-existent in the contemporary office.  Business people can be nasty, cruel and brutish as Thomas Hobbes would call them in “The Leviathan.”  A business person can exhibit the manipulative insincerity of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”  Worse of all, professionals can exhibit the traits of the “Ubermensch” running roughshod over the “last men,” as Nietzsche would call them.  Backlash, is natural in human progress and it is up to coaches and scrum masters to address it.

Fear and uncertainty dominate the contemporary office environment.  Lots of factors are to blame for this state of affairs, but the principal factor is the shareholder value postulate of business.  In this postulate, shareholders or investors are the most important constituency in a corporation.  Customers, employees, and communities which also rely on the corporation receive secondary treatment because they are not as important as shareholders.  It is how we have educated a generation of business leaders since the 1970s.

Combine this trend with the deregulatory actions of the conservative movement, and you have a recipe for sterile and exploitive work environments.  It does not matter if you are blue collar, white collar or in service industries you are generating wealth for others with little upside to yourself.   Karl Marx called this the “labor theory of alienation.” It is one of the few things which Marx has written which has held up to scrutiny over the years.

So the agile coach is often in an environment where people are alienated.  People work hard enough not to get fired but not too hard because they will be singled out for extra responsibility with no subsequent increase in pay or authority.  The “company way” keeps a person paid and provides a modicum of security.  It is a miserable and uninspiring way to work.  Thus, the coach or scrum master is fighting on three fronts.  The coach must address the apathy of individual team members.  Next, they are changing the perspective of managers who often benefit from the alienation of the workers they are supposed to serve.  Finally, inertia in the organization acts as an easy alibi to resist organizational change. It is frustrating.  You are hired by organizations to help them change, and they actively oppose the change.

What I have discovered over the last few weeks is organizations want to improve; they do not know how.  Companies need scrum masters and coaches to help them.  They are looking for individuals to offer help rather than inflict it on the organization.  Often a scrum master acts as a therapist or pastor to an organization.  A coach needs to practice non-violent language and help others find solutions rather than dictating those solutions.  It is not easy, but anything worthwhile is going to be difficult.  Backlash is natural and it is up to the agile community to turn it back on itself to effect real change.

Until next time.