The tribalism hurting your agile practice

My Agile Practice has changed over the years.

It has been a strange year.  Last year, I was talking about comfort food and sleeplessness.  Three hundred and sixty-five days later, I want to share a little wisdom I have gained along the way.  This week how disappointment can make you a better scrum master. 

I have deliberately not discussed politics on this blog.  The internet is filled with plenty of places on the political right and political left to discuss current events.  I have plenty of strong opinions myself but do not share them here because they are not germane to the discussion of Agile, Lean, and Scrum.  The world of business transformation is hard enough; injecting partisan political views seems counterproductive to me.

I come from the world of college debate and forensics.  It is a community centered in the “reality-based,” zones of academia, science, media, and government.  It is a skeptical community which relies on empiricism and rhetoric to persuade others. These same institutions are referred to by political conservatives as pillars of deceit.  A year ago, my smug self-assurance in my expertise took a severe beating. 

Over the last year, I have gotten much wiser.  I have rededicated myself to my profession.  I shut down my internet startup.  I even made an effort to listen to Nickelback to see if there was any merit to their music.  Suffice to say; it was the audio equivalent of eating chocolate frosting out of a tub with a spoon; including the stomach ache. 

The most significant notion revealing itself to me was the concept of epistemic-tribalism.  I felt that if you are “reality-based,” and gave people the facts of the situation, they would eventually come around to your point of view.  If this formulation was good enough for Socrates, then it was good enough for my agile practice.  I now realize this was naive.  People have deep emotional and political biases.  Stating the facts is not good enough.  When confronted with facts that contradict their worldview or place in the world, some people will reject those facts.  It is similar to the ideas of Wittgenstein who explained language was a construct and subject to games.  Furthermore, two people can look at the same object and see two different things.  The neat and tidy world based on objective reality and evidence fell away replaced by an effete world of conjecture resembling a postmodern literary theory class.  It was disorienting. 

If epistemic tribalism can happen in the realm of national politics, it is not too far of a stretch to see it manifest itself the cubical of an office.  Personal relationships are more important than sales.  Countless Quid Pro Quo agreements bind the office together and harm customer service.  Tenure with the organization is more important than accomplishment.  Finally, being likable is more important than getting work done.  It became clear to me that these things were happening.  I counted on the better angles of others instead of understanding the tangled webs of motivations.  To be a successful scrum master or agile coach, I had to accept office professionals could be nasty and brutish. 

So this last year for me, the political became professional.  Reason and empiricism are less useful tools for change compared with understanding the motivations and prejudices of my colleagues.  Epistemic-tribalism is a real thing, and you need to understand it in your organization.  Finally, it takes disappointment for you to set aside your prejudices and view your surrounding differently.

Until next time.

The Coffee Pot and Innovation

The coffee pot can tell you a lot
of things about the corporate culture. 

Certain things happen in a business which are illustrative of that organizations culture and its approach to innovation.  This week I wanted to share an example.

The facts

It is 8:30 on a week day.  The coffee pot is out of fresh coffee and a pound of fresh ground coffee is sitting next to the pot.  The department manager comes into the office and sees there are no pre-measured packages from the coffee service.  They retrieve three pre-measured bags of coffee and make a pot of coffee.

The maker and innovator in the office perceives 

“This is why we cannot innovate in the business.  You had a pound of coffee and could not make a pot of coffee without a measuring spoon or visually filling the coffee filter.  This means we are inflexible to changing situations, unwilling to try new things, and unable to deal with ambiguity.”

The person who made the coffee perceives

“I don’t see it that way.  The pre-measured coffee is just the right amount.  I do not have to measure it.  I don’t have to guess and I know that I am going to get a good pot of coffee every time.  This means less waste and everyone got a cup of coffee with no fuss.”

Some conclusions

I need to read some Wittgenstein or take a class on his feelings about the nature of reality.  I am the innovator in the office and being unable to make coffee without pre-measured packages makes me crazy and is an example why change and innovation is so difficult.  The person who made the coffee does not see this as a symptom of a larger cultural issue and is more concerned with the end result rather than the process of making coffee.

This further reinforces what I have been reading in business literature and in cognitive psychology.  People want creativity until they are confronted with creative people and ideas; then educators and business leaders reject creativity.  So we create a situation of cognitive dissonance where we want people to be creative and adaptable but when they are we discourage those behaviors.

This is the world of shadows that a scrum master needs to navigate. We need to help people learn new ways of doing things but not be too creative otherwise we are going to face backlash and rejection.

So how do we agile professionals learn to better manage change in organizations who prefer the coffee in pre-measured packages?  I would love to hear your recommendations.

Until next time.