Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.
Thanks for this. One of the issues I found with the Agile implementation in my current company is that there's no longer an architectural/technical leadership within the team: the manager acts as scrum master, but it doesn't guide on how things should be done. As a result, as the quoted paragraph mentions, there's progress when the team is well suited for a given set of tasks. But most of the time progress is slow, because the team doesn't want to tackle the boring ones, or challenging tasks that would require the extra mile of effort.
That extends to the leadership of the company. It seems structureless, or "democratic" organizations can only work if the will/resolve/capacity of the lowest common denominator is good enough, and there's a large pool of commonly-minded individuals.
In a properly structured Scrum team, the Scrum Master is a peer of the other team members and not a resource manager. The Product Manager sets the priorities and can insist that the team tackle boring or challenging user stories if that's what delivers the most customer value.
One of the issues I found with the Agile implementation in my current company is that there's no longer an architectural/technical leadership within the team
Agile Coach here. Yes, this is toxic to quality and technical excellence.
The typical hybrid Scrum/corporate org chart I find puts product ownership (the “business”) in control and leaves each team’s tech lead (responsible for getting the team to the sprint goal) as the last line of defense of quality and technical excellence. What ends up happening, tech leads with no technical air cover give up craftsmanship in exchange for making the product owner happy and therefore keeping their job. A number of companies are going to wake up in a few years with an agile hangover of legacy garbage rivaling the mountain of shit they used agile to replace.
When the Agile movement started out, it was very much about empowering teams to do good work. But the form that won, Scrum, was the one least disruptive to existing corporate hierarchies. (At least until somebody invented SAFe, a comically unagile Agile process.) I have very rarely seen "we're doing Agile" shops where technical concerns weren't entirely overruled by business concerns, when the goal of many early Agile proponents was to bring them back in balance. (And here I use "business concerns" advisedly, in that they're often much more about the political concerns of managers, not the actual needs of customers or the business.)
Your point about "legacy garbage rivaling the mountain of shit they used agile to replace" is spot on. If an org does a big rewrite without fixing the problems that got them the mess, they just get another mess. Switching from manager-dominated waterfall to manager-dominated mini-waterfall with some Agile labels slapped on doesn't fix the broken feedback loops and distorted values that created the legacy garbage. It would be as if George Washington had declared himself king after the Revolutionary War, or when a left-wing dictator overthrows a right-wing dictator. Deeper change is necessary.
>That extends to the leadership of the company. It seems structureless, or "democratic" organizations can only work if the will/resolve/capacity of the lowest common denominator is good enough, and there's a large pool of commonly-minded individuals.
It’s a chicken or the egg problem kind of problem. For all its talk about its love “freedom,” America is a deeply authoritarian and putative society.
The institutions that define much of our default “social scripts” (e.g. school, and later, work) are run like little dictatorships and their hierarchy and despotic bent come to define and permeate broader culture. Surrendering your “fundamental rights” (like freedom of speech and assembly), the moment you cross the threshold of your workplace leads to cognitive dissonance and a diminished belief in the truth of their “inalienable” status, both at work and in society at large.
The democratic participation of working class people in labor unions used to act as a check against this orientation, but as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions, businesses have filled the resulting power vacuum with even more authoritarianism, both in the workplace and in the outside politics they fund and support.
To change things, you’d have to do something like what Valve is attempting, but from the bottom up and at a more baseline level of culture and social arrangement.
> as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions
Unions largely have done that to themselves, as they organized into the same structures they purport to combat and act accordingly, with a capitalistic bend.
While this arguably might be true of some sectors (like the auto industry), the same cannot be said for unions like those of service workers, teachers, and those organized by the IWW.
And this narrative of course absolves business interests of things like how they used the red scare to attack union leadership, buying themselves judicial and favorable NLRB rulings, not to mention how curbed they are in their power relative to unions in Europe by the Taft-Hartley act:
TEACHERS? Teacher's Unions (as well as various other service workers...like the Department of Water and Power) are notorious. Their authoritarian and misappropriation has been the top story in California off-and-on for decades. This isn't to say that unions are a bad idea, but there's a direct correlation between union leadership corruption and 10th percentile income bases those unions derive from. They fail uniformly (over a long enough period of time) to prevent bad actors from subverting their purpose.
That was my experience as well. Maybe it's my (very marginal) Asperger's biting me, but when I joined a supposedly self-organizing team as their only outsider, it was like walking into a buzz-saw. It was an awful experience that I never want to repeat.
Thanks for this. One of the issues I found with the Agile implementation in my current company is that there's no longer an architectural/technical leadership within the team: the manager acts as scrum master, but it doesn't guide on how things should be done. As a result, as the quoted paragraph mentions, there's progress when the team is well suited for a given set of tasks. But most of the time progress is slow, because the team doesn't want to tackle the boring ones, or challenging tasks that would require the extra mile of effort.
That extends to the leadership of the company. It seems structureless, or "democratic" organizations can only work if the will/resolve/capacity of the lowest common denominator is good enough, and there's a large pool of commonly-minded individuals.