Is Agile against human nature?

The last few months have been interesting. My colleague Arvind and I have been coaching teams who are foraying into the world of Agile. Trying to figure out what each team is doing, what can work for them and always keeping our eyes peeled for anyone that needs indoctrination to an Agile mindset or tweaks to any of the Agile practices, while doing our day jobs of leading Aerospace product development programs has been enervating, but the learning that we are getting and some whiffs of success are propelling us along. Then we are always talking about what each of us has read or learnt, therefore staying motivated and inspired by each other. In a different setting under the same circumstances, we could very easily be trying to outmaneuver each other in a game of one-upmanship. So, what is preventing such a thing from happening? Hark back to Deming who said “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centers, and thus destroy the system. The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization.” In an Agile world, it is critical that people at all levels understand this. Whether it is a software engineer who sacrifices some of her work to help her teammates, managers of departments who cooperate with each other and forsake optimizing within their own boundaries or a customer and supplier who do what each can do best to generate the maximum combined value without viewing each other as adversaries, Agile calls for such behavior always. Left unmanaged, each could be trying to optimize themselves with little regard to the whole. A few days back while in the office cafeteria, I took a longer route to get to the chair I wanted to sit on because a person seated on another chair was blocking the direct passage. A colleague of mine asked me why I didn’t request the seated person to make way for me. I had unconsciously calculated the total effort in both scenarios: 1) making the seated person get up and me taking the direct route or 2) not disturbing the seated person and me taking the longer route and decided that the sum total effort in option 2) was lesser. It didn’t matter that my individual effort in option 2) was greater. Similarly when one barges into a street causing an incoming car to brake or waits for the car to pass by and then gets into the street. There is a global optimum at work in the second case and a local optimum in the first.

Similarly when leaders sacrifice short term interests for a better tomorrow. Delayed gratification is another form of striving towards a global optimum while compromising short term interests or local optima.

So what is at work here that is preventing Arvind and me from political wrangling or causing team members in an Agile organization to cooperate with each other for the greater good sometimes at a short term cost to themselves? The answer is TRUST! We trust that each of us is in pursuit of knowledge and genuinely trying to do better for the company and has no ulterior motive. So we see and deal with each other relying on that trust. Team members in an Agile organization similarly cooperate because they trust each other. Trust keeps such behavior alive. A leader sacrifices a possible increase in share price in the immediate quarters for a longer term good because she trusts the chosen path. People collaborate or seek delayed gratification because in the bigger scheme of things, everyone is better off but such behavior is possible only in an atmosphere of trust.

Leaders in an organization need to build that trust between themselves and their employees and also work towards building trust between the employees. Without constantly working on keeping trust alive, things can soon fall into disarray and people will become selfish and strive for their own good with little regard to the greater one. Local optimizations will destroy the required foundation and Agile transformations will fail!

Read this on how to build trust in your team.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2018/03/17/ten-ways-to-build-trust-on-your-team/#7fee7a752445