Cowboys vs Dinosaurs: Peace Through Perspective

When I was growing up, cowboys fought dinosaurs.

This was in the distant past, before streaming, before cable and even before VHS, in the days when entertainment meant Sunday afternoon films round my grandparents’ house, on the big telly which took forever to warm up and which made everyone look orange.

In those days, even though there were only three channels to fill, the schedule was full of repeats, and we seemed to see the same films over and over again. In particular, I am sure that I saw the film Valley of Gwangi several times.

This film is a bit of an oddity. My grandfather and I watched plenty of Westerns together, but this is the only one where members of a traveling show enter a hidden valley to capture dinosaurs and put them on display. It doesn’t end well.

It must be over forty years since I last saw Valley of Gwangi, but I sometimes feel like I am watching cowboys fight dinosaurs every day, as large enterprises continue with the journey of Agile adoption.

In this analogy, cowboys are, of course, Agile evangelists. People from a traditional technology background worry that these people don’t have the same discipline, the same values that they have carefully built up over many years. They don’t speak the same language, and they don’t use the same tools. They change their minds and their priorities from sprint to sprint, and they may end up somewhere completely different from where they planned.

And, of course, the dinosaurs in this analogy are those people who have worked in a more traditional, waterfall environment for many years. People from an Agile background worry that these people don’t have the same flexibility, the same values that they have acquired through working in an Agile way. They don’t speak the same language and they don’t use the same tools. They take forever to take decisions, they rarely change their minds or their priorities, and they may never reach the goals they had planned.

Described in this way, it is unsurprising that these two groups often come into conflict, just like cowboys and dinosaurs. They seem to be creatures from different worlds.

Fortunately, unlike story book cowboys and stop motion dinosaurs, it is possible for technology professionals to overcome this conflict through wit, imagination and empathy, as well as the faith that most people, most of the time, come to work to do the best job that they can do.

If the cowboys adopt the perspective of the dinosaurs, they will see that the dinosaurs have learnt their skills and attitudes through tough programmes, through late night calls, through dealing with flaky services. They will see that the dinosaurs are motivated by the need to deliver programmes successfully and run reliable services.

If the dinosaurs adopt the perspective of the cowboys, they will see that the cowboys have also learnt their skills and attitudes through tough programmes and through many of the same late night calls. They will see that the cowboys are motivated by the need to deliver change fast and successfully, and the need to run reliable services which can also accommodate frequent change.

At the level of motivations, we all want the same things: solutions that work, delivered fast. We have just learnt different ways of satisfying these motivations.

I don’t mean to propose a false equivalency here. I believe that Agile methods beat traditional methods (although Agile has been around for long enough to be its own tradition), and that Agile teaches us essential lessons about flaws in our traditional beliefs and conceptions. But I also believe that those people who grew up with traditional methods (including me) have skills and perspectives that are worth valuing, even as we learn to change.

Real life technology professionals also have one more advantage over the inhabitants of the Valley of Gwangi, forever frozen in celluloid, doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. We can adapt. In real life, the Wild West era did not last long before the frontier towns evolved from lawlessness into civilization and modernity. In real life, not all dinosaurs were wiped out by the asteroid impact 66 millions years ago: those that survived evolved into modern birds. Even dinosaurs can learn to fly, if the impact is big enough.