DC48: A personal story of rebellion

“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” – Rage against the machine.

This was me in 1988.

I was 14 years old. It was the year I realised I was not like everyone else.

(It turns out everyone else is not like everyone else either, but I didn’t figure that part out for a long time).

This picture made its way to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum as a representation and icon of the Heavy metal and Punk scene of the 1980s.

Despite my dad’s frustration, I was not going to dress politely, and I certainly wouldn’t be told what music to listen to, or what to think. There was no way I was going to be a sheep, a NPC, or Truman Burbank.

The rebel was born.

It was not born out of being a troublemaker but out of a necessity that I simply could not fit into the norm. I could not find a resonance that my spirit or emotional being could be happy in. I was compelled to be different. It was almost biological.

Defy the hierarchy!

Entering the world of work was problematic for me. I could not resonate with a hierarchical model where I was not equal and that meant getting a job was part excitement but part pretence. This was, at times, exhausting and confrontational. I had to seriously mask. This means I pretended to toe the line, show deference, and do what I was told because the benefits of doing so meant an income and access to great opportunities.

Covert ops as a developer

The advent of the internet meant that anyone in the 1990s who could code was so sought after that you could do what you wanted, and any deviance was taken to be a sign of the new order of work and innovation. For a good 15 years I was earning top dollar working for huge corporates and still being free and outside of most of the hierarchy. And I worked for some of the best, e.g. Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, Oxfam, top marketing agencies such as Saachi and Saachi, Avenue A, and Blue Marble, as well as retail such as Tesco head office, M&S, and Philips.

I believed the internet technology that I helped pioneer would create the instant transparency to solve the injustices on our planet and instant communication would make all our lives better.

This was what I was really doing. Not the corporate hum-drum existence. I had a cause and that gave me motivation to keep going through the boredom.

Interestingly, not really being in the hierarchy in my heart meant I got to spend a lot of time with very senior leaders as equals, although this upset many middle managers along the way.

I had a purpose. My rebel was satisfied.

I was changing the world and getting well paid for it, and best of all, I had the freedom to be me while I was doing it.

It turns out that rebels need a cause. Without that, why are you rebelling? It's bloody hard work being different. There has to be a reason why the status quo is so uncomfortable. Finding that reason provides purpose, and then you can work to change it.

Incompetence, inefficiency, and the death of creative corporate tech

As the tech implementations in these organisations started to become siloed and under more and more localised managerial control, the amount of freedom and creativity in tech dropped significantly. Teams lost sight of the customer and of their values. I no longer felt valued, and I couldn’t fit in any longer.

The rebel did not allow me to conform to mediocrity and banality.

A small sidestep and I found a new home for rebels. Moving to Enterprise Architecture meant that I could again sit outside of hierarchical control. Architects, by their nature, are always looking into the system and have to remain separate, and there is a fair amount of tolerance in the corporate ecosystem.

There is a reason why we made an ivory tower: it was to protect us from the inane culture that the rest of the corporate machine had bought into.

As part of my later roles, I played interim Head of Architecture in a few firms. My role was to disband the architecture teams to move towards a flow-based system, and this was always the biggest hurdle. No one wants to rejoin the hierarchy after experiencing the freedom of good pay outside of it.

Top of my game but the purpose is not fulfilled

Having reached the pinnacle of Enterprise Architecture, for example, designing a new derivative stock exchange with dark pools off of a private wired internet at a secret exchange location for Euronext, part of the New York Stock Exchange, I found that the real hurdle to achieving incredible tech was the corporate culture that is derived from the dysfunctional hierarchical structure itself.

Not just for me but for the creativity of whole teams. This was primarily expressed in the architectural silo or skills-based separation teams represented. This structure really didn’t work. It was blatantly obvious to me, and I could not see how the vast majority of people could buy into this huge dampening and waste of human potential. ?

However, being the only one to see dysfunction had been my life experience, so I took it for granted.

The problem is people

Now, it affected everyone in it, and not just me; I set about trying to change the dysfunction in corporate structure. I had helped make Agile work well in teams since 2005 and wanted to extend this idea to the whole enterprise.

I struggled to do this on my own even though I had been covertly working to change organisations for decades, so I sought to get an actual role where the job description was to make these changes. I wanted what I was already doing to be official.

This was before the advent of SAFe, LeSS, Agile Coaches, etc.; the Scrum Alliance was the only certification body. Surely someone there must see the world as I do?

I tried to get my enterprise agile qualification from the Scrum Alliance. After three months of solid work, no one even bothered to review my application. Eventually, after enough chasing down, someone did, and I was dismissed in five minutes as ‘not having enough community experience’—end of application.

It turned out (at that time) that the organisation that was supposed to represent agility was hierarchical and dysfunctional, and you needed to be in a small clique of trainers that were ultimately as self-serving as the people it sought to help. I am happy to say this has greatly changed since the early days.

The instruction was ‘go away and get more experience’, roughly translated to get back in your place and grovel to the Scrum trainer community if you want in…..

Enter the rebel. (See Rage Against the Machine quote above).

(The Scrum Alliance has improved a lot since then, and I don't have anything negative to say about them now, and I have worked with and become friends with the person who turned me down and got an apology. This was years ago, and it is water under the bridge).

This setback gave me the power to do my own thing, which is crucial. As long as you have a purpose, a setback contains the power to drive you to be bigger than the context that is holding you back.

Pathological Demand Avoidance

I have a natural aversion to people telling me what my limits are. However, I have realised that much of the power behind my drive to fulfil my purpose comes from just this: transforming the constraints others try to put on me. I step outside the box and become something even greater than the context in which they operate.

This is a form of neurodiversity. It’s called Pathological Demand Avoidance. (PDA).

I have a very mild version of this. I have some problems like starting the process of making food, talking to call centres, and dialling numbers on keypads. But mostly, I can’t be in situations that demand me to be treated or treat others unequally or if I am asked to be inauthentic or less than I perceive myself to be.

Many entrepreneurs, like me, use this biological reaction to demands to change the status quo. It is like a built-in fire—a power for reckoning, a superpower.

Let the adventures begin: Bigger, better, louder

“I want it all, I want it all and I want it now” – Freddie Mercury

First ever AWA meetup 23rd October 2014 - and no it is not Christmas, I actually wore that jumper.

I had a new purpose. Change the organisational culture of work across the planet.

I set about creating a new community with a tremendous motivation of power that was bigger and with far more reach than the Scrum Alliance. (he he)

I created Adventures with Agile with huge passion, led the largest and fastest growing agile community on the planet (at least for many years until the pandemic), and put my weight behind ICAgile. A community-led certification authority that deeply holds the values of equality.

I played a significant part in introducing Sharon Bowman and her ‘Training from the back of the room’ to the Agile community; I asked Craig Larman to teach (Large Scale Scrum – LeSS) in the form of training, my team helped Disciplined Agile to promote their work, and I worked with Don Reinertson, Lyssa Adkins, Michael Spayd, Aleister Cockburn (Heart of Agility), David Anderson (Kanban), and countless others to shape agility and organisational change.

In 2016, I won the award for the person who had done the most to promote agility across the globe.

Directed by a new purpose and fuelled (powered) by an aversion to being put into a box by anyone, the team at AWA passionately spread to every continent, opened offices in the US, Norway, and Southeast Asia, and partnered with people in many, many other countries. We trained thousands in better organisational design, leadership, and agility.

We made and continue to make a difference.

Purpose, Power, Passion

If you don’t know your purpose, you have no direction apart from what someone else has given you.

If you have no power, then you are ineffective in your purpose. (no sugar coating here)

If you have no passion, then there is no art, and you will produce boring work and die a little every day.

Deeper Change

Join me in making the changes that are so desperately needed. As long as you have your own purpose, power, and passion, it doesn’t take much to be more effective than 99% of everyone else.

This is why I have created Deeper Change. It is for people who are trying to find their purpose, their power, and their passion.

You can subscribe to the Deeper Change newsletter and join me in learning how to find your purpose, power and passion.

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