I wonder why - Agile goes Subterranean

Recently I have come across several Teams, which abandoned openly working the agile way,? instead deciding to go into hiding and work underground. Quite often the teams are very good at what they do, they like it and they serve their customers well, they have just given up on the surrounding organization.

Here are some of the symptoms of Subterranean Agile:

• Information passed to the organization is very carefully controlled and edited, transparency exists within the team but not outside. Meetings are carefully managed so that nothing rocks the boat.
• Often a politically savvy person assumes the role of liaising with the organization. I have heard one such individual describe himself as implementing an “adapter-pattern”, making sure the outside sees what it should and the inside what it should,
• Estimates, forecasts and statuses are tweaked before presenting them to minimize the risk of being challenged or getting into trouble. They are not outright lies, just the truth presented in its most favorable light.
• The numbers are cooked, timesheets are often doctored to match estimates. Expenses are often recorded as something else, to avoid accountants finding something that upsets them. We have experienced several places where training courses were bought with credit cards and accounted for as travel expenses because there was no budget for training courses.
• The team spends a lot of time obscuring what they are up to - in order to avoid being found out. This includes finding funny places to hide costs in the accounting system.
• Team members shut up or revert to code-speak when strangers enter their territory.

Needless to say, this amounts to quite a lot of waste and is not ideal. And although it can be fun to operate under cover and see how long you can keep going without being discovered, it is not a very mature and fulfilling strategy to be gaming the system.?

But why does it happen? What causes teams to choose this path? Here are a few examples from real life.

• First and foremost it is about control or micro-management. Detailed budget, process or documentation control are probably the biggest culprits. When bureaucratic pressure is applied to a team for any length of time there is a good chance that they will head for the mountains or go underground.
• Fear of managers meddling with the team’s affairs. Often middle managers have very little to do, so they are looking for opportunities to get involved and exercise power over something. Teams naturally want to protect themselves from that.
• Fear of managers snatching good people for some other work. This is known as the much-feared osprey that flaps through the team’s territory and claws an individual for another job. Better not let them know who we are.
• The organization's overall values, vision or strategy is bogus or untrustworthy. The team just concludes “Who cares?” and they focus on their own territory, customers and collaboration and derive fulfillment and value from that.

I am sure there are many more symptoms and causes, perhaps you can supply them in the comments. It is quite common in larger organizations, and it should be a huge wake-up call to any manager worth his salt if such subterranean activity is discovered. It must be dealt with or the organization will descend into several uncoordinated tribal territories and a totally detached bureaucracy.