So I've been very patient. Last month I blogged my enthusiasm for Ray Immelman's Great Boss, Dead Boss. I purposefully didn't spoil it for any prospective readers by spilling the plot or the underlying theme. However, I've been getting mail and it is now time for a series of blogs with lessons learned from Ray. If you intend to order the book, or are reading it now and don't want the plot spoiled then look away now and ignore my next 3 or four postings, come back in week or so and squint at the top of the screen, don't look down ;-).
Last year, I wrote a treatise on my discomfort and dissatisfaction with tribalism in the agile community. My feelings were based on the assumption that we are all highly educated and articulate and should be able to put our tribal past behind us and act objectively for the greater good. Well I was wrong. So it's time to eat humble pie. Ray Immelman takes a whole different view on tribalism. He basically believes that it is a force of nature. We are genetically wired to behave in tribes. This genetic wiring is pre-human. It can be observed in our close genetic cousins such as chimpanzees. Hence, it is so old as to be impossible to undo through training and education. Immelman argues that denying our tribal wiring leads to dysfunction. He takes the view that to improve productivity, we must harness the tribal force in nature and use it to our benefit. [Hint: functional orgs are not tribes]
If you want to understand why Extreme Programming has been so successful and why people are so passionate about it, then you need to understand Immelman's 5 tribal dimensions and his 23 tribal attributes. I'll be writing more on this tomorrow. Meanwhile, we can use Immelman's primary approach to understand what might be wrong with the agile community as a whole. When the tribes are warring, the way to unify them is not to appeal to their intellect (as I did) but to create a super-tribe to which they can all affiliate. A super-tribe which is stronger than the local tribe. A good example of this would be the United Kingdom. Where people like me feel Scottish and would identify with the Scottish tribe - an affiliation underscored with a broad brogue accent, a penchant for wearing a plaid skirt to formal dinners, and a deeply wired need to eat Haggis around the birthday of Robert Burns on January 25th - most of us Scots identify with being British and being part of the British super-tribe. It is this super-tribal affiliation which holds the United Kingdom together. Compare and contrast with the breakup of Eastern Europe into many small nations in recent years.
Hence, how do you get the agile community to speak with one voice? to work together optimally to change software development for the better, for ever? You create a strong "agile" super-tribe. So far the Agile Alliance has failed to achieve that. It's membership stagnated at around 1000 people. Until the Agile Alliance can deliver on most of Ray Immelman's 23 attributes and 5 dimensions, I fear it is inevitable that it will remain a loose affiliation of rival tribes. [Hint: To pick the 22nd attribute from the book - a strong tribe has a leader dedicated to the tribe's success. (a selfless leader who puts the tribe first before his/her own interests). This would be a good place to start. Can you even name the leader of the Agile Alliance? - I'd have to go look it up.]
As we begin to build the new project management organization behind the Declaration of Interdependence, I'll be very aware of the lessons from Great Boss, Dead Boss. I'm confident we can build a strong tribe of new paradigm project management professionals.
