(2012-09-19) Agile Enterprise Culture Hacking

Eric Raymond examines the past and current connections between the Hacker culture and the Agile Software Development movement, coming from Agile Culture Con (see post from June by Venessa Miemis, plus background from Dan Mezick from May).

Their initial problem, as Dan Mezick puts it, is that so far agile development hasn’t been scaling very well. Techniques like unit testing and TDD, design by story, pair programming, scrum, planning poker and the like have amply proven themselves at the small-group level (up to, say, a dozen developers). Properly applied they do boost the hell out of the effectiveness of Product Teams. But evidence that they can be scaled up effectively to much larger projects or coordinated Enterprise-wide development is lacking... agile, trying to scale up from the bottom, collides with the top-down-imposed conventional corporate habits of Death Marches, rigid hierarchy, and WaterFall planning. And loses, because the imperatives behind all that sludge are wired too deep into the culture of most corporations to be displaced by mere productivity improvements, however dramatic.

They want to write a how-to manual. How to meme-hack your corporation so it’s not wasting most of its energy on Authoritarian BullShit and territorial games, how to make it a place where more value is added and people are happier. Oh, and where agile techniques can be applied throughout.

The Core Protocols are very clarifying – that much is obvious to me even from limited exposure. One of the authors calls them “Software For Your Head”, and they’re a building block that can be used with other kinds of software for your head, including ways to re-invent how we organize groups larger than will fit in a single meeting room.

Two of these got an airing at the conference. One, actually the less radical one, is a kind of organizational design (Organization Models) called Sociocracy... Sociocratic double-linking is a clever pre-emptive strike against the effects of the SNAFU principle. The existence of a reporting chain separated from command authority at least removes much of the normal incentive for command chains to distort information passing between levels.

There’s still hierarchy in the system, though. The more radical path is to flatten the firm entirely – no bosses, no subordinates, not even sociocratic circles. And this is just what two of our presenters, from a firm ("tomato ingredient processor") called MorningStar, told us about. At MorningStar, they practice “Self Management” (Self Organizing). Your job isn’t defined by who you report to, but by your Commitment agreements with your colleagues. In effect, everyone in the firm has horizontal contracts with other firm members. The business runs on a painstakingly-maintained process model and objective performance indicators. The contracts include performance targets, and your pay is tied to how you meet them. More details in the book Beyond Empowerment, which lightly fictionalizes the history of MorningStar and then presents supporting factual case studies... perhaps the most intereresting thing about MorningStar’s organization is that they’ve scaled it past the Dunbar Number.

In Dave Logan’s analysis, a firm – or an entire society – is best understood as a mosaic of interlocking tribes (Tribalism), each with its own MicroCulture. Logan distinguishes five Culture types or stages: Stage 1 = “Life sucks”, Stage 2 = “My life sucks”, Stage 3 = “I’m great (and you’re not)!”, Stage 4 = “We’re great!”, and Stage 5 = “Life is great!”... Not every tribe knows what it wants. The shared desire and Value-s may be partly or wholly unconscious, and point to something larger than the tribe understands. The Prophet’s job is to reflect the tribe’s values back at it in such a way that it changes stage – wakes up and starts to function at a higher level.

See also Eric's comment further down about the power of naming things (Shared Vocabulary): One of the most powerful things a prophet can do is identify something his tribe unconsciously does, or strongly desires (or both), and give it a name. The name then becomes three things: a focus of all that pent-up emotional energy, an object of reflection, and a rallying cry... As I noted at the conference, a prophet in Dave Logan’s sense of the term gives people permission to be idealists – he allows them to opt in to a bigger, more beautiful myth than the one they’re living in.

Update: Venessa Miemis posted her notes, including about a session that involved working on a Manifesto. Some people had pointed out that just as the Manifesto for Agile Software Development framed some simple principles and values around different organizational models, a culture hacking manifesto might be useful in promoting specific behaviors and attitudes at the human level.

In a separate post, Eric Raymond tries to identify the Prophets of the early Hacker eras: Larry Wall; Jon Postel or Fred Baker; Oddly, I’m not sure I can identify a prophet in the early Unix tradition. It’s possible that whole crew was already at Stage 4 when Ken Thompson had his brainstorm – collaboration, playfulness and high creativity certainly seem to have been already well-established traits of the BellLabs Culture when UNIX incubated.