Agile 2. Adrian Lander
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failing to understand that the capability of the team members is highly relevant to how much autonomy a team should be given. Is complete autonomy for every team from day one what the authors of the Agile Manifesto intended? We do not know, but to us that would be irrational; and in the mission command model, a mission commander first assesses if the troops are up to the task or if they need more training. A mission commander also knows that there is a cost to failure—perhaps a cost in lives—and so failure as a learning tool best occurs during training, not during actual missions.
Good judgment about when failure as a learning tool is appropriate is essential, even for product development. If one's product is a website about retail items, some level of mistakes in the deployed system are probably tolerable, and so the risk of allowing people to “learn through failure” by working on actual systems might balance out as a valid instruction strategy; but if the product is the flight control system of an airplane or if it is a microservice that manages the bank account of customers, then the balance of risk and learning reward is different, and experimentation and learning need to occur far earlier and in a safer setting.
Knowing When to Intervene
If we could cite the one idea that screams most loudly in the Agile Manifesto, it is an idea that is not even stated explicitly but rather is embedded in the wording of each value. Each value statement specifies two things, and each statement is of the form “thing 1 over thing 2.” Then following the values statements, the manifesto says, “That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
In other words, the four value statements emphasize balance and judgment. Nowhere does it say, “Do this instead of that.” In every statement, it says, in effect, “Use your judgment about the situation.”
This has been overlooked in the community, where the polarity between the two statements is taken to mean that one side is bad and the other side is good. The caveat of the need for judgment is so frequently overlooked that many written interpretations of the Agile Manifesto leave it out entirely and pose a series of good/bad opposites.
We mentioned earlier that since the Agile movement began with Extreme Programming (XP), which set the tone for extremes, this could be why the Agile Manifesto came to be interpreted in an extreme way: when people read the value statements, they read them as, “Do this instead of that,” rather than “Consider these two things and balance them for the situation.” Agile became a movement of extremes, to its detriment.
Applying contextual judgment was actually a disruptive idea at that time, and so extremes were not needed to displace the unhealthy practices that had become common in the industry. Practices such as creating a huge and inflexible task-level plan up front and defining all of the system's requirements during a requirements phase and then passing that off to a set of “implementation teams” were extremes, and so bringing judgment back was the most novel idea.
Just as the right kind of leadership is the most key thing to have, judgment is the next most key thing. Judgment follows rather than precedes good leadership because a good leader must exercise judgment. A good leader uses judgment when deciding whether to let their teams decide something on their own or when intervention is necessary.
Good judgment cannot be taught. It is innate in some people, but experience and knowledge improve everyone's judgment. That is why any form of leadership that needs to apply judgment is more than just facilitation. People need to decide how best to do their work—most of the time, but not all of the time. Knowing when “how” matters is a matter of judgment; and deciding whether the situation can tolerate learning through failure and when it cannot is also a matter of judgment. Deciding what kind of instructional mode to apply—coaching or teaching—is also a matter of judgment.
Judgment occurs at every point. Judgment happens every day. Judgment is what it is all about. Good judgment leads to good outcomes.
We now have a foundation for understanding leadership in its various forms. We will use that foundation in the rest of this book for considering what forms of leadership are needed in various contexts, with agility in mind.
We hope that you now see that leadership is a complex and multifaceted issue. A team needs leadership—not simply one kind, but many kinds. Leadership is not only needed for a team; it is also needed for teams of teams, at every level of the organization.
Notes
1 1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opnk-cPOM50&app=desktop
2 2. Mark Schwartz. A Seat at the Table. IT Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.
3 3. Titus Winters; Tom Manshreck; Hyrum Wright. Software Engineering at Google. O'Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.
4 4. www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-method-tesla-explained
5 5. www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-was-supposed-to-revolutionize-hollywood-heres-why-it-failed-11604343850?mod=mhp
6 6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%E2%80%93goal_theory
7 7. fortune.com/2016/03/04/management-changes-at-medium/
8 8. www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-tyranny-of-structurelessness/
9 9. www.fastcompany.com/3022131/does-google-need-managers
10 10. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
11 11. www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200827-why-in-person-leaders-may-not-be-the-best-virtual-ones
12 12. Marta Wilson. Leaders in Motion: Winning the Race for Organizational Health, Wealth, and Creative Power. Greenleaf Book Group Press. Kindle Edition, p. 134.
13 13. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27194144/
14 14. hbr.org/2018/06/too-much-team-harmony-can-kill-creativity
15 15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader%E2%80%93member_exchange_theory