Keeping the corporate superorganism alive.

I spend plenty of time working with technology.  It is a career filled with wonder and long stretches of exertion.  One day, you are building a mobile phone application; the next, you are spending months attempting to grind millions of records out of a database in microseconds.  It is not a glamorous world. It is a world filled with indifference and self-doubt.  Lewis Carroll said, “…between the idea and the reality lies the shadow.”  Technology people live in the shadow world of continuous improvement and innovation.  Today, I want to discuss what it is like living in the shadow realm.

The world of global business is so complicated people struggle to find good ways to describe it.  Often, others use metaphors to describe the way the business world behaves.  Some describe the business world in military terms, and others attempt to use athletics as their reference point.  I think these approaches are too simple.  I prefer to use biology as a way to describe a business.

Owners, Employees, Managers, and customers work together in an intricate dance to generate value.  People exchange trust and money as the enterprise becomes more extensive; the system becomes more complex until it starts behaving like a giant organism.  A friend, Andrew T. Keener, refers to the modern corporation as a “superorganism.”  Watch hundreds and thousands of people commute into our major cities to work, and you can understand what Andrew is attempting to say.

A technology professional is an essential part of any large business.  Network engineers maintain the corporate nervous system so that information can flow.  Software professionals create new ways of interacting with customers and keeping the money flowing through the organization.  Scrum Masters and Project professionals act as pacemakers, keeping everything running on time.  It is a complicated dance to keep the superorganism of the modern corporation alive.

People in technology live in a shadow realm because no one pays attention to the systems they create and maintain until they do not work.  Unfortunately, the relationship between business professionals and technology professionals has been dysfunctional since the beginning of business computing.  The dysfunction was beginning to undermine companies and hurt their ability to respond to changes in the competitive environment.

The agile reformation was born when people who understood the problem outlined four values and twelve principles to make working in the shadows more sane, sustainable, and satisfying.  Business people and technology people had to work together for the greater good of the business.  Technology people began to understand business challenges.  Business people started to understand things like technical debt and data security.  The collaboration of these two tribes in the parent superorganism makes it stronger.

As a scrum master or agile coach, it is up to you to work in the shadows to improve the organization.  If not, the superorganism you work for will succumb to darkness.

Until next time.