The Two Olive Paradox

I have worked in the business world for over twenty-five years.  When I left college, I hoped that I would work with grown-ups who would do the right thing.  Experience has crushed those hopes like peanut shells on the floor of a baseball stadium.  This week, I wanted to write about one of the pathologies I have noticed in the business world and how it is affecting the implementation of Agile and scrum.

This week, news broke widely about the poisoning of water in the city of Flint, Michigan.  If you want to understand the situation's details, I strongly recommend this article from Vox.com.  Suffice it to say this is the failure of government on a local, state, and federal level.  This failure has a root cause, and it is what I like to call the two-olive paradox.  Politicians, technocrats, and business people want to save money to look like they are being fiscally responsible and instead create situations that cost significantly more money.

I use the phrase two olives because it is based on a true story from the world of air travel.  Robert Crandall was the president and chairman of American Airlines.  He figured out that if he removed an olive from an in-flight salad, leaving two olives, he would save $100,000 a year and that passengers would not mind.  It has become legendary among business school students, professionals, and journalists.  Crandall didn’t address the falling market share of the airline in the 1980s or improve customer service. He was able to save the company and the shareholders money.

Since that time in the 1980s, businesspeople have done everything they could to emulate Crandall.  In my career alone, I have seen toilet paper rationed, office supplies cut back, and training and development cut back, all to save a few thousand dollars in corporate budgets in the millions and billions.  For the scrum master, this means technical debt festers, mission-critical technology becomes obsolete, and quality developers quit because they are not being compensated correctly.  This is the two-olive paradox creating petty solutions because we cannot or will not solve the real problems in the organization.

How does this tie into Flint, Michigan?  The state-appointed administrator, after cutting police service, renegotiating the contracts of every municipal employee, and cutting pension commitments, still needed to save money, so he attempted to do it by finding an inexpensive source of tap water.  Thus, he went to the Flint River instead of Lake Huron or Detroit Water.  Concerns about pollution were ignored, and the Flint River started flowing through the taps.  When activists began to complain, the un-elected authority did the usual thing and attempted to protect itself without fixing what it caused.  It would take the attention of the national media to get people to pay serious attention to the poison flowing through the tap water.

In many respects, a scrum master must be like those community activists from Flint.  They have to raise awareness, point out problems, and work within the system to try and make change.  It is not a very good way to advance your career because most managers are people who go along and get along, being likable rather than trying to solve problems in the organization.  It is frustrating.  I struggle with this in many of the organizations I work with.

So be on the lookout for the two-olive paradox because if you see business leaders thinking this way, your life as a scrum master is going to get very complicated.

Until next time.