Three types of failure in an organization.

I have been spending plenty of time looking at best practices and patterns in software development. The more I learn, the more I discover knowledge in the field, which grows logarithmically. Thanks to the web, developers and scrum masters can share hard-won wisdom. Sharing this knowledge makes everyone better at what they do. We can also gain understanding by looking at bad practices and seeing how they hurt an organization. 

A maxim in agile reformation is that everyone should be allowed to fail early and often.  Failure is an early building block for future success and innovation.  I see failure as an excellent teaching instrument.  An agile practitioner should take a fair and empathetic view of failure and see what we can discover.  Agile practitioners need to call out what works and what does not.  Reviewing bad practices and business failure educates in ways success cannot.

The Cargo Cult

A cargo cult comes into being when individuals create totems and rituals to mimic success without understanding how to achieve that success.  I have blogged about this topic, and it came from a South Pacific tribe who built faux airports and vending machines in the hope cargo planes, and Coca-Cola would return.  I see it with businesses that begin a digital transformation but do not want to change their command and control structure.  The open office movement is another excellent example of how business leaders hope to improve collaboration and instead ruin employee morale.  The lesson is to discover the “why” and “how” something works before implementing anything in your organization.

Cultural Inertia

Suppose you work at an organization where people introduce themselves by how many years they have worked for the organization instead of what they do for the firm. In that case, you are dealing with cultural inertia.  The term inertia comes from the field of physics. An object can remain still or in motion if outside forces do not act on that object.  Complex business organizations exhibit this trait.  These organizations get accustomed to doing things a particular way.  These organizations hire and promote specific people.  Thus, when confronted with change, they treat it like heresy or deviance.  Managers or executives kill ground-up initiatives.  Digital transformations fail because line employees have no buy-in.  As a coach or scrum master, inertia will be your biggest obstacle.

Software Samurai

Software development is a human activity that resists automation.  So far, no artificial intelligence has been able to write C# code or take vague business requirements and turn them into working software.  Human beings are messy, complicated creatures.  Intelligent and talented people are messier than standard employees. Making matters worse is the glorification of the “Hacker” or “Brogrammer” culture of software development.  It is a worldview that is misanthropic and sexist.  The glorification of a software developer as a disruptor, visionary, alpha male, shaman, and deity has a few consequences.  It creates a toxic stew of intelligent people who are smug and contemptuous of business partners.  It also makes developers behave like lonely samurai who are willing to show off their skills only to other developers in battles for supremacy.  By following “the way of the samurai,” these developers ship poor-quality code that does not meet business needs and is impossible to maintain.  When called out for this conduct, a samurai will say, “If they were good enough a developer, they could maintain that code.”  Samurai coders are why agile fails at the team level, and it is up to a coach and scrum master to help these individuals reform their ways.

So here are three ways agile can fail in an organization: cargo cults, cultural inertia, and software samurai.  Each of these situations spells doom for your agile maturity.  Be on the lookout for these examples of failure. 

Until next time.