Mis(sing) Behaviors in Agile?

Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge

- Plato

Agile methodologies and frameworks outline values, principles, and practices (rituals) that form the foundation of these frameworks. The Agile Manifesto [3] outlines four core values and twelve principles behind the agile movement. Each agile methodology approaches these (and other values) slightly differently and has developed specific processes/practices to foster the values [6]. 

Business is a human enterprise, and people develop software. Humans are naturally inclined to cooperate, but their behavior is influenced by various factors such as organizational culture, leadership, individual genetics, traits, and attitudes. Norms (institutionalized or informal) influence and govern individual behavior, facilitating cooperation among individuals to achieve a common goal.

Since behaviors are important to an organization's overall productivity, I believe we need to formally incorporate them into any agile framework. In many organizations, moving to agile is both a good time and an excellent opportunity to incorporate cultural and behavioral transformations. 

Framework for Agile Methodologies

With behaviors included as one of the pillars of any agile framework, we will have the following four dimensions to explain agile methodologies:

• Values
• Principles
• Practices
• Behaviors

In this article, we will define the above four dimensions and how they relate to each in general. In future article(s), we will formally study them in detail in the context of SCRUM.

Values

Values are sets of beliefs about good and bad, right and wrong, and many other aspects of living and interacting with others in society. Values are fundamental beliefs. Values are our guidelines for living and behavior.

Kent Beck defines values as [1]:

Values are the root of the things we like and don’t like in a situation. Values are universal - values at work are exactly the same as values in the rest of one’s life.

Examples of values:

Agile Values

Principles

Principles can be described as universal rules or laws. Principles are fundamental scientific, logical, or moral/ethical "truths", arising from experience, knowledge, and (often) values, on which we base our actions and thinking [8]. Principles are guides to behavior.

Kent Beck defines principles as [1]:

Principles are domain-specific guidelines for life.

Jim Highsmith defines principles as [2]:

Principles are the simple rules of complex human adaptive systems.

Practices

Practices are evidence of values [1]. 

Jim Highsmith defines practices as [2]:

Practices are how principles are acted out - practices vary from team to team but principles remain constant.

Behaviors

Values need to be anchored to guiding principles in order to have a clear understanding of the ideal behavior they want to see in their organization [7]

Individual behavior can be explained by three major sources[4]:

• basic human nature (via universal psychological processes)
• culture (via social roles)
• personality (via individual role identities)

Cultures influence individual behaviors[4]. A company’s culture includes the collective behaviors within the organization [7].

Two types of behaviors are important in the context of enterprises: Pro-Social and Anti-Social [5].


Anti-Social/Toxic Behaviors

The following behaviors have been identified as toxic, antisocial, or anti-collaborative in an IT enterprise [5]. I have highlighted some of them (in bold) as more applicable in the context of agile software development.

Anti-Social Behaviors

Pro-Social/Collaborative Behaviors

The following behaviors have been identified as pro-social or collaborative in an IT enterprise[5]. I have highlighted some of them (in bold) as more applicable in the context of agile software development.

Pro-Social Behaviors

How Are They Related

Kent Beck [1] talks about "principles" that bridge the gap between "values" (though universal in nature, may sound too abstract) and "practices" (though important, may appear ritualistic). To extend Beck's bridge analogy further, "behaviors" are like the  high-tensile-strength cables supporting a suspension bridge.

References

1. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, 2005
2. Agile Project Management, Jim Highsmith, 2009
3. Agile Manifesto: Values and Principles
4. Culture, Context, and Behavior, David Matsumoto, 2007
5. Transforming It Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms, Frank Wander, 2013
6. Agile Principles and Values, by Jeff Sutherland, MSDN
7. Some thoughts on guiding principles, values and behaviors,  Mike Stoecklein
8. Some Core Principles, Assumptions, and Values

Quotable Quotes (Part 2)

Ed Catmull, Podcast

Companies are now realizing that they have to involve technology ..., for me, the model is that you know you are an integrated company if you can't draw a line between ...

Sir Ken Robinson, TED Talk

If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

Lew Cirne (New Relic), Podcast

Every business is a software business.

Simon Sinek, Start with Why

If you follow your WHY, then others will follow you.

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

Fear, real or perceived, is arguably the most powerful manipulation of the lot. It's not the statistical probability that one could get hurt by a terrorist, but it's the fear that it might happen that cripples a population.

Though positive in nature, aspirational messages are most effective with those who lack discipline or have a nagging fear or insecurity that they don't have the ability to achieve their dreams on their own (which, at various times for various reasons, is everyone).

Søren Kierkegaard, Danish Philosopher

Boredom - a sense of emptiness, not an absence of stimulation but an absence of meaning. An idea that also explains why it is possible, today more than ever, to be overstimulated but existentially bored.

Peer pressure works not because the majority or the experts are always right, but because we fear that we may be wrong.

People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

Decision-making and the ability to explain those decisions exist in different parts of the brain.

When you compete against everyone else no one wants to help you. But when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you.

US Marine Corps Leadership Manual

An individual's responsibility for leadership is not dependent on authority .... the deep-rooted assumption that authority should equal responsibility is the root of much organizational evil. I believe misunderstanding around this issue is rampant, problematic, and runs so deep in our consciousness that we don't even realize it.

Peter Drucker

Good intentions are no excuse for incompetence and lack of results.

Gregory Chaitin in Proving Darwin

Societies that suppress creativity temporarily gain increased stability, increased efficiency, but they are not flexible enough to deal with a changing environment.

Teddy Roosevelt, Citizenship in A Republic, 1910

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Jeff Sutherland in Scrum, 2014

No one should spend their lives on meaningless work. Not only is it not good business, it kills the soul.

In software development there is a rule, borne out by decades of research, that 80 percent of the value in any piece of software is in 20 percent of the features.

Just because everyone has always told you that's the way the world works doesn't mean they are right. There is a different way of doing things - a different way of working.

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

John Maxwell, Videocast

The difference between winners and whiners is: winners they know they have to do the right thing and then they feel good and whiners they want to feel good before they do the right thing.

Laugh at life, but be sure to laugh at yourself because someone else already is.

Thomas J. Watson

The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.

Tom Rath, StrengthsFinder 2.0

You cannot be anything you want to be-you can be a lot more of who you already are.

Anthony Robbins

Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.

John C. Maxwell

Good questions inform; great questions transform.

Good leaders listen, learn, and then lead.

Bernard Baruch

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the only one who asked why.

Rick Warren

Humility is not denying your strengths. Humility is being honest about your weaknesses.

Samuel Johnson

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities he does not possess.

Henry Ford

If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

Unless you do right things, right things will not happen to you.

Weston H. Igor

Intuition is what you know for sure without knowing for certain.

Joyce Brothers

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

If you tidy your house all at once, you'll rebound. It is better to make it a habit to do little at a time.

People cannot change their habits without first changing their way of thinking.

Captain Marquet 

The goal of a leader is to give no orders. Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there.

Ram Charan, HBR IdeaCast

A leader who does not produce other leaders is not a great leader.

High-performance leader is different from high-performance individual. And the difference is a high-performance leader gets things done. A high-performance individual does the things in terms of himself or herself.

No Titles, Only Roles - Agile Way?

Everyone a technologist - McKinsey

Every business is a software business - Lew Cirne

Information Technology (IT) has become important to overall success of an enterprise: 

• "technology is no longer simply a budget line or operational issue—it is an enabler of virtually every strategy" [3]
• "the IT organization can help make the entire enterprise more agile by helping it build modular components that can be quickly combined into “solution architectures” for specific opportunities" [7]

Despite aligning IT with business has been a key priority for IT executives [1], the rift between IT and business organizations still exists and numerous authors have stressed the need for brining IT and business teams together:

• Organizations need to cultivate in-house talent for roles that require intimate knowledge of the business and the organization and ... is to open career paths between the IT and business sides [2]
• Large, complex software projects are better served by work cells—cross-functional teams with end-to-end ownership of application modules. In a work cell, business analysts, developers, and testers work together as a tightly knit group and take responsibility for the whole process—definition of user requirements, development of code, functional testing, rework, user-acceptance testing, and the ultimate delivery of functionality to the customer [4]
• Smart Creatives are the product folks who combine technical knowledge, business expertise and creativity [5]
• Today, companies are competing across product categories, and with the rise in integrated solutions, silos are merging. Employees must be able to easily navigate functional and product boundaries to achieve the collaboration needed to deliver these more holistic solutions. Then, as boundaries begin to dissolve, and once-separate groups combine into single teams (a services, sales, and engineering team, for example), roles will need to be redefined [5]
• Digital initiatives ... call for dedicated [digital-speed] teams that are staffed with jacks-of-all-trades rather than specialists. The ideal candidate for the digital-speed team is not an IT specialist but rather a jack-of-all-trades who has both excellent technical skills and functional knowledge [8]

Though some organizations have tried to have formal job titles for business-technolgists, by and large, it is difficult for most organizations to come up with job titles that allow people to perform different roles as needed. But the job titles (and by extension, tribes/groups the individuals belong to) are sometimes the main reason that make it difficult for business and IT professionals to collaborate to achieve success on most projects. 

If enterprises adopt agile frameworks, it is possible to achieve alignment of IT and business without changing the formal HR job titles of the individuals since agile calls for cross-functional and autonomous (self-organizing and self-managing) team where a group of individuals come together to become a team by playing different roles as required and demanded by the team.

Using SCRUM/XP as an example, the following roles are typically needed on software development teams using agile: 

• Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst
• Scrum Master, Project Manager
• Developer/Programmer, Tester
• Technical Writer
• Stakeholders (Customers, Sales, Marketing, and other members from business)

As Kent Beck explains in [9], 

Roles in a mature XP team aren't fixed and rigid. The goal is to have everyone contribute the best he has to offer to the team's success.

I think it is possible to achieve the goal of aligning business and IT by adopting agile methods since it doesn't require changing organization structures and official job titles - individuals play roles (different from their titles) and collaborate more effectively across organizational boundaries when they belong to "single" team given a common goal to achieve.

References

1. Can the IT-Business Marriage Be Saved, Susan Cramm, Harvard Business Review, September 2008
2. Developing talent for large IT projects, Francine Debane, Katya Defossez, and Mark McMillan, McKinsey Quarterly, August 2014
3. Management intuition for the next 50 years, Richard Dobbs, Sree Ramaswamy, Elizabeth Stephenson, and S. Patrick Viguerie, McKinsey Quarterly,  September 2014
4. Achieving success in large, complex software projects, Sriram Chandrasekaran, Sauri Gudlavalleti, and Sanjay Kaniyar, McKinsey Quarterly, July 2014
5. How Google Works, slideshare.net
6. Transforming Technology Companies: Putting People First, Nicole Bennett, Ruba Borno, Sebastian DiGrande, Jim Hemerling, and John Wenstrup, BCG Perspectives, November 2014
7. IT-Enabled Business Agility: A Sports Analogy, Stefan Deutscher, Antoine Gourévitch, Stuart Scantlebury, and Wolfgang Thiel, BCG Technology Advantage, March 2012
8. Two-Speed IT: A Linchpin for Success in a Digitized World, Antoine Gourévitch, Benjamin Rehberg, and Jean-François Bobier, BCG Technology Advantage, August 2012
9. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Kent Beck, and Cynthia Andres, 2005