The Agile Emporer of Dune

Had a nice chat with a work colleague today, someone who generally is too busy to be interrupted by the likes of me. Happily today was not one of those days and we were able to converse about what we were doing, books and Agile. Turns out, Brian Herbert, son of Frank Herbert, has written another book in the "Dune" line and this time it's not a prequel. Guess I gotta get ahold of that sometime. However in preparation, my colleague was re-reading some of the older books and decided to start with "God Emperor of Dune", which is probably my favorite book.

I like this book because of the tale spun of the cycles of history - of oppression and bureaucracy and of leadership. That is one of the key themes of the book and I especially like the description of what separates a good leader from a great leader: a heartbeat. The great leader will make a decision in a heartbeat, while a good leader will hesitate. The great leader doesn't hesitate because they know that the decision taken is more important than if it is the correct decision. With the right people reporting to you as the leader, a less-than-perfect decision can be identified and corrected. The people under the great leader can all be trusted to make their own decisions and bring information up to the leader, good or bad. Some leaders will surround themselves with people that will bring "results", but that usually means the bad stuff will be avoided and hiding information is never good.

We both agreed that the principals behind an Agile workplace would seek to produce the great leader, where information is shared and decisions are made rapidly and can be changed easily when it becomes necessary.

One of the things that Agile seems to promote is a recursive pattern - a fractal, self-similar ideal. Each individual should be a great leader, but their underlings may be their email client, web browser and senses. But the feature lead, the product owner, the executive, the customer all these would ideal have a great leader in that position. There may be a chain of reporting, but each link looks like the one on either side. Information would flow up and down the chain. Decisions and compromise would flow as easily as information. What a blissful utopian dream (I gotta be a glass-half full guy).

A couple of things spring to mind - comfort and creating comfort. People, in general, would not feel comfortable to make decisions and operate in the ideal described above. Comfort being the key - they won't be able to perform at their best unless they are comfortable. To help that along, we need to provide a comfortable environment. That means a work place that everyone enjoys, but it also means predictability. We need to make sure that we, as a group, provide enough structure so that things operate in a predictable manner.

Further reflection suggests that such structure can't be imposed, only developed. Meaning that it is a cultural mechanism and the company culture has to be gentle nudged in a way that makes things more Agile while still feeling comfortable.

Well, the thoughts are jumping around a little more now, so I'll take that as an indication that I should stop. If it were possible to type coherently while I slept, I suppose I'd have more blog entries but thousands of commas don't really make for good content. Plus drool is hard to remove from keyboards.