4th in the Series: Collective Responsibility over Disjointed Disempowerment
In a series of publications, Consequential is exploring ideas for new values for going beyond working code in agile product development. You can read our overview and introduction to this series here.
The original agile manifesto and its values pointed out many of the problems with software development that were present at the time. In creating our ideas for new values, we looked to do the same. Tech has eaten the world, and for this to be a positive thing we want to reframe and refocus what we value in its creation and how that can impact what gets put into the world.
In the spirit of our goal, disruption for the common good, we present our ideas for 5 values for the future of agile product development:
- Stakeholder conscious over customer-centric
- Focusing on objectives over measuring output
- Foresight over failing fast
- Collective responsibility over disjointed disempowerment
- Critical questioning over rigid rituals
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Let’s look in more depth at:
From Disjointed Disempowerment to Collective Responsibility
In product, engineering, and design, there’s a deep sense of responsibility for delivering value and for direct impact on a customer.
But what does collective responsibility look like? Especially in large organisations and in teams where you might only be building a small part of a whole? The reality is that most work on tech products is outsourced, or distributed across many teams, functions, lines of business and more. Thousands of people may touch one product, and this leads to a sense of disjointed disempowerment.
In their 2019 report, one of AI Now’s recommendations was that ‘tech workers should have the right to know what they are building and to contest unethical or harmful uses of their work.’
This isn’t only for tech — everyone should be empowered to know what they’re building and given the opportunity to either influence its direction, or challenge or protest. Teams deserve the opportunity to determine where they are collectively responsible and where it’s ok to fail (or not).
Responsibility is a scale, and with this in mind we want to introduce two different types of responsibility that you as an individual or a team might be able to take.
You can take direct responsibility — this means you’ve considered impacts on all stakeholders and you can do something about it as an individual or a team. You can take action, make a decision, change a feature, change the product vision.
Or you can take influencing responsibility. This means you can’t make the decision yourself, but you can influence the outcome. This might look like bringing in other experts, working with another team, or escalating your concerns up the chain. It might mean you look outside of your organisation for advice.
People tend to underestimate the power of influencing responsibility. We all know that organisations run on relationships and that more often than not this is the real way change happens.
But it’s only in determining what kind of responsibility you can take and following through on it can teams more actively shape what gets put into the world. People who make code literally create something out of nothing. Having them feel as though they have no power in how their work is used when there are huge societal consequences simply isn’t tenable.
Which is why we’d like to see a shift from disjointed disempowerment to collective responsibility.
The future of tech product development
It’s been almost 20 years since The Agile Manifesto was published, and it has changed so many aspects of how we work and create tech products. It’s in the pursuit of Continuous Improvement that we explore here the role of responsibility in agile and ideas for new agile values. We hope our ideas can help to positively shape the next 20 years of agile product development.
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Consequential does both big ‘I’ and little ‘i’ innovation to change the existing business landscape. This means we focus on large-scale systems change within business and tech, and strategy and innovation within individual organisations to build their businesses and products in more responsible ways.
