(fr)Agile Teams: Handle with Care
Once I read a very interesting post by Anna Forss called “Stupidity of the Team”. While Anna concludes that it’s healthy to introduce diverse opinions and invite opposing minds to dissolve the like-mindedness of homogeneous teams, I think there’s one important nuance that risks being overlooked here.
Let’s think: teams exist for some purpose. To achieve some goals. If it’s a product development company, then this team exists to develop a product. Permanent rebels (of which Anna writes in her post as of “the opposers”) are not generally welcome in any group, because with their constant rebels, argues, and drawing attention to themselves they might blur the team’s focus. Of course, the team would naturally tend to outcast this person. Besides, if a team is bombarded by controversial opinions and judgments, a good chunk of their time would go into evaluating and deciding if this or that is true or not. People would get busy with sticking tags on new opinions instead of focusing on their work and, as a consequence, they’d lose focus.
Life in a small development team, with its particular culture, can be compared to living in a sheltered reality. A sheltered reality won’t last long in complete isolation, so emerging on the surface for a gulp of fresh air is absolutely needed. As a member of a small team, do you remember if “the opposers” and their opinions have actually been helping? By triggering something that the team would not have thought out by themselves? Well, of course, if someone comes up and says “your UI sucks” , and then someone else comes up and says the same, you start thinking that there’s indeed something wrong with the UI. You’ve got this signal from the outside world. You work on it. Basically, you know what you should work on. The outsider’s opinion has accomplished it’s task — the outsider’s opinion can now go, because you will not want to be hearing variations on one and the same opinion. You get to work, and you work to develop a nice new UI.
In this context, there’s no need to focus on outsiders’ opinions and pay too much attention to them. Such opinions serve as a trigger to team’s actions , not as something that the team should clog their minds with all the time. In a way, diversity of opinions may even be harmful. I guess that’s why, in an ideal world, there’s always someone whose job is to say: “Stick with what you’re doing, and don’t listen to anyone”.
My conclusion is: a healthy vaccination with opinions opposing a team’s culture or a team’s vision is good. But don’t overdo with them.
Related:
It’s Teamwork. Rescue me, Quotation.
Further reading:
This story is based on an earlier article.
