I mentioned a book in my last posting, Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzales. I keep finding things in it that seem so relevant to teams and Agile. I wouldn't say that writing software constitutes a life or death activity for the development team, but Gonzales' two "Rules for Life" certainly apply: "Be here now" and "Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to" (which he also calls "the friction rule".)
"Be here now" Gonzales translates as "pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model." In other words, accept and work according to what is, rather than following the plan, which he also calls the "memory of the possible future." Sounds a bit like the fourth value in the Agile Manifesto, what?
"The Friction Rule" or "everything takes eight times as long..." also applies to working in Agile teams. The accumulated frictions, including "countless minor events" in the lives of all the team members, and the friction in the environment (read organization, customers, marketplace) inherently slow progress, communication, and decision-making, and lead us to errors in estimating what we might accomplish. Lucky us. We have data like yesterday's velocity, techniques like built-in slack, concepts like finding process bottlenecks, inspect/adapt, and other Agile-related practices that cause us to notice and acknowledge the friction.
He also proposes a dynamic that, to me, seems related to the Prime Directive of retrospectives, as well. He quotes Charles Perrow (from Normal Accidents), "I am arguing that constructing an expected world...challenges the easy explanations such as stupidity, inattention, risk taking and inexperience." Then Gonzales goes on to say,
"Perrow is proposing the frightening idea that we are doing the best we can with what we've got. We are not asleep at the switch. We are doing what everyone does, what the best among us do, and when we have such an accident, it's normal."
Even when we do our best, the outcome is not always what or how we want it.
I'm particularly fascinated with this part of the book. The story of a fatal accident knits together his observations of how we perceive risk and challenges and how we estimate what is possible. That tragic story took place on Mt. Hood, here in Oregon, with experienced mountain climbers.
Again, I'm not equating this kind of physical life and death challenge with software development. I am, however, noting that both activities require people to engage in rapid decision making, to push the boundaries of their experience, to challenge themselves to do more and better, and to respond in unexpected and innovative ways to the conditions of their environments.
It's a pretty cool book. :-)