Scrum and Power

September 30, 2018

Many organizations are built around power. It is an old old idea. Power and hierarchy — I think I was told — goes back to the days of Babylonia. Roughly 5,000 years ago. And the birth of the city and of city-civilization. They needed some organizing principles, so they adopted those.

If one has a dog, one understands the idea of an alpha dog. And a beta dog. Dominant and submissive. Not that it isn’t notably more complex than that. But it is all about power.

We think knowledge creation and power do not go well together.

No one person knows everything with our kind of work. None of the people in our teams has a below average IQ (well, I guess that is true for you). Everyone can contribute, even if only with logic and “dumb” questions.

So, to share the knowledge in each Team member throughout the Team, we need at least a rough feeling of equality.

So, I few key ideas.

The whole team is responsible for success.
We leave the business cards and the titles and the hierarchy at the door of the Team Room.
Everyone is listened to. We let the smartest person on this specific topic make the decision (usually fairly quickly). Very likely a different person on the next topic.
We do not worry about power or position. We ask everyone to do the best they can today to help the Team win.
To the degree that the organization still has power and hierarchy, we can laugh at it and ignore it within the Scrum team.

Note: Scrum does call out two or three “super-powers”. The PO gets to make the final decisions about the order of the Product Backlog. And when we have an MVP that can be released. And the SM is the final authority about what is or is not Scrum. (But the SM cannot make them do Scrum. Only point out that the Team is not doing Scrum now.) For fun, I called them super-powers. In practice, the PO and SM are not nearly so powerful as any one of the Avengers.

So, I did NOT say we eliminate all hierarchy. Not sure that day is coming soon. And some people have more X on a given day, and the cream rises to the top. Maybe more knowledge, or courage, or insight. But something that helps lead the Team (we hope well). And the other Team members follow.

I am NOT waiting for the day when the word power is never used.

Often power is linked with fear. Ex: We can have the implication that if you do not delivery by this date, I will fire you. One use of “power”.

But putting fear into knowledge workers will not help. We have to get over a LOT of old uses of power, position and hierarchy. A lot of old games. And everyone, pretty much, has to get over it. The workers have to have more courage.

Why? Because however much some manager says “we are all equal” (or something similar), you do not know it’s true until you take the courage, speak up, and see that you do not get punished. It is in these actions that we all see and know that the culture has changed (or was always different than we imagined).

Note: Often people bring their ideas about the current culture from a former company or a former time. Often the current culture is really quite different than they, subconsciously, expect.

Similarly, managers must start too. And talk in a different way. And it is often contrary to what they have been told or told themselves for years. It too can feel scary. Do not be afraid. In NYC, someone might say “be a mensch!” (You might google that phrase.)

To be fair, this is not a Scrum issue per se. This is an issue, broadly, for any business with knowledge workers. (With physical labor, it may be that power and hierarchy are still useful. Maybe, maybe not.)

And in our work we need some controls, eg, over people who talk too much (a common problem in our work). Power is not the answer for that. Timeboxes might be.

Say hello to a world run notably less by power. The world of knowledge workers.

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So, we are suggesting taking power “away”. Or at least reducing its use. But what replaces it? Or how do we get things done without it?

Good question. To be answered another day.