brAAAA(GILE)AAAins!
Hmmm, Brain Chemistry Driven Development. Are you doing it? Why not?
Check this out on InfoQ, neuroscience agile leadership —
http://www.infoq.com/articles/neuroscience-agile-leadership
It’s a brain chemistry treatise on agile leadership. The author has a “Certificate in NeuroLeadership.” I researched this Yet Another Certification — but this one is really getting out there. The theory of this article is that you can manage people by understanding their neurobiology, and use it to make them physiologically accept change.
Talks about prefrontal cortex, limbic systems, dopamine receptors, the amygdala. All the things you hear during scrum of scrum of scrum of scrums, or SCOSCOSCOs, as they call it now.
Bit of a background: I used to do door to door cognitive science for the visual system, that is, for a while I was a graduate student in visual cognitive psychology. One of the departments I didn’t like to hang around was one where they drilled a hole into rats skulls to glue in a cannula to drip dopamine onto their brains. One day a scientitst picked a rat up by a brain cannula and I was off to developmental studies for good.
In Agile NeuroScrumming — since we are all addicted to our own lives, we need a NSCM (neuro-scrum master) to take employees through a period of withdrawal and break the cycle of dependency on one’s own independence.
Now this. My god, Watson, now I think its only a matter of time before the PM blokes install a brain chemistry changing machine for the projects . . . !!!!
I’m going to be honest. Agile has went a direction I never thought possible. I mean, like TOO metric. Like TOO “process, not people.” Here are some quotes from this article:
“We can start where they are at (employees in the danger/reward contiuum), and design our interactions to minimize the feelings of danger and maximize feelings of reward. “
“As leaders, we must be patient and know that achieving a mindset shift in our people – essentially rewiring the brain to create new habits – requires clearing the path and creating a safe environment that allows a shift to take place; where people have the overview and feel in control of their work.”
FEEL in control of their work? Because in reality they aren’t? Been there. Rewire our brains? That’s an Agile manager’s job? WTF is that about. Seriously, in this area of specialization how many c-panel types or managers in general have it *so* together that they know how to do a person’s task list. How many of them have it together in general? None of my managers for my last contracts dating back 15 years could do one thing I could do. Now they are going to change my brain for me. Maybe while they are at it they can pick a new religion for me or rewire me to eat more chia seeds. Don’t underestimate the power of chia seeds.
I checked in the code and surprisingly to me, the build broke because of an integration test failure caused by unannounced changes in database configurations on the QA server. White coated PMs and team leads were dispatched immediately and administered high doses of zoloft to workers of neuroscrum cell 7-2521. The configuration manager fared much worse, and was removed to receive several treatments of shock adjustment therapy.
Maybe, and it’s just my humble opinion, but this is just another approach to assign “all of the responsibility, none of the blame.” Sure there are salient points in the article– like make a work environment “safe to fail.” But seriously, will a manager in that author’s world do a CYA polka faster than you can say “let’s revert to Windows 7” when a project fails? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing off neuromanagement for running the local Pizza Hut. Heck, you can get drug tests at the dollar general, Kroger runs infrared cameras in their stores, why not run some bodily invasive stress detectors on your employees?
Contrast all this to a Joel Spolsky’s treatise on Microsoft (ownership) vs Juno (people bailing left and right):
At Microsoft, management was extremely hands-off. In general, everybody was given some area to own, and they owned it.
At Juno, quite the opposite was the case. Nobody at Juno owned anything, they just worked on it, and different layers of management happily stuck their finger into every pie, giving orders left and right in a style which I started calling hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces.
And Joel’s conclusion:
PaxDigita Culture
So this is why I’m concerned with creating the right culture of hands-off management at PaxDigita. In general:
- everybody owns some area. When they own it, they own it. If a manager, or anybody else, wants to provide input into how that area is managed, they have to convince the owner. The owner has final say.
- every decision is made by the person with the most information.
- management is extremely flat. Ideally, managers just don’t have time to get their fingers in the pies of their reports. You may be interested to read about a GE plant in North Carolina that has 170 employees who all report directly to the plant manager.
I’m not sure how the great brain machine get’s along with his lesson.
Maybe someday, an Agile manager can be merely seen as a kind of thought-dairy farmer. They will come in, rub iodine all over the employee-resource head organs and hook up cerebellum milking devices. Now that’s lean baby.
Seriously, what are we really trying to accomplish with all this?