Unspoken Cultural differences in Agile & Scrum

For a while now I’ve been convinced that a lot of “Agile” is about cultural differences. In particular I believe the canonical version of Scrum, which I often refer to as Hard Core Scrum or Scrum™ is rooted in 1990’s American software management culture.

Unfortunately the role of culture behind many Agile techniques and methods isn’t really stated. This make it even more important to work out what Agile means to you and which tools work in your environment and culture.

I first started paying attention to the cultural differences around teams and Agile after Steve Freeman said something along the lines of “Scandinavian teams just do this, they don’t see much new.” The teams I’ve seen in Scandinavia, and to a lesser degree Holland and the UK, don’t need big lectures in self-organization, left to themselves they do most of it.

I’ve pondered on this for some time and at Agile Cambridge last month I got the chance to talk a little about this with Dave Snowden. We only had a few minutes to talk about this - I was about to present - but it was clear we could have talked for hours.

Take stand-up meetings for example.

When I worked in Silicon Valley I worked in a cube. I hated it. I didn’t even know if my neighbours were in the office, let alone what they were working on or if they had achieved anything that say.

Working in the UK, in open plan offices, usually sitting opposite my co-workers we would certainly know who was in, most likely they would tell me when they had done something.

I believe that stand-up meetings are a good thing in all teams. However I believe they make a much bigger difference in cube and office dwelling environments than in open plan offices. In other words: stand-up meetings have greater benefit in US offices than they do in European offices.

In the original book of Extreme Programming Kent Beck talked of a “sustainable pace” and “40 hour work week”. Beck talks about his experience in Switzerland and contrasts it with the US norm. Although European workers - particularly in the UK - frequently work more than the 40, 37.5 or 35 hours they are contracted for they work hours don’t get excessive for too long. I’m not sure that is the same in the US. Sustainable pace means different things.

Personally I’ve always found “sustainable pace” does not fit well with the Scrum idea of “commitment”. I’ve written before - Two Ways to Fill an Iteration - about the contractions I see. Culturally it isn’t hard to see how “sustainable pace” is easier to do in Europe than the US.

(By the way, I’m limiting myself to the US and European, specifically UK, cultures because these are the ones I have some experience of.)

Now lets talk about the big one: Self-Organizing teams and evil managers.

(Apologies if this comes across as Scrum bashing, I believe Scrum works, or at least Scrum-lite works, and I believe self-organization is best. I just don’t believe hype.)

Some Scrum courses and advocates make a big thing out of self-organization. Personally I don’t. In my courses I I talk about it a little, more if people want to, but I focus on giving people experience of how it works. My style of Agile - yes I’m slowly writing up Xanpan - believes that self-organization is the result of the right approach not a stating point.

Self-organization goes hand-in-hand with an attack on Managers, and in particular Project Managers. Again this theme runs through all Agile but in Scrum is particularly strong. Hard-core Scrum really has it in for Project Managers but then replaces them with Scrum Masters which most companies think is just the same job with a different name. I’ve written about Scrum’s contradictions with Project Managers before so I won’t repeat myself, When did Scrum start loving project managers?

But Scrum’s dislike of managers only goes so far. After all, Scrum is the management friendly version of XP - see Scrum has 3 advantages over XP.

Now I’m not a big fan of Project Managers, in my programming days I too suffered a few managers who tried to hand out tasks and impose their way of doing thing. And I’ve been told No when I want to spend a little money - I once threatened to leave the company if they didn’t buy more RAM for my development box.

When I look back over my career I have to say most of the (project) managers who behaved like this made themselves irrelevant. We worked around them. Certainly removing them would have made us more effective.

But, most of my experience is that managers, even project managers, didn’t behave like this. They may not have been the most empowering of people but generally they left me, and programmers I worked with, to get on and do it. We worked out what needed doing, we divided the work up amount ourselves, we scheduled at the micro-level.

In other words: we did self-organization on a day-to-day level.

Again I think there is a cultural difference here. In my experience America is a more hierarchical culture than Europe (with the possible exception of Germany). Please, I’m not talking class systems here, I’m talking command and control.

I think Europeans are more likely to question their managers to their faces - perhaps it was the 1914-18 experience - or just plain ignore them.

National characteristics are not the only basis for culture. Industries have cultures too. Here again I’ve written before: Agile will never work in investment banking - one reason being that investment banks are very hierarchical.

Most of the managers, even project managers, I meet when delivering Agile training courses and consulting, like the Agile approach and want to work with it for the benefit of their teams. Few seems to be the whip-cracking project managers of folk lore.

Jon Jagger tells a story about one of his clients in Norway. The company was bought by an American competitor. When the engineers started to work together they would convene a teleconference. The American programmers would arrive with their managers while the Norwegians would arrive by themselves. The American’s would ask “Where is your manager?” The idea that the Norwegian could talk and make decisions by themselves was a new idea.

I had a manager in California - Irish as it happened - who used to practice “management by walking around.” Every morning he would appear in my cube and chat. Took me months to realise he was my manager and when I did I wished I had been more guarded with some of my remarks.

This all begs the question, why would American management be such a hinderance to software development? (Note I’m not saying European management is better, that has its own faults, I’m just exploring different cultures.)

For many years the USA was the world foremost manufacturing nature. Part of this success was the superior management practise implemented by the Americans. Such practices made a difference on the factory floor but even here they have been .

I can, and should, write more about managers and their role in the software team. Suffice to say for now: there is an awful lot of bad management out there. I believe good managers, good management practices, can be help companies massively. But on the whole, in the IT industry, there is a lot of poor management.

Bringing this back to Agile.

I think Agile’s anti-management slant is really a reaction to bad management. Hard-core Scrum is the Extreme in this respect. Scrum-Lite, as practiced by most teams, is less so.

Agile, and particularly Scrum, is the product of 1990’s culture, and particularly American work/management culture. Since American culture spreads the fact that Europe never suffered from quite these ills may down to the fact that we were not that good at copying American ways.

There may be a silver lining here: if America adopt Agile, Scrum, self-organization, etc. then we should see it spread out to the rest of the world.

If you disagree with me I’d love to have your comments on this blog. And if you agree I’d love to hear your stories to. Please, leave a comment.