Burke and the Agile 400

Take Edmund Burke. Burke lived in a time where the British people were watching the American and French revolutions and starting to yearn for self-government, self-determination, and all of that stuff. It was a heady time, much like the roll-out of Agile methodologies over the past few years. People were talking about the theory of individual and natural rights, and the theory of the social contract. Locke and Hume and Hobbes and a lot of other really smart people had expanded at length about the roles of people in society.

Burke was a guy paid to stand up for the establishment. In today's terms, I guess you could call him a PR flack. He pointed out that self-serving philosophizing didn't make a government. All the feel-good, pie-in-the-sky rhetoric about the powers of the individual didn't make man a more honorable creature. By the way, he's also the guy who said "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”

He liked the American Revolution, but had a lot of disdain for the French one. He accurately predicted that the French would devolve into a bitter mob-rule kind of barbarism, which they did.

Burke posed a famous question: Suppose you had the choice of eating in two different restaurants. One had a chef that, while he had never cooked anything before, had the greatest skill and learning of any chef in the world. The second had a chef that had tutored under all the great chefs of Europe and had the most wonderful reputation for good food, yet he had no pedigree. Which would you choose?

His point was that theory does not make a good meal. Good chefs make good meals. And the rabble of the common man armed with theory and having their heads filled with philosophy didn't make for a good government. Instead, people who have actual, real-world experience governing people made for good government.

"In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority," Burke famously said, and reminded us that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

It's easy to screw up, to let the mob rule, to govern to the lowest common denominator. Burke was the father of modern conservatism -- and the old crusty guy has been proven true more times than not.

I don't think Burke was a critic of democracy per se, he just thought that totally unstructured free people exercising their "rights" (whatever that meant) always went to the lowest common denominator. We sell out. We rob future generations of social security so we can pass budgets we can't pay for. We do the quick and easy instead of the wise thing.

"Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Likewise, in agile philosophy, we see the emphasis on the team and the team's needs ahead of, say, the larger organization. Agile teams have a hard time scaling. People know this instinctively to be true, no matter how many authors say differently.

As a contrast, let's pick, no, not a liberal, but another conservative: recently deceased William F. Buckley. Buckley was a smart guy, and an expert in politics (agree with him or not.) He famously said, "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

Buckley was expressing the quintessential feeling of American politics -- we trust our neighbor more than we trust a ruling class. Americans have always been very distrustful of people who feel they are born to lead. In our country, everybody starts the same, and everybody ends up with the same rights (in theory, anyway). We don't want "experts" controlling our destiny. We can do very well by ourselves, thank you very much.

It's neat that this is a political as well as a software development question. What kind of people do you want to elect to office? A lot of people will respond will some version of the alpha male/female: somebody who is smarter enough and wise enough to lead. Somebody who is "better" than the other person.

But there's another answer. People sometimes elect other people based on their personality and their ability to create and lead teams. Mary Sue might not be the smartest knife in the drawer, but she is friendly, has impeccable ethics, and consistently leads great-performing teams. This is another version of the "doing" versus "knowing" debate.

When I first wrote my MAT tool, which enables teams to assess their own risk and adjust their processes accordingly, some of the other mentors and coaches were appalled. "How can the teams know what they're supposed to be worried about unless we tell them?" they said.

That's the thing about experts: they're hard to get rid of. As the old saying goes, you can't live with them and you can't live without them. One is reminded of Thomas Jefferson's view on slavery -- it's like holding an angry wolf by the ears. Nobody is happy with the situation, but you don't dare let go either.

So what is the role of experts, of structured documents and behavior, in running Agile teams?

I'll defer back to one of my favorite Virginians, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. In the DOI Jefferson makes the case that the king did not live up to his end of the bargain and therefore political power reverted to the natural legislature of the people.

Those are some high-sounding words, and Burke should have been critical of them. But Jefferson's point was not that the colonies were using new and fancy theories and applying them willy-nilly. His point was that the colonies were left no choice: that in order to continue the practical matter of governance something had to be done. In that case, and in only that case, the colonies turned to the theory and applied it as best they could, realizing that changes would constantly be needed as time went on.

The point wasn't that we started with the theory and then decided to reject the King -- just the opposite. We were forced into taking some action and at that point the theory was all we had.

Likewise when we participate in Agile teams we need to be constantly on guard: we should always be pragmatists and adopt our work according to the things we have to accomplish, not some idea of what agile should or shouldn't be. If we're building a Mars Shuttle it stands to reason we're going to have a lot of experts and a lot of really structured conversations and documents. If we're building a web site for a florist probably not so much. These are common-sense, practical considerations.

So put me on the side of the phone book. But sometimes the phone book has experts in it too, and if I were building a Space Shuttle, I just might use a phone book from Cape Kennedy. Practical needs of the project must drive the implementation of the philosophy, not the other way around.