I gave a 3 minute lightening talk at Agile Coach camp at Goa. These were the quick thoughts I gathered and delivered. Following is probably a little more elaboration of those thoughts.
In all honesty, I want to be proved wrong on everything I am writing in this post.
In my article on Agile & CMM a while back, I passionately argued about the missing people focus in CMM and how Agile is the champion of that very focus. Given the changing generation, I believed (and continue to believe) that the “mandate, control and track” models are bound to die. The only way ahead is trusting your teams to self organize themselves and deliver… I argued!
Unfortunately however, the ground reality is increasingly raising doubts in my mind, “may be, I am wrong”. We the Indians may be not be fully trustworthy. A racial, generalized, self defeating statement that is. So be it.
I worked in multiple organizations in US. Anywhere I went, the stationary room was wide open and there were full supply of pens, note pads and everything. How many Organizations can afford to do that in India? It is cheap and embarrassing to talk about such things, I know. I was talking to a facilities head of a reputed IT organization from Hyderabad recently. He said, they started with a open stationary room. But quickly they learned that the stationary started disappearing faster than they can refill. It’s apparently beyond multiple times of any reasonable usage for a work place. After a long struggle, mulling over the embarrassing situation of having to doubt their own beloved proud associates, they resorted to “manned stationary room”. You enter your name and sign before you take a pen. The facilities head told me that the entire management was so upset for having to do that. But then, the usage of stationary was less than 25% to when it was free.
All that started working at the back of my mind. I started thinking with the premise that “okay we are not trustworthy”, but what must be causing this? I broadly could think of following few reasons.
1. Hand holding
At what age do kids in India are allowed to take decisions on their own? Not even the serious big items like career and marriage decisions. Even the minor day to day decisions like what to dress, what to eat?
I am aware of parents accompanying their sons and daughters to get them admitted into professional colleges. They get them admitted into post graduate courses. Show them the hostel, talk to his/her classmates/seniors to ensure the hot water is available in the hostel, the timings of breakfast, where to go for hair cut etc.. Sometimes, parents do these things to the utter embarrassment of their kids. What happens once the parents leave is a total different story.
Have you ever noticed any Indian matrimonial? Something like “A 25 year old boy looking for a bride”. I always wonder why we call someone 25 year old a “boy” and why a “boy” needs a bride. At what age do we recognize our boys becoming men and our girls becoming women?
In my opinion, our middle class is guilty of being over protective of their kids. Most men (especially men) do not even know how to wash their cloths, cook their food … even the simplest basic survival skills are a big ask.
This very crowd at work, can we hope them to throw their hat voluntarily into a risky situation and take ownership? Can we expect them to accept responsibility of something that goes wrong?
2. Overdose of Politeness
Our Indian parenthood, while celebrated for its middle-class-conservative-strong-family-values, it made it difficult for individuals to become decisive and take a stand. Our brought-up makes it very difficult to take a stand and have an opinion. Lest being able to open up and say “I disagree”. Especially if it involves people older than me with whom I have to disagree. At home I can’t disagree with my zero-IQ-uncle just because he happens to have born couple of decades ahead of me. I bring in the same personality to work and find it difficult to disagree with my colleague who seemingly is much smarter than me, who possesses a degree from a more reputed college than me and has couple of more years of experience than me.
3. Indiscipline/Unethical
Probably I don’t need to talk much about this. Any traffic light at any part of India can tell you the story. If there is no police man around, we don’t have to care for the traffic light. Driving on the wrong side is no big deal.
How many of us have a reasonable plan of what we do on weekends and on our personal times?
We don’t insist on receipts if that allows us to evade taxes. We don’t mind bribing ticket collectors if we can get a berth in a train. Such acts have become so casual that they have almost become standard operating procedures
If I can cheat on my own fellow citizens and travellers in train, would I mind cheating my own team mates? Think about it!
4. Public sector mind set
(Before I make my point, I want to make it clear that I am a strong supporter of public sector. I never supported and never will the maddening uncontrolled privatization that is going on in India for a while now. That is due to my political/ideological beliefs that are outside the scope of this post/discussion. I am only limiting this post to talk about the culture part)
Our public sector has been inherited from the colonial British Raj. The clerical Indian staff always had to work for the ruling “sirs” from a foreign land. The independence just replaced the white-sirs with brown-sirs. The culture has not changed much. The strong bureaucratic system of boss controlling the entire operations still prevalent in most govt offices. The peon walking behind the big sir carrying sir’s office bag/folder is a common scene even today.
Public sector has been the major employer for very long. The private sector always been looked down until recent times. The safe, secured government officer job was the most desired job around. That resulted in major portion of educated middle class becoming the primary beneficiary of this public sector. This very middle class is what made their kids go into engineering colleges and then onto private corporate sector.
How does that matter? Imagine the first day of work for any engineering grad at any office. It’s more likely that he/she will address his/her supervisor as “sir”. It takes few weeks to correct that and bring them to modern/current day professional work culture. It is actually not that difficult to correct such obvious behaviours like addressing bosses as “sir”. What is actually difficult to change is the internalized culture/mindset that they have acquired from their earlier generations at home since childhood “be subservient to your boss”.
Needless to say that this behaviour suites perfectly for strong process oriented organizations. Boss gives the work, tells how to do it, tracks how it is happening, appraises how it has happened at the end. No wonder so many organizations in India were able to go for such heavy weight process models without much dissent from their truly qualified smart engineers on the floor. That’s how so many process slaves have been created in India. It probably comes natural to our ilk.
With a work force who never trained to take a decisions on their own, who are not disciplined, who cannot disagree with anything, who are brainwashed to be subservient to their bosses…. can we really aspire to build self-organizing, self-managing teams and working models? What Agile are we talking about here?
(I dedicate this to my friend Madhav, who has been pestering me to write a counter point to my own strong opposition to top-down-control-freak-process-driven models and my favouritism towards bottom-up-trust-driven-agile models. The truth is, I am deliberately being provocative to generate discussion and validate the above)
Defining “trust” = Firm reliance on the integrity ability or character of a person.
When you are hiring a “trustworthy” person, how much should the hiring mechanism be responsible for this?
In the huge growth potential in offshore, there is a big “unemployable” section of Indian graduates.
This “unemployability” is not just technical but also behavioral. Behavioral science is called “soft skills” or optional training/coaching in the software industry i.e. when people are on bench lets train them to behave maturely.
Self-organizing teams cannot be built by relying on “trustworthy” people but by building a mechanism of trust.
e.g. Case of stationary self-organization. Put cameras (feedback mechanisms) and retrospect on the footage to understand the problem rather than putting in a “manned” procedure. Its not just the stationary but a case of inducing self-discipline. We have security cameras all over the place. Why not use a camera for instrumenting feedback?
When you want to build trust, look for personal alignment of an individual when the person is hired.
Conduct the behavioral ironing when the new joinee is booted into the company culture.
Trust cannot be just expected, trust can be built.
Thank you so much for crystallizing these thoughts. They are all very true and their existence certainly makes it much harder to implement Agile.
We are doing our bit to emphasize the importance trust in our company – but after having read your post, its become apparent that we need to go on overdrive in this regard.
Akki,
Thanks for this article. But we are facing same issue. As you said, that tough middle class mentality is very tough to adopt the change. In our company, we are trying make our team members like decision makers and ownership of what they are doing, it is kind of really a challenging task for us to convenience them in that direction. We tried for few months and got tired of it.
But we don’t want to give up. with our 35 members staff, if we can bring the difference in 10-20% members,we might success in a sense.
Lets wish for the best
Once again good one from my favorite Akki.
Thanks
Satheesh k
Good Post.
I might suggest changing the title to – do we trust other people enough?
and that can lead to another question – do we trust ourselves?
One of the basic problem is that the rules are applied on everyone.
e.g I asked one of my colleague as to why don’t we have work from home facility?
To which the reply was, we don’t know if people will really work when they are at home.
I agree with that response, somewhat.
Instead of applying this rule on everyone, people who don’t give results (whether WFH or no WFH), should be told so. And give the flexibility to others who work & give results.
The idea of blanket rule is equally bad.
On many of your points I can’t but agree.
Do you recall my discussion in karmayog-hyd earlier when I had brought in a mention of ‘Games Indian Play’ by Prf. Raghunathan of IIMA.
You are talking about taking decisions about marriage and career of our boys. How many take independent design decisions at work? How many can defend their design decisions?
How do we break the vicious chain or circle? One begets the other and the cycle never breaks and we quickly find excuses to justify why we are what we are.
Decision making from an young age and at the same time a good secure family environment supportive of even wrong decisions by their kids would make a start. As long as parents continue to believe that they are responsible for their kids’ education, career, marriage and at the end their happiness also – this country will continue to be what it is. Kids lean on parents and they in turn lean on the kids and they do not want to leave one another.
The country and its citizens should GROW up…
I enjoyed your language and ofcourse I am able to see your yearning to see the society to improve…
Love
Tiger
Well covered points. And in the right forum, I guess.
While all of this is excellent diagnosis, apart from me and my self restraint, where do we start addressing this issue – at schools, homes, corporations, municipalities, etc. ? Like Swami Vivekananda had perceived in the 1890′s itself, three Indians cannot come to a consensus even today; what then we are talking of a nation.
[...] (2010-07-29): This blog presents a very relevant and candid account from one of the active Agilist. I just hope he did not [...]