This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Someone has to be the boss Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

I'll take complete responsibility for anyone having missed the point of the previous entry. Stefan thought I was "pushing it" in asserting that a team does not remember. I will stand by that: a team does not have a singular memory. You can't remember what your teammates did yesterday, nor they remember what you did.

What a team does have is memories - but the tough problem is not to remember things; it is to recall them. The problem is not storing information relevant to the project, such as Bob's suspicion that this gnarly bit of code might have a nasty bug, but accessing the information: if you had been in Bob's head when that suspicion crossed it, you might have been less enthusiastic about shipping the latest release to the customer site. That is why teams have meetings - to exchange information that might be relevant. It's also why frequent meetings work better than infrequent ones - when timely access to information that is in other people's heads can be critical to project outcomes.

Another thing a team doesn't have is a singular personality. As with Memento, we can stretch our imagination and envision what it might feel like not to have a personality, by reading novels or seeing movies about people afflicted with multiple-personality disorders (MPD). These people's lives are a mess, of course; that's what makes the stories interesting. You can't take a decision and actually stick to it, since another personality will soon be taking over.

Instead of memories, teams have meetings. Instead of personalities, teams have managers, or architects. There is one person who is "the brain" of the operation, integrates the various perspectives, and ensures that the decisions taken are consistent. Fred Brooks argued that for software projects, this was the only way to maintain the "conceptual integrity" of the software that got built.

We believe that "someone has to be the boss" when teams are concerned, because we believe it about ourselves. But what if that wasn't true ?

That theory of Dennett's which I cited previously strongly undermines the notion that our own personality and consciousness are really singular; Dennet calls consciousness a "user illusion", saying that we perceive the world as a serial, ordered, continuous stream of events because that's a workable design, not because our minds actually work that way - the mind's nature is actually parallel, modular, messy and contentious, just like a team of individuals.

There is a school of thought that if conditions are right, teams actually work better when there isn't a boss; they're called "self-directed work teams", or self-organized teams in the Agile jargon. With teams where "someone has to be the boss", or the single brain that directs all the activity, you also have to suppress the motivations of the individuals, or at least provide enough incentives to ensure that they completely align with the bosses' motivations, and not work against them. Robert Austin's book "Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" does a great job of illustrating the problems with that strategy.