I wrote a LinkedIn article after being inspired by Joost Icke's original piece. Johan Cruijff had some amusing sayings but also had a very deep understanding of team performance as a system.
The Company to Consumer model under threat teambrunel.com Originally I became interested in agile software development when I started to discover a pattern between great teamwork in yacht racing and teams that produced software. Some of the greatest software teams that I worked with were people working together on open source projects. Thousands of people worked together in self-organizing teams throughout their technology stack, much as if they had belonged to a single organization. Could that model work in more organizations? There was an essential thing missing though - most of these teams were making things that were useful to themselves but not necessarily to a user who would be willing to pay. Motivation was often very idealistic: working on free (as in liberty) software usually entailed working for free (as in beer). Some projects became wildly successful, imagine a world without Linux , Wikipedia or Bitcoin . But do you remember Joomla , Mutuala or Erpal ? It was
Continuous Improvement, Autonomy, Validation - these terms are becoming so worn that they feel like business jargon. But if you have experienced the pain that Stagnation, Command & Control and Big Bang Deployment brings, you have ample reason not to look back. The mild embarrassment that comes with joining the 'Agile cult' is greatly outweighed by the soul-numbing awfulness that is the alternative. Although the above is my experience too, this is not that story. I have also had experiences with Chaos - the inferno that regularly erupts in Startupland and in many Open Source projects. It, not Agile, is the real antithesis to the frozen hell that is Waterfall / Taylorism / TheoryX . This is not that story either. I actually started appreciating what I now call the Agile mindset, on a sailing boat.
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