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As per my last post I said I will be talking more (but not entirely) about politics. And if you think I’m going to jump into something big, right now, not really. Well I kind of am. Because I want to share something that I find useful in thinking about society, politics, and how we get things done at scale.
It won’t surprise you that it’s about Agile methods, but one that affects my politics – and might give you a few ideas.
For anyone not familiar with Agile (a vanishingly small number of people who read me as I talk about it a lot), it’s an approach to work, started in software, about reasonably-sized teams working in short increments. The popular method is Scrum, where teams take a list of priorities, tackle a limited set over a short time, and then review and do it all over again. I’ve applied it to writing, art, and more.
But as you may guess, small teams is like about 5 people give or take. So how do you do a big project? Well someone invented Scrum At Scale. You have teams, but team leads from those team meet on their OWN Scrum teams to coordinate. Bigger project? Then you have teams of team leads of team leads, and pile it as high as possible. It’s pretty cool and isn’t the giant process-haul that rival SAFE is.
It also affected my view of politics.
First, one of the problems of politics is non-participation or exclusion. To be part of society is to be part of it, like it or not. At the same time plenty of people want to exclude others to get their own “selectorate” to make holding power easier, and of course usually screwing over everyone else. Scrum at Scale made me realize how important it is for people to be involved and involved at multiple levels.
You should pay attention to your community, but also to your state/province, federal, and the world and be involved. If necessary hold office even if it’s an informal community thing. Good leaders should also be trusted if they can and have held positions at lower levels and have actually done something. I’m no military adventurist by a long shot, but there’s a reason I sometimes vote for ex-mils as well as doctors, emergency workers, etc.
Scrum at Scale is about being involved and being in touch among levels. A team lead on the lowest level scrum team might be a representative on one team, and the team above that, and so on. That’s the kind of thing software development or society needs – integration of people.
But there’s one more factor as well. Scrum of Scrums, especially, emphasizes communicating problems upward. What a team below can’t solve, the team above tries to tackle, and so on up the chain. Eventually unsolvable problems land on a leadership group, and if no one else can fix them that’s their job.
Problems go up, solutions come down. If you’ve ever seen politicians try to solve issues that they usually make up you realize how important this idea is. The higher up the chain you are the more you should help fix the unfixable things below. If no problems come up then you keep things running, which is important because I can say quite cynically many a problem is caused by a politician trying to keep their job.
Honestly, a lot of my politics are influenced by things that aren’t seen as political – project management, biology, and so on. But as I’ve noted before everything is really political, so we should learn from everything.
Steven Savage