Team performance and assumptions
Pure knowledge doesn't exist. I mean, there is not such a thing as an accurate and objective portrayal of the world unbiased by the beliefs, values and interests of those who provide it. This idea of pure knowledge stems from the early mechanicist view of the world in which everything can be explained with a set of objective phenomena behaving to a set of rules which can be readily observed and described.
In fact beliefs, values and interests of those who generate knowledge colour the knowledge itself. And this is true not only for the easily spottable cases like advertising or propaganda but also for knowledge that comes from a rigorous scientific experiment because it is created within a certain view of the world.
Thomas Kuhn called these views of the world paradigms and we all know that many different paradigms existed before, exist now and more will come in the future.
Different paradigms exist not only at the area of knowledge level (e.g. medicine: Western and Chinese) but also at the people and role level within a chosen paradigm (e.g. in a Western medicine hospital doctors and nurses operate within different paradigms).
The paradigm idea can be illustrated comparing two contrasting views of what knowledge is: Positivism and Constructivism.
In the Positivism paradigm knowledge exists in an objective sense, it's a complex pattern of facts and ideas and learning is seeking and absorbing this knowledge. Scientific knowledge usually reflects this paradigm because, as Jurgen Habermas defined it, it's coloured by the technical interest to control the world.
In the Constructivism paradigm knowledge is not just objective, it is coloured by our own meanings and feelings and therefore everyone's knowledge is different. This is the knowledge we need to understand human relationships that Habermas defined as practical interest.
Of course Habermas ideas reflect his own paradigm… 
All this lecture leads us my main point: team dynamics and performance. A team to work efficiently needs to have shared assumptions operating at an inconscious level so that its members don't have to constantly stop and determine what they believe and how they should act. The beauty of assumptions is they become a shorthand for the team which, when faced with similar situations, just acts and doesn't re-evaluate each time.
On the other side though the team may fail to see new data that contradicts its beliefs and may miss an opportunity to improve its effectiveness. In fact missing details may false an experiment even if the results make sense because they fit our frame.
Piaget suggested that when faced with a new situation we have two options:
- Assimilation - happens when we handle a new situation by applying an existing schema. We make the new situation fit with our existing paradigm
- Accommodation - takes place when we make adjustments to our routine schema to cope with something new. In these cases our existing paradigm is modified to fit in with the new situation.
There is obviously a tension between assimilation and accommodation - between using old responses in new situations and acquiring new ones (or updating old ones) to cope with change. This is a continuous process and the result is a continuous learning.
Our team is a nice example: since the beginning of the project we have gone through many cycles of assimilation and accommodation trying, inspecting and adapting many aspect of our way of working: to date we have changed the duration of the iterations, the way we pair (2 or 3 times), the story lifecycle, the way we do the planning game, how different people interact and even the way we move the stories on the cardwall (plus many more details). We are now going to change the day and the way we do the showcase before the planning.
And everytime there has been a tension between our assumptions - as a team and as individuals based on experiences in previous projects - and the feedback - both as data collected and people feelings (retrospective but not only).
Paradigms, beliefs, values, assimilation and accommodation heavily affect the relationship between traditional and Agile people but this is, maybe, a topic for another post.
sladow said,
May 14, 2006 @ 4:13 am
What shared paradigms do you think students bring to a group project, besides being students?
Marco Abis said,
May 14, 2006 @ 8:11 am
Hi Sarah. I don’t think we can consider a group of students a team (at least at the beginning when the group is new). They are a workgroup and there are substantial differences between the two.
Team are usually (”The Wisdom of Team: Creating the High-Performance Organization” by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith):
- small
- have agreed on an approach to the work
- have complimentary skills
- have interrelated or interdependent interim goal
- committed to a common purpose/goal
- make commitment about tasks to each other
The last two points in particular make a great difference and it takes a lot of time and effort to build a real team. The members of a workgroup usually have similar skills and independent goals.
But of course workgroups can work in a collaborative way: they share information, help each other and can make decision together even if everyone has his own individual goals and interests.
silk and spinach said,
May 18, 2006 @ 1:30 pm
carnival of the agilists, 18-may-06…
Welcome to the May 18th edition of the Carnival of Agilists - providing you with a commented digest on what’s been said in the agile blogsphere during the last two weeks…
Jay Conne said,
May 19, 2006 @ 5:41 pm
Moderator - please replace the previous comment with this one that fixes typos - Thx.
Marco,
Sadly this posting reflects the sorry state of philosophy in the world. It goes back to errors by Plato and Kant and is echoed through the voices of most of professional philosophy and the wannabees. Note that those ‘professionals’ have never been held accountable to reality like those that drive trucks, build houses, weave cloth, grow food, design and build computers and write business software. All these people understand and control what’s necessary to get the job done.
Specifically, the term ‘Pure Knowledge’ suffers from the presumption of omniscience fallacy, i.e. if you don’t know everything you can’t claim to know anything. Don’t be fooled by this common trap. Whenever you hear the words ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’, a red flag should popup in your head. You’re most likely being set up with this trap.
Omniscience is a contradiction in terms. It’s the product of two factors: 1) an unrealistic desire to never be wrong again; and 2) taking a real value “knowledge” which is specific in amount, and prefixing it with ‘all’ which introduces the contradiction in terms. Adding ‘ALL’ to a specific measure makes it meaningless - it’s just been made into nonsense. It’s the same error as if you treated infinity as a real number rather than a relationship - meaning more than anything you care to specify.
The same principle applies to all variations of qualities typically attributed to god(s): omniscient, omnipotence and omnipresence. Each is an attempt to take a valuable measure of human capability: knowledge, power and presence and deny the need to do the specific measuring. It’s an escape from the responsibility to think. It’s an attempt to have some mythical supernatural character relieve us of our most basic human responsibility.
Scrum, like all real world discipline demand the opposite of us.
To repeat, when ever someone implies you can’t know anything for sure because you can’t know everything, or the corollary, that you can’t have ‘true’ knowledge because we are using our senses, which distort the information that is only accessible to us through the senses, your BS DETECTION should be flashing red!
Obviously we *do* understand and manipulate reality effectively, otherwise would not have all that differentiates us from cavemen. Don’t let philosophical crap deceive you - even if your teachers and the rest of you society encourage that.
Humans deserve better - Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher has rethought and brought sense to the foundations of philosophy.
For a sane alternative, read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand, 2nd edition. Be sure to read the appendices in the 2nd edition. For a simpler introduction see her “Philosophy, Who Needs it?”. For information on the web see http://www.aynrand.org another great resource that I recommend highly is the introductory article in the first issue of a new journal at http://www.TheObjectiveStandard.com.
Agile and Scrum work because we can learn and know. We do that through the healthy and effective way we really learn - and that’s as good as it gets.
Jay Conne
BrainScrum » Blog Archive » Retrospectives IN and ON action said,
May 22, 2006 @ 10:37 pm
[...] When we critically analyse our work we do it through reflection and this is when, in my experience, the tension between assimilation and accomodation happen. [...]
From Technicality to Business Awareness: now what? « BrainScrum said,
March 20, 2007 @ 12:08 pm
[...] I’ll go so far as to say that nowadays if a team is doing all the good Agile/XP stuff like TDD, refactoring, continuous integration, etc, etc but I don’t hear people talking about delivery of business value I’m usually worried because more often than not it means some fundamentals are missing and people are in a sort of “agile Assimilation mode”. [...]
carnival of the agilists, 18-may-06 « silk and spinach said,
May 12, 2007 @ 1:17 pm
[...] Abis at BrainScrum discusses the impact of assumptions on team performance, and particularly on the agile inspect/adapt [...]