could not reconcile their difference of opinion, because it was deeply rooted in their respective values; and since their opinions defined them as philosophers, they had a famous falling out.8
Most modern cultures place a high value on equality and the importance of the group, and also most place a high value on individual liberty. However, some value one over the other.
For example, North American culture tends to value individual freedom and liberty more than equality. The importance of liberty traces to the founding of the Americas by people who were searching for a land where they could practice their religion their own way. The subsequent settling of the Americas by pioneers reinforced the importance of the hardy individual and self-reliance.
In contrast, many European cultures place a higher value on the community than the individual. Perhaps that is why so many European countries have strong social safety nets, and in many European countries, it is commonplace for union representatives to sit on corporate boards.
Central and South Asian countries have cultural patterns as well pertaining to individualism and the group. In many Southeast Asian cultures, the group is valued more than the individual, and age and seniority are considered extremely important. These values are in conflict to some extent with the tradition of Agile, which advocates an “everyone is equal” and “anyone can work on anything” mindset.
Which is better? Is it better to value the individual or the group? It depends on your value system. It is also impossible to say, in a strict technical sense.
Visionaries usually call upon us to follow them on a path that is atypical and that experts advise against. That requires a great deal of trust, and that is why visionaries need a source of influence: either they have a powerful and persuasive personality or they have great resources in their name.
Is it better to let visionaries dictate our path or to block would-be visionaries and always compel their subordination to a group of experts who presumably know better?
Given the emphasis on the individual that one finds in North America, it is no surprise that North America has so many startup companies. In North America, the individual is the star: Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison. The list goes on and on—they are visionaries who are celebrated.
But what about Elizabeth Holmes? What about Bernie Madoff? Michael Milken? Kenneth Lay?—antiheroes who could have been heroes if their efforts had panned out in a positive way.
How does one know that a person is a visionary? Can one know ahead of time? How does one know if one should trust the experts or trust the visionary?
There is no way to know. Most wannabe visionaries are often wrong, perhaps usually wrong. However, it is visionaries who change the paradigm. Given enough time, the paradigm would probably shift, but visionaries make it shift now. It was visionaries who gave us the iPhone and its copycats, electric cars, and relativity (which was stridently mocked and refuted by many scientists of the time).
So, do you follow a visionary or follow the group consensus? There is no way to know, and it also depends on your value system.
People Don't All Work the Same
Individuality also pertains to how people work. Not everyone works the same. Just because someone works differently than others on a team does not make that person a misfit. Agile is rife with all-team practices: everyone joins the standup; everyone is equal in the retrospective; everyone takes a story and works on it, collaborating with others. But some people do not adjust well to those ways of working—ways that are highly interactive, in which you are on the spot all the time, on your feet or expressing your idea verbally. Some people work better in isolation, with quiet, and express themselves better in writing.
Such people are not outliers; they are the introverts, as we discussed in Chapter 1. If we shun those people or make them feel like they are misfits, we lose the enormous value of what they can contribute. Those people are often the deep thinkers—the ones with the powerful insights. It was during quiet reflection before a fireplace that Dirac suddenly realized the solution that became the Dirac equation—the key to relativistic quantum mechanics.9 It was a moment alone, making his morning coffee, in which Héctor A. Chaparro-Romo suddenly saw the solution to the 2,000-year-old problem of spherical aberration.10 It was a walk along the Royal Canal in Dublin when Sir William Rowan Hamilton suddenly saw the solution to the quaternion problem,11 which underlies much of particle physics today.
Yes, these people collaborated with others, which led to new trains of thought, which is essential; but it was during silent reflection that they were able to create the deep and complex mental model needed to pursue those new trains of thought and suddenly have the insight needed to solve a complex problem.
It is a shame—a poverty—to ostracize such people and make them feel like misfits on teams.
Communication Is a Process, Not an Event
We have mentioned that before the Agile Manifesto was created, Alistair Cockburn had been writing about how, in his opinion, face-to-face communication is the most effective form of communication. It is not always, though.
Communication about complex topics is a process, not an event. If you gather five people into a room for an hour to talk about something complicated, which none of them have had a chance to discuss together before, then what usually happens is that in the course of the hour the conversation will jump all over the place. Some will be unable to fully explain their thoughts. They can't because for a complex topic, it might take longer than people are willing to listen without jumping in.
The situation is different if they have all been immersed in the subject. In that case, they have a shared understanding as a baseline, and they can discuss incremental ideas relative to that. But if someone is far ahead of the others, they won't be able to lay out their thoughts and not have someone inject tangential issues that will take up the rest of the hour.
In the realm of IT, there is a common topic that is complex. It pertains to branch/merge strategy. The issue is even more complex if one is considering multiple code repositories. The various issues pertaining to this are way too complex to discuss effectively in person, unless there is a shared baseline understanding of the issues. That is why one of us has used the approach of writing up a white paper, explaining the issues and laying out options, distributing it, and then having a meeting to discuss it.
Similarly, the idea that after a challenging product launch a team can gather to talk through what happened, what went wrong, and how to do things differently next time is simplistic. One of us has the approach of spending a week inviting team members to record and share their ideas in writing anonymously, summarizing the input and sending that out, then asking the group to submit solutions or action items in writing anonymously, and only at the end of the process coming together in person to discuss and prioritize what to do next. This gives people time to think, to write, to reflect, and to share ideas asynchronously over time, before having a meeting to discuss it. Indeed, we took a similar approach to developing the ideas of Agile 2.
The point is that the idea that face-to-face communication is always best is—like so much of the Agile community's interpretation of the Agile Manifesto—an oversimplification of real-life
