Foreign to Familiar

As I've been studying Hofstede's five cultural dimensions (power distance, individualism/collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long/Short Term Orientation), I remembered a little book I had read years ago called Foreign to Familiar (by Sarah A Lanier) in preparation for a mission trip. She used several other categorizations including Hot/Cold climates, Relationship/Task, Direct/Indirect, Inclusion/Privacy, and High Context/Low Context.

What's amazing to me is that we use so many different ideas to try to somehow express the complexity of the human race. It's wonderful to see the variety of human experience and background and it just makes me think that it's a miracle any of us can really work with each other at all. It reminds me a little bit of isolated biological communities like the Galapagos, Australia, or Madagascar where different populations of animals begin to take on characteristics of their own. Even though those animals on the Galapagos for example are very similar to other animals found on the mainland, they are unique in many ways. In some cases, so unique in fact that they would not survive if they were removed from their local habitat.

As our world grows smaller and smaller, people are in some sense, being forced into environments that may or may not be conducive for their success (at least in the short term). So people may be forced to do what the animals do: adapt, move, or die. I'm hoping that as I begin to learn more about other cultures and their special characteristics, that I can adapt and help others to adapt as well. The research shows that even though the globe is becoming smaller because of technology and our ability to communicate more easily, our cultures are not about to go away quickly. It's the hidden, assumed, historical "feeling" of our own culture that is not so easy for others to grasp, and for us to communicate. So I suppose that my learning about other cultures, is forcing me to be more accountable to understand and help others understand my own.

Hidden IT Dragons

The concept of Hidden Dragons is very interesting when considering the IT Industry. Many places, like India and China, who have traditionally be operating in more of support/maintenance role are now beginning to transition to more primary service type of work. Global IT companies that only provided maintenance development and quality assurance work, are now not only doing primary development for other companies, but starting to build large businesses with their own product lines and innovating their own software products.

This is beginning to change the industry in several ways. One primary way relates to the pay standards for these other countries. When HP first started using India for offshore solutions they were getting 5 Indian workers for the cost of 1 American Worker. Now that India has discovered that they can make significant amounts of money, their prices have gone up. So much so that HP for example outsourced to China instead where the labor and material costs are back down to the 5 to 1 ratio.

These Hidden Dragons are being built on the "savings" of large American and European companies. Strangely enough, as these foreign companies are doing this work, they're building competence and expertise in many areas that they previously didn't have. As the foreign companies gain this intellectual knowledge and operational capability to deliver (all at the expense of someone else's R&D dollars and experts), they are growing and silently becoming huge competitors. This raises questions around how and when these Dragons will rear their heads and what the results will be on the global market and in the local markets they previously have served. In fact many companies have lost so much intellectual capability to these Hidden Dragons, it has actually led to their decline (speaking from experience at HP).

Hopefully as businesses become more global, the standard of living for workers, the reduction of corruption, and the opportunity for innovation will significantly increase.

Chinese Business and Agile

In a review of Ming-Jer Chen's book Inside Chinese Business there are several concepts that stand out to me especially from the perspective of the Agile Scrum framework for software delivery (see www.mountaingoatsoftware.com for more information about Agile Scrum if you're not familiar with it). I am an Agile consultant, so exploring the similarities between the Chinese culture and Agile may provide some helpful insight to Agile done better. In today's post, I'll limit my discussion to the topic of Guanxi, a relationship based network approach.

Guanxi - a relationship based network

Guanxi is not just networking and connections, it's about a reciprocal relationship with a person which has mutual obligations (renquing) and is often supported by a sense of goodwill and personal affection (pg 46).

This relates directly to the relationship and face to face communication aspects of Agile Scrum. The team must build a strong relationship with one another, where there are mutual obligations for quality and assisting one another to ensure that the Sprint goals are achieved. It's also imperative that there is clear communication between the team and the Product Owner who is the customer representative. Since there is little formal documentation or process, the face to face relationship becomes the primary vehicle for communication and transfer of knowledge relating to delivery of value.

Another aspect of Scrum is transparency, where team members deal with actual time remaining (instead of percent complete), no buffering of task work, clear visibility between business, customer, and team goals, and many other things. The delivery team and process is extremely dependent on the partnerships that are created between them to ensure that the documentation/process-light approach of Agile remain effective and delivers real value.

The belief that adversity binds a group is also part of Guanxi and certainly part of a mature working Agile team. As the core team and extended team go through changes, hard choices, failures, and successes, they bind together more fervently and become more able to deal with challenges together.

As the team wants to work together, they also should consider their action and impacts on the rest of the organization, especially the customer or end user. The Agile team is very sensitive to it's quality (impacts to the system) both in the short and long term. The team doesn't want to build debt in the system or role relationships that make for difficultly later.

As with Chinese relationships where real trust based symbiosis is occurring, a mature Agile team will interact with their business counterparts and stakeholders, ensuring timely information exchange, compatibility between personalities, and capability to deliver work value.

The entire purpose of Agile as a framework or process is to provide a company with flexibility and capability to change as necessary. This is also part of the concept of Guanxi. Individuals must be flexible (even job descriptions blur) and use an informal approach based on simplicity which is valued above any other approach.

I thought about entitling this blog, the Confucian Practice of Agile, but that may be taking it a little too far. As we continue to explore some similarities between the Chinese mindset and the concepts of Agile Scrum, my hope is to see where there may be leverage to improve the agile experience.

Jason Dean
jason@AgileScrumPro.com
www.AgileScrumPro.com