An extremely popular approach to business, almost iconic in the United States, is one we’ll call Hero. Hero is what most people actually are doing when they say they are being Agile. They sometimes look alike, but are fundamentally different.
Companies who have a Hero approach and who think they are doing Agile–will truly struggle to be Agile.
So what is Hero?
To illustrate Hero we use the 1971 Clint Eastwood motion picture, Dirty Harry.
In the movie, a killer threatens to randomly kill a person each day unless the city of San Francisco pays him a ransom.To lead the investigation the Chief of Police and the Mayor of San Francisco assign “Dirty” Harry Calaghan the task.
Why Dirty Harry?
Because he gets things done… he is a hero you can rely on. He doesn’t care about rights, doesn’t follow rules, breaks laws… in order to get the job done. A more recent example of this type of character in popular fiction is terrorist fighter “Jack Bauer” in the TV series 24.
The Hero Approach
The Hero is a maverick. Independent. Confident, yet highly skilled. He is driven by his own internal moral compass and doesn’t let rules get in his way.
Americans like Heroes, and our biggest grossing films almost always feature “Super Heroes.” A business philosophy built around heroes says we make our own rules to get the work done. We do not constrain our teams with bureaucracy and paperwork, but leave them to themselves to discover the best way to succeed.
Laws don’t really apply to super heroes. Or to software heroes.
It is a compelling way to work, and some of the most interesting American companies and products were birthed in a heroic fashion. Very significant companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook followed a hero launch pattern.
What does Hero look like in business?
A small group of people working together in a small room or garage dedicated to a specific task. Apple and Google started in garages, Facebook in a dorm room.
Smart, dedicated, passionate people working closely on a project they love. Send pizza and Mt. Dew into the room and hope something great comes out.
Large businesses actually ask for this type of thing all the time: “Give me a war room and get out of my way.” The executives are known to say, when something they think is really important needs to be done.
Of course, the executives also steal the best people from every other project to put in their “war” room. Heroic methods require, no, demand heroic staff.
However, hero has some down side. Care to guess what they may be?
A list recounting the failures that spring from relying upon heroics would extend to heroic proportions.
Instead, I strive for predictable, sustainable, routine teams. That’s not to say the work is boring, far from it, but by making the process, governance routine, it disappears causes little if any churn, i.e. waste. Predictable supports planning and cost containment. Sustainable supports human growth and people management.
Heroics burns teams out, rapidly builds mistrust, cynicism, and mis-communication and drastically lowers quality.
Reliance upon heroics to deliver a release is a failure of planning and management, and increases the cost to deliver in terms of quality, trust and inefficiencies.
Unfortunately, the cult of the hero is quite well-ingrained in middle and upper management. There’s a rich vein of information for an MBA case study out there around the role of the Heroic Narrative in management reporting.