I don’t even remember how long it has been since I first read Robert Sternberg’s Successful Intelligence, mainly because I’ve reread it more than a few times and it’s one of my top five recommendations. There is a lot of good in that book, but one part that really got to me is a very small section dedicated to haste and how it relates to intelligence.
The author conducted a survey asking people job function email list from around the world what they think is a sign of someone being intelligent. To his surprise, Americans replied with words like “fast”, “quick” and “speedy” while Europeans opted for words like “contemplative”, “insightful” or “creative”. He goes on to argue that in life we tend to test people on how fast they can do their work or solve a problem, but rarely do we measure contemplation, insightfulness, or wisdom.
There are few words more apt to describe IT than “fast”. Project managers and developers write code at breakneck speed trying to get their product out the door as fast as humanly possible. It’s so ingrained in our culture that we even have concepts for the consequences of hasty development (technical debt, anyone?).
Agile Teams: A Vaccine or a Band-Aid?
For the longest time, development followed the trend of traditional methods, more specifically, the waterfall model. We all know the steps by heart: Requirements, Design, Implement, Verify, Maintain. And we are also well aware of the risks and issues that come with the model.
On the developer side, the waterfall types of content writers requires a work benchmark structure (WBS) which means, “don’t take a step without a plan”. That can lead to long delays and what I like to call “this meeting could have been an email” syndrome where teams spend more time arguing about a change than actually implementing it.
On the client-side, waterfall is like a black-box, you give a set of instructions, get a few phone calls every couple of weeks telling you that things are coming along, and finally, when it’s time to implement, you get a product that may or may not be what you had in mind.
Hybrid Teams, the Third Way
Aristotle, one of the greatest greek australia cell numbers philosophers, proposed that virtue is the means between two extremes. As in, finding the right balance between two opposing forces. So is hybrid project management, a middle way between the structure of the waterfall model and the looseness of the agile model. Going back to my original argument, you can be fast as well as contemplative resulting in more “intelligent” development.