SELF-DISCIPLINE

by Jim Highsmith, Director, Agile Project Management Practice

Agile project managers encourage teams to be resourceful, collaborative, inventive, and empowered. These characteristics contribute to the notion of a self-organizing team -- one that needs steering in the right direction but rarely needs command-control-style management. I've referred to this self-organizing "style" as leadership-collaboration management (Agile Project Management). In much of the agile community, from proponents of Scrum to those of Extreme Programming, this notion of a self-organizing team runs very deep.

However, there is a flip side to self-organization, one which agile teams and organizations forget at their peril -- self-discipline. Just as freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand in a democracy, self-discipline and self-organization cannot survive without one another. Companies cannot empower teams that do not want to be empowered: those teams that are populated with individuals who refuse to accept any accountability for results, who refuse to confront reality and leave dead fish sitting on the table, who gravitate to their cubicles and refuse to engage with other team members, who are unwilling to accept approaches to work that the team has agreed upon, and who disrespect colleagues they refuse to understand.

My ideas about self-discipline -- in contrast, for example, to imposed discipline, which comes from outside the individual -- were shaped by reading Jim Collins's outstanding book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't. Collins presents three key ideas about what he calls a culture of discipline:

Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework. Fill that culture with self-disciplined people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities. Don't confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian.

To me, Collins's culture of discipline is filled with self-disciplined people -- people who work diligently within a broad framework that supports freedom and responsibility -- exactly what agile project management and development approaches recommend.

My journey into a deeper understanding of self-discipline has been greatly enhanced by my relationship with Cutter Senior Consultant Christopher Avery. At the Project World conference in the spring of 2004, I came across Christopher's book in the bookstore and we then met briefly at the conference. He also did a keynote talk at the XP/Agile Universe conference in Calgary in June. I'm paraphrasing here, but several things Christopher said in Calgary have stuck with me. First, "In today's world, 'control' is an illusion. Teamwork and collaboration are a growing part of worklife." While this statement reflects what many agilists think about teams, his next statement looks at teamwork in a different light -- "I can control me (at least some of the time). Therefore, to improve teamwork, I need to improve me." Hence the title of Christopher's book, (Teamwork Is an Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility).

I must admit, I'd often thought of teamwork as, well, a team effort. We've all been through team-building sessions, which are valuable, but I really had to stop and think about the idea that "to improve teamwork, I need to improve me." Christopher then went on to add two additional quotes -- another that was relatively traditional and one with another new twist. First, "I am accountable for results and tasks that I have agreed to accept." This one is fairly traditional, I've used it in my list of characteristics of self-discipline. But the second is different, it expands the boundaries of self-discipline: "I am responsible for ALL the relationships within my project community." While many people have talked about the need for close communication (osmotic communication, as Cutter Senior Consultant Alistair Cockburn says) and collaboration, Christopher's statement is much more specific, and demanding: "I am responsible for ALL the relationships."

Why are relationships important? Why should everyone be responsible for them? Innovation and creativity come from interaction within teams of individuals. Interaction and synergy are driven by relationships. When every team member works on and takes responsibility for relationships it powers innovation, creativity, and performance.

We often relegate relationships in the project community -- especially those outside the core team -- to the project manager. And in many respects, those external to the core team, internal to the project community relationships are the primary responsibility of the project manager. However, I agree with Christopher and think this is a key insight into creating effective, jelled teams -- that everyone is responsible for relationships. I might be specifically responsible for developing a feature or creating a test plan, but I'm also generally responsible for building healthy relationships with each and every member of the team -- core team and others in the expanded project community. When teams contain members who all except that challenge as part of their self-discipline, team performance will increase significantly.

-- Jim Highsmith, Director, Agile Project Management Practice