I recently came across a rather fantastic competition from Agile 2007.

‘Developer Abuse’
This one’s errily accurate. Remember: it doesn’t have to be this way.

‘Being Agile is Our Favourite Thing’
This entry’s quite clever, entertaining and hilarious. Watch it with your team. Play it loud. Sing along. Do whatever it takes to maximise your Agile reach.

It’s that time of the year again: gratuitous displays of a jovial fat man in a red suit scaling miniature gingerbread houses and base jumping off slippery rooftops. If the advertisement boards are correct, it’s also time for seasonal teeth whitening. O! And, of course, the hordes of plastic trees in the shopping arcades. (Better a plastic tree than a tree on death row in the living room.)

Ho! Ho! Ho! Spot the problem

UK tradition has it that shopkeepers save up to pay for decorations to attract more custom during the Christmas period. In return, they get to worry about not only having their in-store goods stolen, but their pricey Christmas baubles being taken too. The plastic card boasting of CCTV monitoring is an example of trust broken. It tells us, loud and clear, that we are a thievery nation.

Where did all the trust go?

It reminds me of when managers give their teams approximate (fictitious) deadlines to work towards instead of actual ones. One date for the development team, another for the customer. Presumably it’s because they think that developers are lazy and won’t work hard without unrealistic deadlines. Such behaviour helps us identify the chicken managers from the pig managers. By keeping the actual deadline to themselves, such managers are witholding information. By withholding information, they are limiting the team’s options to work optimally towards successful delivery. By putting in a false constraint, a manager is actively guaranteeing their project will fail. By doing so, they’re also limiting their chances of personal success. If you are committed to a team, witholding information is illogical.

Teams know when they’re being controlled. Unlike collaboration, the command-and-control style of management can reduce or even eliminate trust. Without trust, there can be no loyalty and commitment. Without loyalty and commitment, you can forget about performance. Chicken managers often confuse collaboration with coercion. You have to put trust in to get trust out.

Imagine: It’s 7.30 am. Another fun-filled weekday is only a tube ride away. On your descent down into the station what do you see? Not just one, but two information boards. If you squint you’ll see the sticky tape. The posters are homemade.

You can tell that whoever put the posters up are doing their best to help. They’re actually offering information. The boards are there to workaround a problem.

To show my appreciation, I decide to blog about them, so I take some pictures. Someone resembling a station manager approaches me, uncertain of my next move.

‘What are you doing, miss?’ he says.

‘I was just taking some pictures,’ I reply.

Then, as though struck by inspiration for want of something more to say, he says, ‘You’re not allowed to take pictures, miss.’ By this point I feel like a time traveller’s wife, revisiting Dickensian times.

‘But I think these posters are really very useful,’ I say. He smiles. I realise I have his attention, so I ask the question that my friend Jim and I have been asking ourselves for the past three months: ‘Why is the stairwell closed?’ I had speculated that perhaps it was due to a health and safety issue, to which Jim replied at the time, ‘It seems to me the only danger if it were open is that they might actually have to clean it.’

‘I don’t know, miss. I can’t really remember. It seems so long ago,’ replies the nice man.

Suddenly, another official appears on my right and thrusts a card under my nose. ‘Please call this number if you have any complaints,’ he says. This is fast becoming a minor situation. Like the time I was arrested by the Moldovan police.

‘But I don’t wish to complain,’ I reply. ‘I was just asking for information.’

The official who gave me the card stares at me and says, ‘Please. Please call up and complain about the stairwell. THEY haven’t done anything about it for ages. There’s nothing we can do. Someone cut their hand using the staircase ages ago.’

Perhaps that stumbling someone was under the influence I thought, having traversed up and down the staircase on a number of occasions myself and emerged hands intact.

I knew it! The people working at the station were trying to be helpful. They wanted to run the station as best they could. So who are these people known as ‘THEY’ who are blocking instead of helping? How many THEYs and THEMs do you work with? What if I told you there is only US?

Hate something, change something, make something better. Another key source of inspiration for this blog is one man’s pursuit of a better, cleaner, diesel engine, that of Honda’s Chief Engineer Kenichi Nagahiro. The advert works because it transmits a meaningful message: it reminds us there’s always choice and we as individuals have the ability to make change happen.

Click here for the full visual and sing-along version to ‘Hate Something, Change Something’. You know you want to.

‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.’

– The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

Dawkins’s examination of the biology of selfishness and altruism has led him to assert that “we are born selfish”. The manifestations and consequences of his assertion in terms of people and software development are what I have coined (the art of) Selfish Programming.

Together we can thwart it and may be even turn it into ‘environmentally-friendly’ energy. Welcome.