THE SPINE MODEL

JASON SUTTIE

THE SPINE MODEL

– a philosophy of thoaught for

Agile companies.

Let’s Walk the Spine to show

how this philosophy

can be applied to the real

world.

Similar things happen in software development teams where the team follows a ritual but has no idea why.

When questioned the people usually say “Because we’ve always done this/followed this process”. The wisdom here is that it’s often very hard for people to see clearly when they are in a system, an external view sometimes provided by a coach can provide insight for change that may have dramatic impact. Be clear on the need that is being solved for.

Typically, how this comes about is that a person establishes the work needed to solve a problem at a point in time. This work process is then adopted by the team. At some point the person who established the process moves on yet there may no longer be a need for the work.

I’ve seen accountants doing arduous reconciliations that were replaced by a new system yet they continued with these process regardless. .

Over the years I have been all over the world and have observed:

AN ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERN THAT ALWAYS SEEMS TO SURFACE IS WHAT I CALL “CARGO

CULTING” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

. Simply put the pattern is where people conduct rituals e.g. follow processes without any understanding of what the purpose of this work is.

WHAT IS VALUED IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS NEED?

Also having the insight around whether people associate value to themselves by what they do versus who they are (human doing versus human being) is critical.

In our competitive workplace I frequently observe an imbalance wherein people associate all of their value to what they do, then in the absence of the work they find themselves lost.

Values are also not binary, for example a team may favour flow over simplicity – it’s an “and” discussion.

I believe that all of us behave according to our value drivers. Being conscious of one’s own value drivers as well as the value drivers of others, the team and the organization is possibly one of the most useful insights a person can have

MAKING PRINCIPLE DECISIONS

Half way through the exercise we came to the realization that we disagreed on a number of principle issues

It’s harder to address these issues when you are half pregnant, my takeout is that one should always do an Agile Bootstrap when forming a new team. Agile Bootstraps typically allow for a safe space where team members can share their backgrounds and where the team can walk the spine together – through this process it raises where there is disagreement..

Principles are a great tool to guide decision making. I recently was involved in organizing a large industry event with a number of peer organizations.

Over the years I have been all over the world and have observed many teams and their ways of work. An organizational pattern that always seems to surface is what I call “Cargo Culting” – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming. Simply put the pattern is where people conduct rituals e.g. follow processes without any understanding of what the purpose of this work is. Typically, how this comes about is that a person establishes the work needed to solve a problem at a point in time. This work process is then adopted by the team. At some point the person who established the process moves on yet there may no longer be a need for the work.

I’ve seen accountants doing arduous reconciliations that were replaced by a new system yet they continued with these process regardless. Similar things happen in software development teams where the team follows a ritual but has no idea why.

When questioned the people usually say “Because we’ve always done this/followed this process”.

The wisdom here is that it’s often very hard for people to see clearly when they are in a system, an external view sometimes provided by a coach can provide insight for change that may have dramatic impact. Be clear on the need that is being solved for.

ALIGN CHOSEN PRACTICES TO SATISFY THE ULTIMATE NEED OR OUTCOME

so that management can obtain a holistic view of the system. The second caveat is that some practices are just inappropriate for some problems – see Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_Framework. The summary of this is that it really isn’t wise to use Waterfall for work that is not highly repeatable.

 If you have hired smart people who can solve problems with creative thought, then why on earth would you dictate a solution? The first caveat is that in large enterprises there are some metrics that need to be provided by the team that are common across each

INTERESTINGLY THIS IS WHERE MANY PEOPLE START.

We are in the world of DevOps and there are best of breed tools in each part of the pipeline. Do some research, your time will be well spent.The last point to make is that when you have conversations be clear where you are having the conversation – the Spine again is useful for this.

They think that choosing a technology or tool will solve all of their problems. Unfortunately, this is a cognitive distortion. Tools don’t solve problems; humans do so don’t expect tooling to have any effect on the behaviour of the people in the system. Having said this if one adopts best practice then common sense must apply.

Lets start more conversations, www.jason@suttie.nethello@jason@suttie.net