Improving Collaboration with the Heart of Agile: Notes from Alistair Cockburn's Interview for 1st Conference

My students and regular readers will likely remember that I am a fan of Alistair Cockburn's work. His book on software development is one of the best I've ever read, and I have been reading his blog for years. Earlier this week, he linked to a video in which he was interviewed by the organizers of 1st Conference in Melbourne. The conference has refocused to emphasize Cockburn's latest conceptual model of agility, the Heart of Agile.

I listened to the interview while doing some painting, and a few things stuck out to me that I want to remember. First and perhaps trivially, Cockburn explains that he lives in different places for a few months at a time, traveling the world with two backpacks and a suitcase that contain his possessions. He travels the world like an old-world bard, sharing stories that he has heard along the way. I don't know that this is relevant to my teaching and professional practice, but it is interesting. I do believe that such a lifestyle would give someone a very different perspective on what the prevailing culture assumes to be true.

All the discussion of Heart of Agile makes me think that perhaps this is something I should introduce in my Spring courses, particularly the game production studio course. I have become an advocate of inspirational posters that are tied to team identity, things like having the vision statement or Sprint theme posted publicly so that we can look up and see it. Perhaps I can post something like this canonical representation of Heart of Agile in the studio space and see how students react.

There's a short discussion in the interview where Cockburn talks about how this model is not designed specifically for software development but for organizations in general. He hypothesizes that it was discovered in software development because we have a particularly keen understanding of what "deliver" means, but he goes on to explain how this model is being used also by NGOs. During this part of the interview, I kept thinking, "What if the university adopted this idea?" Cockburn points out that it always starts with micro-steps. I am not sure even what micro-steps the university could take, but that would have to be the topic of another essay. Actually, watching a part of the video again, I do know what it would be, since he talked specifically about what a big organization can do: center its budget upon improving collaboration. I think it's pretty clear that we don't do that at the university, and I wonder what it would look like.

Around the 25-minute mark, when asked what a good starting spot is for an organization, Cockburn describes an exercise focused on improving collaboration. As he discussed it, I had visions of running this exercise with student teams, either in the studio or in a class like CS222, where teams inevitably have to deal with the real problems of failed collaboration attempts. The exercise involves each person drawing a diagram of all the people they have to collaborate with to get something shipped. Mark each collaboration as whether it needs to be weak, medium, or strong, and label each one with the current quality of the collaboration on a 1–10 scale. Finally, pick out the two collaborations that you consider the most important, and name one thing that you personally can do to improve that collaboration. A second step would be to write two or three stories for each collaboration about a time that it has worked well; this leverages the idea that if we look for good, we can create more good. I can see both of these being valuable for the kinds of student projects I mentor, even though their collaborative networks may be a bit small. Their version of "deliver" is a bit different from an industrial sense, but as Cockburn says, the Heart of Agile should apply anyway.

The final element of the conversation that jumped out at my was the discussion of host-leadership. This was not a phrase I had heard before, and Cockburn praised the interviewer for his reference to it. Cockburn makes the claim that , "'Servant-leader' is an outmoded term that is not serving the purpose anymore." This surprised me, since I feel like I generally understand the concept of servant-leadership and have found it a useful metaphor. Host-leadership uses the metaphor of host, and the movement seems to be grounded in the book, Host: Six New Roles of Engagement. I have not read the book, but I came across this summary of the six roles, written by the book's co-author. The roles are Initiator, Inviter, Space Creator, Gatekeeper, Connector, and Co-Participator. Nothing about the description struck me as particularly novel, and I admit I have not searched for empirical evidence to support any of the claims in either model. I am left having to acknowledge Cockburn's vast experience in visiting many different organizations in many different places, and that he must be seeing dysfunctional organizations that need new metaphors. The space of my experience is so tightly limited to the classes and courses I myself control, I know that my perspective is myopic. Even the whole "Agile is Dead" meme—with the word "agile" being entirely co-opted for profit, and causing the necessity of finding the real heart again—is not something I personally experience, but only something I vicariously experience through readings, interviews, and discussions. Reading about host-leadership is not something high on my list of priorities, as I've become more interested in concepts of safety as expressed most concretely in Anzeneering. Still, I will have to keep my ear to the ground and talk to my network of friends and alumni in industry to hear how these ideas resonate.