It had to happen sooner or later. I was in a Moose Herd the other day, and we were discussing team dynamics.
It started with an innocuous question—
Should remote team members be required to have their cameras on?
One, not to be named Moose, said—
No. It’s 2024. We have tools to work collaboratively and if the team is highly performing, who cares if we see each other.
While I get their point, I disagreed. I argued that having cameras on can create the space for improved team formation, collaboration, execution, and delivery as a team.
Then, I waxed philosophically about “early agile teams,” circa the late 1990s to early 2000s, and how face-to-face communication made such a difference in the team's dynamics. I said that high performance wasn’t just about delivery but about teamwork, creativity, and the joy of doing great work together.
Then the aforementioned Moose said—
It’s 2024. It’s a shame that you’re stuck in 2003 and can’t understand that most of those dynamics are no longer important for teams. That today’s tools support collaboration without needing that quaint notion of face-to-face.
They strongly implied that—
I was stuck in the past or in a time loop.
I was stuck with an antiquated notion.
I was stuck in the no longer relevant Agile Manifesto.
I was a dinosaur who was about to go…gulp…extinct.
(Yes, I may be slightly over dramatic here 😉)
Wrapping Up
While I may be a bit of a dinosaur, I think of myself as an experienced, still relevant Velociraptor—a velociraptor who isn’t willing to accept that everything “old” is inherently useless compared to the “shiny and new.”
I would prefer that we evolve with respect to the lessons we’ve learned while emerging with new ideas and ways of working, balancing the rusty and old with the shiny and new.
It sounds like a keynote I gave in 2014 and a post I wrote in 2014 called The Young Whippersnapper Rule as I think it applies to the whippersnapper who challenged me 😉
Stay agile, my friends,
Bob.
Here are a few related posts I’ve previously shared—
What I do now is not ask cameras on or off, I demand engagement. You have to engage with the instructor, your classmates, the content, the exercises. If you don’t engage, I ask them to find another course or instructor. So, that is a working agreement that is addressed early on.
I would distinguish between content and style.
Content-wise, it is very clear: Usabilty needs do not change within a couple of decades. Spoken or written word contains only a minor portion of overall communication. Therefore, seeing faces during a conversation will give you more content.
Style-wise, it is very unattractive trying to decide a question for the now and here using personal experience from "a different past". This appears like creating a hierarchy: As people either have experienced it or not, and only the experienced have the whole picture, it is obviously the privilege of the old to decide on the question. Sounds very un-agile.
That does not mean past experience cannot serve. Whenever patterns repeat under different circumstances or it seems an old pattern becomes fashionable again, it is great to bring this in a discussion.
More light-hearted:
- When I was young, I hated it when people started giving advice starting with the words "when I was young".
- I have decades of experience to clearly know that I do not accept arguments based on "decades of experience".