How to Tide Over Organizational Politics?

Politics is an integral part of all organizations. Political process is a part of human and organizational behavior. Generally, technical people have a distaste for politics because technical matters are mostly precise and can be stated in black and white where as political matters generally involve shades of gray, which are not always easy to decipher. In a recent discussion on the Scrum Development group, Joseph Little shared a few insights to deal with organizational politics.

Joseph suggested that organizational politics is not as hard as most Agile teams consider it to be. He suggested the following action items to tide over politics,

• When boxing, do not expect to have the first punch be a knock out. Set 'em up for the kill in the 4th round. Lots of combination punches.
• The truth is hard to resist. (Yes, I know people will deny the truth and will often kill the bearer.) Keep finding ways for the truth to be repeated and dealt with. Scrum throws up the truth.
• If a bunch of people go together to a manager's office, it is much harder for the manager to resist. (Make sure you have the truth on your side, and that your idea makes sense.) Maybe even harder if the manager comes to the Team room.
• Justify your impediment removals. Do much better cost-benefit analysis. Do them as small experiments (eg, show the actual results later).
• Justifications include: higher NPV for the product, higher velocity for the team, faster delivery, etc, etc. Make the link from your improvement back to these key things.
• Make the case. Make it so obviously right that the only question is: "How do I know your numbers are right?" Managers only like to approve obviously right things.
• Ask to do an experiment. Make sure the test sample is big enough to draw conclusions from.

Dave Rooney suggested that though all the above points make sense, however along with justification, it is necessary for the team to keep producing working software. The team should ask for a finite time for experimentation and to demo back the results to win the political battle.

Eric Deslauriers further reiterated that the best way to deal with politics is facts. He quoted an interesting case in which he was asking his manager for a better computer and his requests were being ignored.

Being the tenacious person that I am, when one of my coworkers was going on vacation for a week, I asked if I could use his new Pentium while he was gone. I tracked all my tasks and timed them the week before he left, then used his machine and tracked how much time I was saving.I then used the time savings to calculate how much the company was wasting having me sit around waiting for things to happen (compiles, etc.). I got my new PC a few weeks later.

Joe Marasco, shared his viewpoints on politics in a technical organization. He suggested that technical people are generally nervous about politics because their technical prowess does not help them there. According to Joe,

While this is perhaps an oversimplification, it is fairly safe to say that technical people would prefer issues to be resolved on technical merits alone, or perhaps on some mix of technical and business objectives. What they react to, often violently, is the manipulation they see in various discussions and negotiations -- a manipulation they associate with the darker, uglier side of human behavior -- often characterized by self-aggrandizement and personal agendas.

Joe suggested that when the issue moves out of the pure technical realm and cannot be solved objectively then working with politics becomes a necessity.

Examples of legitimate political issues include decisions on marketability, customer satisfaction, business impact, and so on. Since objective, technical criteria are harder to pin down in these areas, debate, including political debate, is necessary.

He suggested that for subjective situations, the key is to get involved in good politics, which is based on consensus building, fact finding, education and intellectually honest decisions. He advised technical people to distance themselves from neutral politics which is based on lobbying, delaying decisions etc. and bad politics which is practiced by lying, bullying and conspiring.

The underlying theme of the discussion conveyed that, though politics would be a definite ingredient of any organization, the key for Agile teams is to base their proposals and decisions on facts, consensus and other attributes of good politics.