July 18th, 2008
Distributed Teams are not Teams
Many Scrum practitioners these days are working hard to come up with the best way to make Scrum work in distributed (usually off-shore) environments. There are many articles being written on this topic, and many submissions to the major Scrum and Agile conferences. They all say something similar, we know that co-location is ideal, but the reality is… and then go on to offer “solutions” (read work-arounds) for the non-ideal, real world situation where team members are scattered around the globe.
It is interesting how the phrase “the real world” is used almost as a weapon to wield against the idealist: yes, it is all very well to say that teams should be co- located but that is not how people actually work in the real world. We seem to forget that reality is not something that is imposed on us. Reality isn’t just there; we create it. The phrase “the real world” is akin to the phrase “it’s just the way we do things around here”. Both should be challenged with a healthy dose of skepticism and a steady barrage of “why” questions. Just because it is, doesn’t mean it has to be.
Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly. But communication is not collaboration; it is a poor relation, weak and insipid in comparison. A distributed team cannot create the kind of energy that comes from human eye contact, from shared spontaneous laughter, from physical touch. True collaboration requires all five senses, not just a voice over the telephone, or a second-hand video image. And email… don’t even go there. Distributed teams require managers, and thus can never be truly self-organizing. Time differences and delayed response times inevitably slow down conversation, hold up decisions and ultimately cripple agility. Distributed teams can never be truly Agile. So let’s stop pretending.
Step back for a moment, and rather than assume we have to take Scrum to anyone who asks for it, let’s look at an alternative. Try a thought experiment: if all Scrum coaches refused to work with organizations who insist on having distributed teams, what would happen? My guess is that those companies would all go under very soon, proving the ridiculousness of the distributed team model. These companies are requesting Scrum exactly because they are struggling, yet they are rarely willing to remodel themselves in an Agile way. They want it all: cheap labor and high yield. Not so different from third world child labor industries. Maybe we should simply say no. No, we are not going to support this madness. Force-fitting Scrum into such environments may keep them afloat a little longer, but ultimately they are headed for failure. The model is ugly, painful and undignified, it undermines human relationships and is certainly sub-optimal.
Scrum believes in fast failure: “Scrum will help you fail in thirty days or less”, said Ken Schwaber in his oft-quoted elevator conversation. Our job as Agilists should be to speed up the failure of the distributed team model, not to prolong its agony. Once the organizations that support it are dead, we can begin building new kinds of companies, democratic companies modeled on true Agile principles: ideal ones, not half-hearted ones. The sooner that happens the better.
To whet your appetite here are a few articles about companies that embrace co-location, self-organization and democracy:
Kind of like Kindergarten — Menlo Innovations
Engines of Democracy — The General Electric plant in Durham, NC
Who’s in charge here? No one — Semco, Brazil