Heaven Can Wait
…a pretty terrific movie (better than the Don Ameche original, IMHO).
Also a good reminder for Agile folks that we’re not here to deliver a religious telos, but instead to make the daily life of the folks we work with better. We need a vision – but we need to temper that vision with proportionality.
One of my favorite essays is Max Weber’s ‘Politics As A Vocation.’ As an undergrad, I was taught it twice, by wickedly smart professors and of all the things they taught from, it is one that has taught me the most. There is a ton worth taking from it – particularly in its conception of legitimacy and authority and of how power is balanced in states and large organizations.
But this quote hits home, and to me, hits home in looking at people who wish to change organizations (and through them, the world):
One can say that three preeminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
Those ought to be the key characteristics of a change-agent as well. Passion – caring, feeling that what is being done matters is at the root of any good change agent’s success.
But passion without any sense of responsibility is the mark of someone willing to break organizations in order to make them perfect. We can never forget – as change agents – that what we do has real-world impacts on real people who will live with the consequences long after we’ve cashed our consulting fee and moved on, or after this wave of change has ebbed and we are paddling out toward the new one.
And a sense of proportion – not only about ourselves and our work, but about the relative value and merit of change work with a longer-term value vs. the ‘pay the bills’ work the organization must do, or of the web of pressures everyone we deal with faces.
People in the organization are spinning dozens of plates (usually dozens too many) and our job is to help them move forward with as little broken crockery as possible.
This isn’t dramatic, or heroic – and I think if there’s one thing I want to do, it is to drain the sense of self-importance and heroism out of the agile community. We try and teach people to be servant leaders. Can we ourselves become servants of change? Can we find patience, and persist? Can we slowly climb the steps to heaven, or do we have to keep trying to ascend all at once?
Weber famously said:
Politics is a strong and slow bring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective.
So is effective change. There’s a lot of passion in the agile community. How can we start mixing in a little more perspective?
I mean, heaven can wait…