How do you react to the elevator ride that seems to stop. On. Every. Single. Floor? Are you cursing under your breath with each passing floor? Maybe you’re thinking about how much time is being wasted for everyone stuck on this ride with you. Or maybe you spend the time devising a plan for a far more efficient people moving system. Considering solutions like express elevators, or special key elevators, could work right? Better yet, Star Trek transporters. But is that truly an optimized system? No. In fact, for the average user it’s less efficient. Systems optimized around individuals can’t be optimized around a group. Until we get those transporters that is.
In agile systems, we can fall victim to this individualistic mindset. It seems logical that an adaptive system would adjust to make each individual productive. By extension of that thinking, if each person isn’t productive, the system hasn’t been optimized. While there should always be improvements in any system, it’s a fallacy that optimizing for the individual should be the goal of any agile approach.
An elevator system in a large building is optimized for the common goal of moving people, not the individual goal of reaching your floor quickly. Only when the system is experiencing low volume, do these goals begin to coincide. Ultimately, elevator systems are optimized to ensure the building is serviced appropriately when many people need to move.
Agile methods that emphasize teams, are optimized for the team, and sometimes this’ll mean that the individuals within the team may have lulls in productivity. Not only is that alright, it’s expected, and valuable! Imagine a system where each individual’s role is optimized. The result? No need to collaborate or innovate, and the optimization would come at great upfront cost to enable the system to be that optimized. In essence, teams, in their true interdependent sense, wouldn’t be required. No new ideas would be generated through teamwork as each individual only sees and executes their individual role. Similar to how machines work in a factory.
There are systems with well-defined individual roles, repeatable work, and clear processes, but even these systems are optimized for the system itself. Lean manufacturing has taught us that slack within the system, at the individual level, is healthy. It can be used to identify constraints, as well as allow the people executing work, to use that time to invest in themselves. It also allows people in the system to work at a sustainable pace. Consider how this works in an agile team. Each member of the team can use slack time to improve their work in ways they might not have had time for otherwise. They may also learn a new tool, explore a novel idea, or help out a teammate. This means that in the long term, using slack time appropriately, can lead to significant gains.
This is how we often use our time in an elevator. We may use the time to mentally prepare for a meeting, catch up on that text reply we’ve been neglecting, make small talk with the other people in the elevator, or enjoy a few moments of quiet. Any of those are valuable uses of our time but it’s hard to think about using our time wisely if we’re preoccupied with being behind or late. In a longer elevator ride, we’re likely to be more annoyed if we’re already late.
Similarly, to make beneficial use of slack time within a team, teams must take on work that they can reasonably accomplish as a team. Loading up on work so that each individual will be as productive as possible, without a common team goal, will inevitably lead to too much work in progress, unhealthy team stress, and less predictability in delivery.
The Moral: When individuals focus on being effective teams can be productive.