When to Use Rituals and Regular Routines in Your Team
Rituals and routines can help us be more effective and concentrate our effort on the things that matter. But applying rituals without thought can constrain us. An example of this can be taken from one of the more pervasive examples of ritual in society: etiquette.
In an NPR interview with the author of the book Sorry! The English and Their Manners, Henry Hitchings describes the difference between etiquette and manners in a way that seems similar to the relationship between being a slave to a process and following a process:
Etiquette, to me—I’m not saying it is inherently wrong, but it is a veneer. It is a code of cosmetic practices. It’s about how long you should wear an armband after your second cousin dies, or what size your greeting card should be, or which fork you should use. And those things are not totally trivial, but ultimately they’re not indicators of someone’s inherent goodness or otherwise "where as manners are" about fundamental principles to do with sensitivity to others, respect for other people and their space, their belongings, and it just seems to me that the moment etiquette becomes the centerpiece of the agenda, manners and morality are essentially divorced.
Agile practices have rituals, habits, and practices that are useful to follow, but it’s important to know when you’re crossing the line from following a habit to make decisions easier to being dogmatic. When you cross that line, you can end up making things more difficult by forcing behaviors that may not make sense in your context.
These practices also are there to help us collaborate and communicate effectively. Much like grammar, rules are meant to be helpful guide but are not everything. When we make the conversation entirely about following the rules rather than achieving the goal, we get into trouble.
Like grammar and etiquette, agile rituals and practices can establish expectations and norms of behavior and also help teams focus energy on decisions that matter. But when people vary from the standard, it’s important to consider whether the variance takes away from the goal of the ritual.
Agile software development is about embracing and adapting to change. The rituals of an agile project help a team establish new behavior patterns, so there may be some value in being a bit stricter about enforcing rituals when a team is first starting out with a new method. Once the team has had some practice with agile methods, it then becomes more important to consider whether or not the team is practicing in the spirit of agile values, regardless of the specifics of the practices.
Rituals are most useful when they help a team do the right things for the right reasons. Enforcing a ritual for the sake of doing it can just be bad manners.
How does your team react when people vary from agreed agile practices? Do the variations cause problems or are they adaptive?
