Coming Clean

In response to the following blog posts regarding management in Agile processes:

Managers Are Grown-ups, too

Can Managers Lead Agile Teams?

I absolutely agree with the premise that one of the reasons Agile works well (when it works) is because it allows the engineers to indiscreetly yet directly and intelligently control and mitigate a manager’s influence – what has failed to be recognized / admitted by the Agile community is that this just inevitably builds new ways (well, not really) to fail (e.g. all the Agile attempts that fail due to mismanagement because the engineers have no better management chops than their managers). It’s about time Agile communities started to address this problem of what really ought to happen to traditional managers and how to inspect, adapt, and improve on the managerial side of the house.

Many managers and management teams use Agile as an excuse to lose cognizance about the what, why, how, and who of the activity of their team. All they feel responsible for under Agile is knowing when things will be done and a summary of the what’s, who’s, and maybe why’s of development activity. This attitude seems to accompany a lack of interest and knowledge regarding the personal interests and motivations of team members and a disconnect with the fact that these concerns are central to their role – that, as managers, they need to be proactive in learning and discerning them.

From the articles, this doesn’t appear to be particularly uncommon in Agile. Either (1) organizations don’t adopt Agile because they see managerial circumvention as inevitable or (2) Agile fails because the necessary leadership doesn’t emerge as is suppose to happen and/or should already be present in existing management.

Either way, if a manager’s primary concern is not his employees and their satisfaction, he is doomed to failure. Employee satisfaction and budget/schedule do not have to be opposing forces. In fact, with a good balance that emphasizes that employees matter first while not excusing poor performance, a manager should find that he gets more bang for his buck out of his employees because they remain retained/loyal, interested, and self-motivated to perform and improve.

Agile is good at evoking these traits within engineers precisely because it puts engineers at the center of the concern of their work. Personally, I suspect the leading reason while Agile is all the rage these days is because older, more standard processes have become more about the bureaucratic machinations of human resources, schedules, man-power allocation, and budgets rather than keeping talented employees happy and involved beyond that of being mere cogs in the work that they are about.

Management is high-level mentoring. As a manager, you must invest yourself and your time in your people and their work; otherwise, your people won’t invest the best of themselves and their time in you and your work. For them, work will be just a timeout from their real life until they can find a better gig.

Geof sent out this tweet yesterday:

…”spiritual but not religious” is greatly akin to “intelligent but uneducated”.

This is very much true.

Intelligence and spirituality are our potential, what we are capable of. Education and religion are the mold in which we let them be formed. With the wrong education and religion, our intellect and spirituality will suffer – just as with the right fit, we will flourish.

And that takes effort and discipline – a will of self to make these things important and to seek out what it is we need. Without them … while we may remain spiritual and intelligent … we won’t having anything significant in both our understanding and contribution to the world except that which we ignorantly, haphazardly, though quite capably stumble upon.

Go to college. Go to church(es). Learn who you are, where and what you need to be.

“Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. … The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.” Luke 1:31-35

Virgin Mary, Theotokos, God-Bearer, Mother of God. Could she rightly and nobly hold these revered titles from time out of mind if the child that resided within her womb was not actually God as she bore Him?

It may seem an odd question to ask, but if we take the questions being asked today regarding embryonic stem cell research, particularly as it relates to Christian morality and ethics, it begs the question – at what point did Jesus become a person with all human (and divine) dignity?

Most Christians would sputter that the question is non-sense – clearly Jesus was fully divine at the moment of His conception within His virgin mother’s womb. And if we are to assert Christ’s divine personhood within His mother’s womb, then we must also assert his humanity. And thus we’re left to turn the question back around upon ourselves – if Christ was divine (and thus human) at the moment of His conception within His mother’s womb, then why should we not accord the same dignity to others who move through the same human embryonic state of being just as He did?

The Christian ethic is clear – embryos must be accorded the same dignity as any other person if for no other reason than that of Christ, who shared in our humanity from conception to death.

… but certainly, somewhere, there’s a physicist who would say otherwise.

People say they remember things a lot, and while it’s not a lie – it’s not the truth either. I can’t remember the first time I saw pictures of a black Santa Claus or a black Jesus … but I can remember the shock of seeing a very clear depiction of something other than what I had always internalized as something like myself – like myself to a degree that it likely was (and is) false.

Today, I think I found myself on the opposite side of that coin. Some protestant friends of mine were asking me about the perpetual virginity of Mary – which means I implicitly have to give an account that dismisses the full-blood relation of “the brethren”. To be honest, I didn’t do very well, and I am disappointed in myself.

But what struck me was the … pure alien thought that married people would remain celibate. It’s not Mary’s perpetual virginity that gets them, really. It’s the Mary and Joseph abstaining part that really gets them. And they think they have a clincher of an argument that trumps, well, pretty much the entirety of Christian history minus Protestantism that says otherwise, in prooftexts of brethren and James and Thomas/Jude. Even with solid arguments rooted in language, translation, etc that satisfactorily argue the half-blood relation or cousin relation, in the end, it’s the abstinence between man and wife that really confounds them.

I’m not one to make the argument that it’s usual. But then, I’ve also never been one to argue that much about the Holy Family was usual. And, really, it’s their peculiarity that really sets them apart and makes them all the more beautiful.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]

Brought to us by the Internet Modern History Sourcebook

I honestly and truly love this parable. I love the madman. I love to stare into his eyes. He is terrifying and horrible, yet he speaks the truth as he knows it – and truth always carries a beauty with it. And I’m left to either agree with him yet while not knowing what to make of him … or to disagree and stand in contradiction to him. He mocks me, croons to me, and weeps with me. He is my enemy, and he is my brother. I love him. I pity him. And above all, I fear that secretly, I am him.

All Christians should meet the Madman, and they should never forget his gaze.

If in trying to find meaning, today is without any, then why should any of the others? I ask because today felt like a pretty meaningless day.

Whatever meaning there is, we should be able to relate to it at any given moment. Perhaps it is just the soft silhouette of a setting sun upon my childhood, but I seem to remember a time when I knew why all things were special yet reasons were unneeded.

It seems to me our hallowed souls have been harrowed hollow by the wisdom of the age. We know instinctively that there is something to draw us awake from our sleep, to put one foot in front of the other, and continue on with the trappings of life … yet when we ask ourselves what that is, the resounding echo of a faithless soul is too familiar and near overwhelming. For some, the words of faith come to us by rote and litany – as empty as that may seem, I can take comfort that there is at least that much.

It all makes the lyrics terrifyingly familiar:

There’s not time for hatred
Only questions:

Well I’ve got a message for and your twisted head!
You better turn around and kiss your hope goodbye
to life eternal
Angel

Individuality gives way to hedonism and self righteousness. Corporate identity gives way to thoughtless anonymity and slothfulness. Surely there is a middle way.

I think I’ve lost taste for mere ideas. I want to see the example I seek living before me. And I pray I’ll be found willing to follow.

I do one of two things:
- try to be as mindless as possible
- try to be as engaged in thought as possible

Being mindless is easy – turn on the TV.

Being engaged is easy – find a puzzle: a game, a thought problem, a book.

Thing is, when I have time to myself, I seldom think to pray. I doubt this phenomenon is rare. Often, I try to pass off reflection of the theological/Biblical variety as prayer. While interesting and often educational/insightful, I don’t think it really counts as prayer.

So, then, I’m left wondering what is prayer, and how I can I know it to be worthwhile. So many times, people tell you it’s suppose be you and God time. God’s been really quiet these days – leaving me to wander back to the reflection stuff more than giving me the sense of some kind of communing. Very frustrating. But in absence of the perception of the presence of the Person, what am I to do? It all seems very backwards and counter-intuitive for what it is suppose to be about.

The witness of Christ will stand in relation to the faith as Christ stood in relation to the mystery of His Father in its revelation. To testify to the faith is to participate in the revealing action of the Incarnate Christ who spoke for the Father. The believer shares in that ministry of spreading the knowledge of God.

Bishop Donald W. Wuerl Fathers of the Church

The last sentence is an old idea to me. The preceding sentences define it in a powerful way that had never really had any hold on me before. Scary cool.

They seem to have left (or been forced out of) our cultural consciousness altogether.

… and, no, charismatics do not qualify as mystics. I’m thinking more along the lines of the monastic.