Agile consensus

It’s interesting how much agile discourse seems to boil down to “the difficulty of pursuing consensus-driven workstyles in an implicitly hierarchical environment.”

Also, “consensus (of experts)” is often unstated…

Like, for better or worse there are loads of situations where doing things the “right/smart/best” way rewuires a high degree of awareness of the business foals and constraints outside the product sphere, customer experience, etc.

Save leaderless FLOSS projects, tiny investorless startups, and worker-owned collectives, the big decisions are by definition made from above. There may be a feedback loop, but the hierarchy is baked into capitalism. (And even many ostensibly leaderless/structureless groups.)

The result is that some of the best agile teams may not be the best product wranglers or practitioners or domain experts, rather those who’ve most effectively internalized the values of the business owners. It “feels” most effective when you surrender to thinking like capital.