Читать книгу Agile 2 - Adrian Lander - Страница 26

Individuality also pertains to how people work. Not everyone works the same. Just because someone works differently than others on a team does not make that person a misfit. Agile is rife with all-team practices: everyone joins the standup; everyone is equal in the retrospective; everyone takes a story and works on it, collaborating with others. But some people do not adjust well to those ways of working—ways that are highly interactive, in which you are on the spot all the time, on your feet or expressing your idea verbally. Some people work better in isolation, with quiet, and express themselves better in writing.

Such people are not outliers; they are the introverts, as we discussed in Chapter 1. If we shun those people or make them feel like they are misfits, we lose the enormous value of what they can contribute. Those people are often the deep thinkers—the ones with the powerful insights. It was during quiet reflection before a fireplace that Dirac suddenly realized the solution that became the Dirac equation—the key to relativistic quantum mechanics.⁹ It was a moment alone, making his morning coffee, in which Héctor A. Chaparro-Romo suddenly saw the solution to the 2,000-year-old problem of spherical aberration.¹⁰ It was a walk along the Royal Canal in Dublin when Sir William Rowan Hamilton suddenly saw the solution to the quaternion problem,¹¹ which underlies much of particle physics today.

Yes, these people collaborated with others, which led to new trains of thought, which is essential; but it was during silent reflection that they were able to create the deep and complex mental model needed to pursue those new trains of thought and suddenly have the insight needed to solve a complex problem.

It is a shame—a poverty—to ostracize such people and make them feel like misfits on teams.