Problematic Team Quotes

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

The first thing we have to do is to look ahead two to three sprints to understand which product backlog items are likely to be worked on (Cohn 2005, 206; Pichler 2008, 146). This requires decomposing and refining product backlog items earlier; more detailed items can now be found at the top of the product backlog. The next step is to identify any dependencies between the teams by asking the following questions: Do they have to work on the same feature or component? Does any team act as the supplier of another team? If so, is it feasible to supply the feature or component and use it in the same sprint? To eliminate problematic dependencies, we may have to change the product backlog prioritization.

In many organizations where automated functional testing is done at all, a common practice is to have a separate team dedicated to the production and maintenance of the test suite. As described at length in Chapter 4, “Implementing a Testing Strategy,” this is a bad idea. The most problematic outcome is that the developers don’t feel as if they own the acceptance tests. As a result, they tend not to pay attention to the failure of this stage of the deployment pipeline, which leads to it being broken for long periods of time. Acceptance tests written without developer involvement also tend to be tightly coupled to the UI and thus brittle and badly factored, because the testers don’t have any insight into the UI’s underlying design and lack the skills to create abstraction layers or run acceptance tests against a public API.

It has been a great privilege to listen to the debate and to hear everybody work through with enormous detail. And I want to congratulate, as others have done, the work that has been done by the team. Then comes the BUT. I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was no discussion early on about which way the boat should go at all. And I really want to risk offending everybody in this room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all. Because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted. And we have all reached this point now where we are leg hanging, even though I hear the majority of the consultants say to the board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between thimerosal and various neurological outcomes. I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic.7 Are you reading his summation the same way I am? That maybe this is a study that should not have been done? In my entire life I’ve never known a scientist to argue against obtaining knowledge.

WHITE SOLIDARITY White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic. Educational researcher Christine Sleeter describes this solidarity as white “racial bonding.” She observes that when whites interact, they affirm “a common stance on race-related issues, legitimating particular interpretations of groups of color, and drawing conspiratorial we-they boundaries.”10 White solidarity requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white position and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy. To break white solidarity is to break rank. We see white solidarity at the dinner table, at parties, and in work settings. Many of us can relate to the big family dinner at which Uncle Bob says something racially offensive. Everyone cringes but no one challenges him because nobody wants to ruin the dinner. Or the party where someone tells a racist joke but we keep silent because we don’t want to be accused of being too politically correct and be told to lighten up. In the workplace, we avoid naming racism for the same reasons, in addition to wanting to be seen as a team player and to avoid anything that may jeopardize our career advancement. All these familiar scenarios are examples of white solidarity. (Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about.) The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. Seeking to avoid conflict and wanting to be liked, I have chosen silence all too often. Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player. Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do. I can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity. People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism, wherein we fail to hold each other accountable, to challenge racism when we see it, or to support people of color in the struggle for racial justice.

The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams that think they can get away with much less than 20%.

We could say that the health of a culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others. Now if you’re an app developer and want to help me build a tool that tracks that, please give a call. What I’ve seen over and over again in my career as a business leader and leadership mentor is that this one thing—the inability of people to feel their impact on others—is the cause of cultural dysfunction. And the higher up you are on the org chart, the more problematic that weakness is in terms of what it does to the culture at large. Which is why, as a manager, the most important thing you can do—after recognizing your own impact on your team—is to help people see their impacts on each other, and to help them let go of the emotional story they’re telling themselves that’s keeping the pattern going. In

The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams

Pelosi’s wariness seemed confirmed on March 22, 2019, when Mueller flubbed the unveiling of his team’s report on Trump’s ties to foreign governments. Although the report was devastating, Mueller’s initial silence allowed Attorney General William Barr to issue misleading characterizations that overshadowed the report’s details. Barr claimed that the report “exonerated” the president. The actual report documented a number of extremely problematic relationships between the president’s campaign and Russian officials. Mueller, who did not believe he had the authority to call for impeachment since the independent counsel law had expired, then made things worse by faltering in congressional testimony.

FN-2187,” Phasma said, “has the potential to be one of the finest stormtroopers I have ever seen.” “From what I just observed, Captain, I agree.” “But his decision to split the fire-team and return for FN-2003 is problematic. It speaks to a potentially…dangerous level of empathy. You heard him.” “‘You’re one of us’?” “Yes, sir. While I am entirely in support of unit cohesion, General, a stormtrooper’s loyalty must be higher, as you know. It must be to the First Order, not to one’s comrades.

although I hadn’t yet studied IT, the plan made me nervous. We didn’t know of anyone who had done something like what we were planning. And if my studies had shown anything, it was that going first is dangerous. So I suggested that a team from the Court Administration visit other countries to investigate. If we found that others had done such a thing already, we could learn from them. If we didn’t, we could wait. Except that wasn’t what happened. The team duly traveled to various countries and reported back in a board meeting. Had anyone else done this? “No!” was the excited reply. “We will be the first in the world!” I had mistakenly thought that my fellow board members would see being first as a strong argument against going ahead. In fact, they took it as a reason to charge onward. The desire to do what has never been done before can be admirable, for sure. But it can also be deeply problematic.

Many organs in our bodies make molecules and release them into our bloodstream as a way to talk with other organs. These endocrine organs include the pancreas, the pituitary gland, the ovaries, and the testes. But few had thought of muscle as an endocrine organ until Pedersen’s work. Interleukin-6 was just the start. Scientists have now discovered over a hundred molecules that our muscles make and release into the blood as we walk. Pedersen’s team discovered that one of these, oncostatin M, shrank breast tissue tumors in mice and could be yet another reason why exercise is beneficial to humans with breast cancer. In 2003, Pedersen coined a name for this amazing family of molecules: myokines. As a myokine, interleukin-6 is an anti-inflammatory. Among other roles, it helps shut down the problematic tumor necrosis factor (TNF). It is the body’s natural ibuprofen. Pedersen’s team also discovered that interleukin-6 can mobilize cells called “natural killers” to attack and destroy cancerous tumors, at least in mice. For some reason, this myokine needs to be produced by muscles during exercise in order to work. But that does not require walking. Can the 3 million Americans in wheelchairs generate myokines? Yes. Researchers at the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Wakayama Medical University in Japan have discovered elevated interleukin-6 levels, and lowered tumor necrosis factor, after wheelchair half-marathons and basketball games. As Juliette Rizzo, 2005 Ms. Wheelchair America, said, “Walking is a way to get from A to B, and I do that.” Myokines, however, are not magic potions. They cannot be injected or swallowed. They are made only when the body is in motion, and in modern societies it often is not.