In recent projects, I encounter increasingly heterogeneous development teams. Some develop here, some next door, some in another city, some across the world in India. Sometimes, I watch one of those teams when they meet people from another team for the first time. In that kind of situation, they almost always question what the other team is doing, very often with little respect for the results the other team has achieved so far. You can really feel the borders between people in those situations.
Why is that so?
There is a program running in people’s subconcious minds – a program that has been written 3-4 million years ago when the human brain was designed. The human brain was created (evolved) in a world that was wild and hostile to the weak animals called human beings. Humans from different tribes competed for the same resources: food, water, places to live and shelter (e.g. caves), etc.
This very old program was probably right in those days when it forced humans to distrust other humans from different tribes. „Hey, I don’t know that guy, maybe he is going to kill the animal that I wanted to eat myself, so watch out…“.
Several million years after that, competition for the same basic essential resources has become less important. We all have enough to eat, drink and room to live today (at least those people whom I typically meet in a software project). However, people seem to be good at finding new resources for the old competition game program. These new interesting resources are power, money, fame, coolness, etc. People continue to run the old program, only the target database on which they run it has changed.
In typical software projects inside large multinational companies where I work, this old program stands in the way. Different teams (formerly known as „tribes“) now have to collaborate for a larger goal, the goal of the project in a multinational company. Developer teams, architecture teams, methodologists, tool providers, different levels of management, foreign subsidiaries, you name them. The subconcious mind puts them into the category „strangers“ and tries to run the old competition program on them. The project suffers or is delayed until people have learnt to trust the others, respect their work and collaborate with them proactively.
This is the bottom line: Stop the old program, at least when you work with people inside the same project. If you think this is a problem, soothe your unconcious and tell it that it may restart the program as soon as somebody really hurts you.
What you’ll discover some time later, however: One human being cannot hurt another without the other’s consent. But when you discover this, you are already playing the next level of the grand video game called „reality on earth“.