Collaboration lessons from the Rainbow Nation
I was born a prisoner in South Africa, and my thinking was set by apartheid. Then, suddenly, I was free. But I still carried hatred, distrust and a multitude of conflicting emotions, yet I must work harmoniously with the “enemy”. The challenges of the teams with whom I work are fractals of 300 year long conflict. In this seminar, I share my life lessons as a nation transitioned peacefully from apartheid to a democracy of interwoven cultures. As a second generation South African Indian my conflicted identity helped me deal with diversity, value conflicts, and collaboration struggles in teams.
My session starts with a very personal story of my life and challenges of living under apartheid, how it shaped my thinking and the dramatic conflict that resulted in the transition to democracy. I switch to my current work and show similarities and differences to my life story. In my presentation I propose a few ideas based on things that I have tried, as well as things that I have challenged. The presentation normally takes approximately 40 minutes leaving 20 minutes for discussion which I facilitate or facilitated by a track host.
This session is suitable to be converted into an facilitated exploratory discussion group of cultural conflict and challenges. Based on feedback from this submission (if it is considered for this conference), I will gladly investigate expanding it into a 90 minute session.
This material has been presented before. The first was entitled “Managing diversity in Agile Teams” on the Leadership track at Oredev in Sweden in 2008 (http://archive.oredev.org/topmenu/video/aspectsofleadership/aslamkhan.4....). I was then interviewed by Scott Hanselman (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast156DealingWithDiversit...) where we discussed the philosophy of ubuntu in teams. In 2010, I presented at Oredev again, on the collaboration track, with a talk entitled “Truth and Reconciliation: Agile Lessons from the Rainbow Nation” (http://oredev.org/2010/sessions/truth-and-reconciliation-agile-lessons-f...)
- Understand that collaboration is a lofty goal that is bound by shared values, as contrasted with a cooperative relationship bound by common objective.
- Discover the personality of a team and that a team boundary may be an inhibitor more than encouraging communication.
- To understand and identify conflicts in value systems of individuals, teams and organisations.
- To actively be aware of relationships where superiority/inferiority situations exist.
- To find ways to bridge the gap of distrust that exists between management and software teams.
- How agile practices at all levels from management to lines of code can be used to shape new social contracts.
