Cultural Change

As I've been watching "Live Earth" today, I started thinking about the seemingly insurmountable challenge of effecting a cultural change such as getting Joe and Jane Q. Public to ever do anything that might actually help the planet at the cost of a little bit of inconvenience to them. That just doesn't seem to be the way people are wired these days. Vicki and I had an "in-the-pool" conversation awhile back about how that spirit of selflessness was so prevalent during World War II, where people took pride in doing their bit - whether it be by rationing, enlisting, or following Rosie the Riveter's example and trading in their kitchen apron for factory overalls - to help the cause. The response to big problems in those days was to get people involved, and to let them feel pride in their contribution, whatever it may be. These days we get 'leaders' like George W. Bush, who pats his people on their heads and asks them to Shop More To Stop Terrorism, rather than someone like John F. Kennedy, who admonished Americans to consider what they could do for their country, and not vice versa.

The obvious irony with the environmental situation is, of course, that Saving the Planet is, in some ways, a very selfish thing to do: it's your own throat you're cutting if you don't, right? The catch is that, like cigarette smoking, it's a delayed threat, not an imminent one. And we all know smokers who wouldn't - or couldn't - quit until they'd had a brush with cancer or stroke... if then! So how bad would the environment have to get before that kind of wake-up call would occur, especially if there are forces who're Hell-bent on keeping people's focus off conservation, because it affects their next quarterly profit margin?

And, in one of the all-time classic moves to make it all about me, I couldn't help but notice a similarity between the chore described above and what we're facing at work in going Agile. In the office, it's not selfishness that's standing in the way of our success; it looks to me like it's lack of will. Courage, it turns out, is a pretty important ingredient in the mix, and I don't think we appreciated that until recently. Committing to quality and then standing up for it when considerable pressure to cut corners is brought to bear... that's not an easy thing to get people to do! And that's just one of the many obstacles. But if getting approximately 200 people in the same company to all pull together in the same direction is proving to be this hard, a year into it, how's it even conceivable to change a world of six billion, before it's too late? That's a very, very depressing thought.

Except on those days when I'm rooting for the extinction of the Human Race, that is! Which is more often than you might think...