Rush Without Ruin

Key takeaways

• Exclusive obsessive focus on a single outcome or output ruins the environment in which we work.
• At the same time, the excitement we feel about a given goal that can change the world is potentially heroic.
• Agile values let us keep both of these truths in sight as we act on an attitude toward work that honors both.

Some Context 

Sometimes a little obsession can be a good thing. It can be great to work full-tilt toward something heroic and transformative — to a point. But as agilists, we know never to focus so exclusively on one thing that we lay waste to everything else. This lesson, so relevant to sustainability efforts today, is painfully evident from the extractive industrial past.

There are rushes and then there are rushes

In the last years of the 19th century, one hundred thousand people beelined to the Klondike River Valley, suddenly ballooning a population of settlers who had until then considered the area the middle of nowhere. The physical rush to get there and beat out others to stake a claim paralleled a rush of a different kind, the heady emotional experience of tossing caution and possibly rationality to the wind in pursuit of something considered priceless.

And you know what? Exactly the same thing is still happening but out of our sight. But mining raw materials for our shiny hardware still leaves the earth behind in this way, polluting water and land.

Today one can visit Dredge Number 4 beside Bonanza Creek, the site of the original Klondike gold strike. Machines larger than houses, and dredges came into favor once the easily-panned gold in the region ran low. A dredge would float in a pond of its own making, scrape up the land in front of it, process it within its innards, and excrete almost all of it behind in a jumbled pile called a “tailing” before inching forward and repeating the process. Such tailings now cover vast swathes of the goldfields in literal wasteland. The tiny amount of gold extracted was all that mattered; everything else was forgotten.

But a proper sense of the fervor behind these operations requires a few additional details. For example: The Klondike (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in lands) is largely permafrost, and any mining there had to be preceded by years spent thawing and clearing. Then again: Prospectors traversing the Chilkoot Pass (the major route through the Pacific Range) could take only what they could carry, which had to be left on the other side while they returned for the rest of their belongings again and again. And yet again: With no rail or waterway from any industrial center, dredging companies had to get the parts for their behemoth machines onsite via a fiendishly complex combination of routes. Woe betide if they discovered a part was missing (or presumably, if one of the tiny crew that operated the dredge got hurt).

The thing is: Somebody thought this was all a fantastic idea. Many somebodies, in fact, raising and expending vast funds and energies in their pursuit. Hold that thought.

In the last years of the 20th century, also in Western North America, the rush was on again. Colleagues from that era in Silicon Valley speak of a “wild west” feel to the early days of the commercial World-Wide Web. Prior to specialization in Internet-specific professions, “webmonkies” did whatever there was to do online, frequently making things up as they went. Stories circulated of huge stock payoffs (bonanzas!) for those in the right place and at the right time. 

Soon enough, the nascent Internet industry would itself turn extractive, mining information about people’s lives in place of shiny yellow metal. And still the rush, for anyone who experienced it, was undeniable. The impossible — in this case, melding the info-experiences of potentially everyone on earth — was once again being done out west. A sense of invincibility, even inevitability, arose that still echoes in the pronouncements of tech titans who act like nothing has changed since then. At least in the beginning, it seemed real.

Was it wrong? Nowadays much or most of the Internet seems as barren and exhausted as the fields of tailings around Dawson City. Other than a few who remain attached to personal wealth extracted from the environment of the internet, most today would agree that wasting the world for the sake of a few nuggets is a terrible way to go.

More to the point, as Agilists, we can recognize that neither of these historical manias is compatible with our values. In Agile, we do acknowledge the thrill of important and urgent work without letting ourselves be so arrogant that we think that’s all there is. There will always be the next sprint, the next ticket, the next point of introspection — and what we do in the present moment has to allow for all those future ones too. Besides this, we’re all too familiar with the pollution of technical and organizational debt that will pile up if we never step back to get a wider view and address the environmental impacts we’re making along the way. As a result, we never want to obsess over our current aim at the expense of everything else; in fact, we sometimes have to rebuff that attitude if it’s shown by organizational leadership.

For a hands-on entry to assess, clean up, and monitor in your organization, see Digital Clean Up: This. Is. How. Reducing (or setting) log retention policies is a great way to reduce unnecessary data storage, how reducing data storage reduces carbon emissions and saves money!

The audacity of work aimed at transforming the world against overwhelming odds really is compelling — in fact, it’s a passable definition of heroism. Failing to honor that deep motivation of ours as world-builders will leave us ill-equipped for the next gold rush. Being inspired by such endeavors is a human trait that is likely to endure, probably for the better. We actually need that trait in the face of climate catastrophe and other aspects of our poly-crisis! What these booms of the past (gold and dot-com) teach us is not that aspiring to heroism is wrong. It is instead that, however inspiring our cause, it must harmonize with all the other causes that share the planet. If it does not, it will leave itself — and us — as bleak as the tailing piles strewn about previously vital valleys and waterways of the west.

Wrapup/Closure

How can you, today, ensure that your team is acting both from a sense of excitement about its current focus and a sense of responsibility to their future selves and the whole ecosystem into which their work fits?