Commitment
Fear of commitment is an institutional problem. It is an emotion that has been carefully nurtured by continued failure to meet expectations. I call it an institutional problem because it is the environment of the company that has created a situation where you are both unable to meet those expectations and the expectations themselves are misguided.
Don’t commit to output
Low integrity commitment is when you have committed to a roadmap, a set of features that you are going to build within some timeframe. Collaborating on this roadmap is typically where the sphere of influence of the Engineering department ends. This approach would work quite well if software development was a repeatable process like an assembly line, known as Obvious in the Cynefin Framework. It isn't, it’s organic and emergent - although it’s not completely random or Chaotic. It is categorised by the framework as Complex and that means it is unpredictable. I suggest you read this discussion of Complicated vs Complex vs Chaotic and then come back.
What does this mean for your commitments? It means that committing to assembly line output is likely to fail, and even if you do manage to build the product within the scope, time and quality constraints, it may not do what the business wanted anyway. Most of us who have spent our career building software have had this experience, it may even be the norm and this is why we fear commitment.
Do commit to an outcome
Instead of committing to output, embrace the outcomes through high integrity commitments. For example, “increase the number of tweets per day from 500 million to 1 billion by the end of this financial year”. To determine this goal requires significantly more collaboration across the business than the output approach and you have a lot more creative freedom to figure out how to achieve that goal. Importantly we are now using the language of the customer, not Story Points and Cumulative Flow Diagrams. Achieving these goals will require experimentation, measurement, learning and repeating. If this is familiar it’s because it smells a bit like “Individuals…”, “Customer collaboration…” and “Responding to change…” from The Agile Manifesto. Don’t fear these commitments, they should be stretch goals aim high and you’ll land high.
