Three kinds of people
Pick a school of practice. There are three types of people in that group.Pick a school of practice. “Agile” could be a good one. Or “DevOps”. Or Karate. Or any religion. Or mindfulness. Or raising llamas.
I estimate there are three types of people in each of these groups.
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Nominal masses
These are the majority, at least for any well-known school of practice. These are the folks who claim to be doing the thing, and do a lot of ceremony around the thing. They hang out with the “right” people. They use a lot of the right terminology (although they may not use it correctly). They truly believe they’re doing the thing. But they’re not. Not really.
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The zealots
These are the loud people, always telling the nominal masses how they’re doing it wrong. “That’s not Scrum!” is a common phrase for some of them. They have long discussions about Big-A versus little-a agile. They debate the definition of “DevOps”, and whether “BizDevOps” is actually a distinct thing or not. They write new manifestos, because the old ones weren’t perfect enough. These are the folks who dominate the social media conversations. Sometimes by rudely correcting the nominal masses.
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The silent doers
These are the folks too busy doing the thing to be bothered bothered by the nominal masses, or the zealots. They probably don’t even realize that there are nominal masses or zealots. If they are aware, they’re ignoring them.
Which are you?
