Need of a disobedient member in your IT team – Dennis the Menace
- By Sanjay Mehta
Obedience has simplicity.
Disobedience needs a little higher order of intelligence.
Any idiot can be obedient — in fact only idiots can be obedient.
Need of a disobedient member in your team is very much necessary. Let name him Dennis the Menace as this person cannot be tamed and does work his way only. Let’s say you have a very obedient IT team which works as what you say and never questions & remain within boundaries. You will always get a mediocre IT project job done as what a normal stupid idiot does. Now there is a Dennis in your team which will always have a greater variety of information sources then the obedient team member. This Dennis will share information and preferences & question openly, this help the team reach better decisions. I am sure you have read somewhere “The good news is great minds don’t think alike. … all believe the best ideas come from a room full of differing opinions.” To get result which is out of the box thinking instead of conventional solutions you need this disobedient Dennis in the IT team. The Dennis will more often favor projects that allow them to be visible and demonstrate their abilities faster, and this makes them work hard to promote innovative ideas and novel applications. More obedient prefer to stick to known project & practices, and thus avoid placing their reputations at risk. The Dennis will be ineffective when you make them do daily mundane routine project maintenance work. In planned situation obedient team works best whereas Dennis generally has an advantage over obedient ones in highly uncertain situations and when the stakes in the decisions are high.
Posted on June 5th, 2008 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: CIO Community
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