Workplace training last week has given me pause to think about the nature of the way work is currently organised at my workplace, and how it affects me as a disabled person. This post muses upon on some of these thoughts.
But first some disclaimers:
I am a disabled person, who works full-time and earns a good income. This gives me choices that other people with disabilities do not have. I am acutely consciously that employment makes me privileged.
I am absolutely not an expert on Agile, but I have participated in multiple training sessions and worked in Agile teams for over a year.
... and some definitions:
Agile: "Agile software development is an approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s)." [From Wikipedia accessed on 10 March 2019.]
Ableism: "Ableism is the discrimination or prejudice against people who have disabilities. Ableism can take the form of ideas and assumptions, stereotypes, attitudes and practices, physical barriers in the environment, or larger scale oppression. It is oftentimes unintentional and most people are completely unaware of the impact of their words or actions." [From the Urban Dictionary accessed on 10 March 2019.]
My workplace has adopted Agile methodologies over the past couple of years.
The training was on respectful workplaces, in other words, an anti-discrimination, harassment and bullying workshop, with a focus on micro-aggressions and the way that these reinforce negative messages about gender, race, sexuality, disability and other statuses protected under human rights legislation. Whilst we discussed in abstract terms the slights we might be inadvertently inflicting on imaginary colleagues, a big, fat, grey elephant sat in the corner of the room and snorted derisively.
"You have stand-up meetings with a colleague who uses a wheelchair."
Stand-up meetings are not unique to Agile, but have a particular value in Agile in order for project team members to check in with one another on a regular basis to review progress and identify barriers or impediments before they become too big. Such meetings are also known as daily scrums, but at my workplace 'stand-up' is the predominate terminology.
Wheelchair users refer to themselves "going for a walk"; blind people say "see you later". In the same way that we understand that Captain Oates saying "I am just going outside and may be some time" in Antartica does not mean that he needed a lot of fresh air, 'walking' is not the point in "going for a walk"; it is a figurative expression that can describe a range of behaviours that may not include actual walking.
However, standing up is the point in stand-up meetings. Standing up is intended to keep meetings short, to ensure participants become uncomfortable if they talk too long. Participants who are also wheelchair users are faced either with meetings looking at their fellow team members' crotches or enduring excruciating jokes about 'sit-down stand-up' meetings.
Agile also prioritises face-to-face conversation as the best form of communication (see Principles of Agile Manifesto). Kanban boards are used to visualise work in progress, and manage workflow for teams working with an Agile methodology. Physical Kanban boards often use sticky notes on whiteboards; digital boards use custom software to replicate the same process flow. There is considerable debate about whether physical or digital Kanban boards are better. See here, here and here for just three discussions on this point.
Sticky notes make a frequent appearance also in workshops, along with butchers paper, textas and pipe cleaners (also called chenille sticks).
I have limited use of my hands and have progressively lost hand functionality. I took all my lecture notes by hand in university, but I rarely write now, except to sign my name, and I find hand writing a cumbersome and difficult task. For that reason, I do not carry a pen with me nor a notebook. I can recall needing to argue a special case to be allowed to have a laptop instead of a desktop computer at work, but now laptops are the norm. For work purposes, I carry an iPad to meetings for taking notes. In my work environment, arriving at meetings with an iPad, Microsoft Surface or laptop is par for the course. Negotiating the world with the assistance of digital devices has largely become normalised.
It concerns me that, just as interacting with the world via digital devices becomes the norm, and the way disabled people negotiate the world of work is no longer remarkable, workplace ideologies are propagated that privilege certain types of interactions over others, less inclusive interactions over more inclusive ones, e.g. standing up versus sitting down. In particular, Agile appears to privilege physical interactions over digital or virtual interactions, e.g. writing on sticky notes rather than creating tickets in Jira or Trello, hand writing rather than typing into an iPad.
For someone whose level of disability is fair-to-middling, the proliferation of workplace sticky notes and other aspects of Agile is a reasonably minor annoyance, a micro-aggression, if you will. I get annoyed, but it does not generally affect my ability to participate in workplace activities. But what if I was the late Professor Stephen Hawking? To be clear, I am not comparing myself to Stephen Hawking - we are both wheelchair users, both with undergraduate degrees in mathematics and both sometime coxswains. But there the similarities end.
I substitute Stephen Hawking in this scenario, not because he transcended disability - quite the opposite, he embodied his disability - but because his status and privileges make it easier to identify when micro-aggressions occur as a result of his disability. Stephen Hawking was a white, heterosexual male who acquired a disability later in life. He was well educated and obviously, exceedingly intelligent. We do not have to imagine his pre-disability self - films have been made about him starring attractive, non-disabled actors, allowing folks without disabilities to imagine themselves as Prof Hawking. In addition, Prof Hawking's prodigious presence in popular media paradoxically both humanised him and promoted his cyborg identity.
In contrast, people with disabilities are frequently dehumanised and degraded in Australian society. Discrimination, harassment and generally crappy treatment as a result of disability are so commonplace that they often go unnoticed: a man with a disability refused boarding to a cruise booked and paid for months in advance; a blind woman refused an Uber ride due to her guide dog; women sexually harassed and assaulted in sheltered workshops, where despite looking like a workplace, normal pay and industrial protections do not apply; a woman with Downs syndrome refused tourist visa to visit her father in Australia; some of Sydney's busiest rail stations are still not accessible.
If it was not me, but Stephen Hawking in your Agile team, would stand-ups and writing on sticky notes still seem like reasonable activities for your team? I call this the 'Stephen Hawking test'.