Agile fable – Doghouse

Your young son wants to construct a dog house in the backyard. Being an engineer, you all know all about dog house, after all, you made one long back during your middle school years. You design a dog house up to end detail – type of wood, size of planks, type of joints, foundation pillars, etc. Now it is your son's turn to take this design and follow the instructions and construct a dog house. You are pretty happy with the end result; after all, it was your dog house. Does your son have any stake in the dog house? He just learned how to read instructions provided to him.

Your young son wants to construct a dog house in the backyard. Even though you think, you know a lot about dog houses (after all you made one during your middle school years), you controlled your temptation. You decided to ask your son to come up with detailed design and specifications of a dog house. After a while, your son came up with design and specifications. After reading those you realized that your knowledge about dog houses was stale by a couple of decades. With some modifications in design and specifications, the dog house is ready in the backyard which is proudly claimed by your son. He not only learned about the construction aspect but also the great deal about structural integrity and how to find the relevant information.

If I ask you to replace your son with one of your team, the dog house with project/product team is working on, and you with leadership; which way of working, will you prefer in an organization? Do you want leadership to confine itself to WHY and WHAT or expand into HOW as well?