Just watching Jim McCarthy's talk about 11 commitments for shared vision over at InfoQ and it got me thinking.
Specifically, how important is having a shared vision to a team?
Looking back over my, wow-is-it-that-long, many years in this game I see that the best teams that I've worked on have had a shared vision and shared commitment to the vision.
Has anyone been involved in a team, for a reasonably sized project, that was successful where they didn't have a shared vision?
Think about how successful you'd be if, in your team, you had 1 team member who disagreed with the approach taken. Someone who thinks you should be using a different technology, or platform, or just should be "doing it his way".
If you ever had, you'd understand how vital it is to all work together - shared vision, shared commitment, shared communication, roles, skills and responsibilities. All are as important as each other.
Keep in mind, too, that "group think" sets in when there is too much alignment within a team. Shared vision is great, but a little individuality is necessary for anything to improve.
Shared vision is fine, if you're talking about the ultimate goal of the project. A lot of times, this is extended into the minutiae of actually building the system.
On a project I've worked on, the group had A Way to do things, and the majority held onto The Way even in cases when it didn't make sense, or was actually detrimental to a particular module or the project as a whole.
Everyone in a group should be working toward the same goal. That said, it's important to have dissenting opinion, questions, even outright arguments about the details. It's also important to have someone managing everything, who can make a final decision (even an unpopular one) about something, rather than letting the "team" steer the project.
a shared vision, in the 'big picture' sense, is what defines a team; otherwise it's just a bunch of people who happen to be in the same room
In my experience if your team leader starts talking about "Shared Vision" then it's time to get out fast. You're just one step away from endless Total Quality Management seminars (or whatever they call them nowadays) and weekends spent building bridges out of plastic bags on 'Teambuilding' exercises as your manager tries to Get Him/Herself Noticed For Controlling The Geeks and eyes up that possible board position.
Which is not of course to say that team spirit, commitment, communication and similar are not vitally important, it simply that any manager who is clack handed enough to be mouthing off such sub BS jargon really is not someone who is likely to have the empathy to lead a group of developers on a software project.
It's a truism, but managing coders is like herding cats. Much more subtly is required.
A shared vision is good to a certain depth. You want your team all pulling the oars in the same direction.
How they pull those oars, on the other hand, is where a certain diversity of opinion is useful.
At the same time, diversity of opinion can be very powerful. A recent book, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, talked about this. I talked about it on my blog as well. Some of the thoughts are counterintuitive or in opposition to how we may think about groupthink, but many of his points are valid. It's a good, if sometimes infuriating, read.
A shared vision can get out of control as well. Witness the Challenger explosion. Or...the market for the last couple of weeks.