Prophets or Priests?

learning about leadership from religions

How should we serve our teams?

This is a question that any agilist or any team leader will ask themselves in their career. I know I’m here to help this team in front of me. Aside from frameworks, tools and techniques, what roles do I embody as a go about my work?

Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke in his 4 P model of cognition lists ‘Participatory Knowing as the broadest and most basic type of knowledge. It’s about how we participate in the world around us in what he calls an ‘agent-arena relationship’. At Wimbledon the tennis star ‘participates’ in a fundamentally different mode to the spectator or the umpire. In a restaurant a parent has a different agent-arena relationship to the server or to the child.

What kinds of participatory knowing does an agile coach or scrum master employ?

There are two contradictory and complimentary biblical leadership modes that I think about when I do my work which I want to share - the prophet and the priest.¹

Prophets are people who are called upon from a personal revelation experience to try to change society. In the Bible the prophets were often advisors to kings or generals (e.g. Samuel, Deborah or Nathan), or lone figures with no formal role lamenting and influence the culture and beliefs of those around them (Miriam, Jeremiah, Jonah).

Gustave Doré’s depiction of the prophetess Deborah

Prophets didn’t sweat the small stuff. They would call the people to repent, or serve God better and turn away from worshipping false gods². Their mode was story, metaphor and shocking public demonstrations. For example in the book of Samuel King David sent Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to die in battle because David saw her bathing on the roof (to quote Leonard Cohen) and wanted to sleep with her - an incredibly problematic thing to do at multiple levels even by biblical standards. The prophet Nathan admonishes him through a parable.

And the LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich and one poor.

The rich man had very large flocks and herds,

but the poor man had only one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He tended it and it grew up together with him and his children: it used to share his morsel of bread, drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him.

One day, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was loath to take anything from his own flocks or herds to prepare a meal for the guest who had come to him; so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

David flew into a rage against the man, and said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die!

He shall pay for the lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and showed no pity.”

And Nathan said to David, “That man is you!”

Putting aside the particulars of the story - Nathan brings David to an ethical realisation through story rather than telling him what he did wrong directly.

Similarly Elijah concocts a big public experiment between himself and the priests of Baal; a ‘false’ god that the Israelites were starting to worship. He challenges them to a sacrifice-off and ultimately proves the folly of their beliefs. Big public spectacle to make a big important point.

As an agilist I often feel peculiarly ‘called’ to the role - to smash unnecessary bureaucracy and vanquish unconscious command and control patterns. When I act in the prophet mode I tell stories, I use metaphors, I make a big coarse point to bring everyone round to a more inclusive and effective way of working.

I spent much of today trying to convince some colleagues that our teams were - to quote Dave Snowden in our podcast conversation last week - recipe followers, whereas we want them to be chefs. Recipe followers vs chefs is a much more effective metaphor to teach the importance of contextual intuitions and intangible knowledge than by just saying it directly or showering them with data. I was employing the prophetic mode.

Other times we are called upon to be priests. Priests are much more entangled with formal structures and rituals. In the Bible the priests administered the sacrifices and rituals in the Temple and the Tabernacle. They were sticklers for procedure and proper execution of ritual. They gave guidance to worshippers, and were tightly integrated with formal roles in society.

Rituals and ceremonies are important. They are a way to perpetuate hard-won knowledge and wisdom through concrete and repeatable practices. Often they are ‘irrational’ and appeal to metaphor and esoteric concepts. Whereas the prophet’s metaphors are fleeting and situational, the priest’s are embedded and perpetual.

Rituals can be slow to change, and in doing so they form the bedrock of a collective experience. People still perform the ritual of shaking hands even though we no longer carry swords, and we still say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes even though it’s unlikely they have the plague. These rituals embody a way to formalise a greeting to someone and to show respect, or to acknowledge that you hope their sneeze doesn’t mean something more sinister.

Our work lives are - and should be - full of rituals. Whether it’s the ritual of ‘Sprint Planning’ or the ‘Annual Review’, when I follow a work ritual I don’t have to invent a concrete method from scratch I can just rely on the wisdom of those who came before me. As agile priests we are the custodians of ritual in our organisations. We ensure that the best rituals are well understood and easily practiced, and we sniff out toxic and unhelpful rituals to dispose of them.

As priests we create new rituals for our teams and work out how to take something like ‘feedback’ and formalise it into practices which can be passed on easily. See Ritual Dissent or Liberating Structures as examples of these. I’m thinking at the moment about formalising feedback rituals into my teams to make the process of giving feedback less fraught and more routine.

I invite you to think of the ways in which as a leader you could lean further into these modes to create change in your teams. From the coarse-grained and abstract level of the prophet, to the fine-grained and concrete ritualised world of the agile priest, how do you create change and steer your teams to success?

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That’s it for this week’s Agile On The Mind where we talk about building high performing Intelligent Teams with the help of agility and Cognitive Science. Please give this post a like or a share if it’s your jam, and let me know what you think in this feedback form. Oh and don’t forget to Subscribe to receive a weekly post straight to your inbox

1. I’m borrowing some of these ideas from sociologist Max Weber as quoted and summarised (from a different article) here https://medium.com/@amdoty90/understanding-the-priest-and-prophet-90d3c4854624

2. I’m not passing any personal judgement on whether worshipping the Old Testament God is a good idea or not, I’m more trying to learn from the Biblical model of leadership that the prophets exhibited, independent of whether their mission was a good one or not.