Tracing a Continuum of Trust: Compliance, Cooperation, Collaboration

by Jim Highsmith

In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins discusses the difference between cooperation and collaboration. I'd like to add another interaction dimension to these two: compliance. These three concepts form a continuum, primarily defined by the degree of trust among members of the project community. Agile teams sometimes get into trouble because a particular practice assumes one level of interaction, while the team is actually operating at another. As an example, a well-functioning Scrum team requires that the development team and the product owner have a collaborative relationship. If that relationship drops back a level, to cooperation, then some of the team activities won't go as desired.