“Bank heist” collaboration pattern

Here’s my favorite collaboration pattern so far: the Bank Heist collaboration pattern. This pattern, which we know from The A-TeamOcean’s 11 and Leverage, among others, shares many properties with an excellent developer team:

  • You don’t have to like following orders to be on the team.
  • Everybody’s a generalist, and an expert in one area (pickpocket, cat burglar, safe-cracker, grifter, etc) but nobody is an expert at everything.
  • “Building the team” is part of the fun.
  • There is – or should be – mutual respect for complementary skills.
  • Everybody on the team needs to do their part and get out of the other people’s way.
  • Prima donnas ruin the whole party.
  • There’s even a role for management: the Nate Ford/Danny Ocean “mastermind” character is an ideal manager: he can do enough of all the other players’ roles to see how they can all work together and set up the whole job.

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I don’t know if identifying this collaboration pattern is actually useful, or if it’s just entertaining, but it is undoubtedly attractive: most people I’ve shared this collaboration pattern with get very excited to work with a team that uses this collaboration pattern. If you or a team you’re on derives some benefit from this pattern, drop me a note.

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A few afterthoughts (connecting to the “theater ensemble” thoughts from Beth on Twitter):

Heist movies pick up the drama when the team starts to violate these prescriptions: when the grifter decides he’d be a better mastermind than the current leader, for example. This opens up two perspective games I like to play:

  • heistify: take your boring office politics (“QA is dawdling because they were convinced the dev will botch it anyway”) and rewrite into a bank heist: “safe-cracker didn’t bother bringing his stethoscope because he figured the second-story man wouldn’t be able to kill the alarms”. Much more fun, isn’t it?
  • shyster: make heist movies boring again by inverting the transformation above.

Finally, heist movies have awesome soundtracks. Who wouldn’t want their workday scored with horn stings?  (And, as Josh points out: you’d have a sweet van.)


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3 responses to ““Bank heist” collaboration pattern”

  1. Q. Pheevr Avatar

    One big difference (I hope) between your typical software development team and your typical group of bank robbers is that the former have much less incentive to stab one another in the back—if only because their end products are less valuable, and their methods less dangerous. (For the sake of context, I might mention here that my favourite heist movie is not any of the ones that you mentioned in the post, but A Fish Called Wanda.)

    If you take the basic pattern of a heist, but reduce the chance of long-term imprisonment and replace the briefcases full of banknotes with a more arbitrary objective, then I think what you end up with is something rather like a classic MIT hack. That’s probably a pretty congenial working environment for many software developers.

    1. Jeremy Avatar
      Jeremy

      I’ve actually never seen Wanda. Didn’t even know it was a heist movie. Must add to my watch list. And yes, a collaborative hack is very similar to a heist.

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